Most people don’t know your startup, what it’s about or what you do. That’s the reason that you don’t get nearly enough people applying for your job ads as you would like. No one knows you. No one cares. Let’s change that and introduce you to the world!

We’ll cover how to introduce top talent to your tech company, startup or agency in 2 segments: Creating the content that shows who you are (and 3 examples of how to do it) – and then distributing it in 3 simple ways!

The Content That Introduces You As an Employer

1. Your Website Doesn’t Say Why You Are Special

Yes, I know. You created your website with everything that shows what you do, who the members of your team are and examples of your work. But does it say what it’s like to work for you, how do the people feel, what projects they work on and what you can offer someone in the long term? There’s always going to be someone who can offer a better paycheck than you, so try to think of reasons why someone would work for you if everyone paid their talent the same amount of money.

Is it prestige? Put the awards you won on the website! Is it the great culture in the startup? Time to start using social media channels to highlight why your team is a great fit for a new member. While your team and your inner circle of friends and colleauges understand how nice a place to work your company is, the larger pool of talent probably doesn’t even know who you are.

The first step is to fix your official website and add a section that describes your company, not to your potential clients, but actually to your potential employees. Try to use a friendly title, such as ‘Opportunities’ or ‘Careers’ instead of the pretty cold ‘Jobs’. Because you’re not offering just a job. You’re actually oferring a long term opportunity to create something truly great and have fun while doing it.

Either that or you can just try beating the other guy based on a paycheck and believe me – there’s always going to be someone willing to pay more than you.

2. Your Blog… Needs Updates!

Do you have a blog? Hopefully, you do have one and you’ve at least posted photos from your team building sessions as well as updates on your product or the services you offer. That’s a start.

While we’ll cover how to use a blog in employer branding efforts in more detail in future posts, let’s just cover the basics for now. You need to start creating content that explains what you do, shows of your expertise and the projects your team works on.

The biggest challenge actually won’t be planning the content since there are so many guides around the web, as well great writers and consultants that can help you plan out an editorial plan. The real challenge is going to be getting your team to blog, which you should start by finding the members of the team that actually want to write. This will motivate the rest of your team to also participate. Creating a top-notch content team from your ragtag team of techies is going to be a challenge but thankfully you can go around it by having a 3rd, objective third party write about your company as an employer. Don’t think PR, think Employer branding…

3. High-authority Websites in Your Niche (a.k.a. Employer Branding)

Not everyone will trust what you say about yourself – and why should they? In order to get your message across you could spend years trying to get PR from mainstream media, but the best way is actually to find the smallest possible blog or portal that caters to your niche.

It will, in most cases, have a higher quality and more focused audience that you can reach far more easily. These smaller websites are used to creating better content for their audience, which will make your job that much easier.
When approaching the media (Yes, I also mean blogs), see what types of collaborations they’ve had with employers before you. Have they written about companies as examples of great working places?

The best way to pitch them to write about you is thinking about what topic you can give them that will be not just interesting to write about, but will also appeal to their audience. It can be about the way the startup is letting you innovate far faster than others in your industry, or an interview with a member of your team that can explain how great it it to work on a particular kind of interesting project – that you imply that people can work on if they join you!

The question that you are now asking yourself is should you pay for this content. Yes, you should. It takes time to create great content and having a great, 3rd party article that introduces people to your brand will make hiring new people that much easier.

3 Simple Ways to Reach Your Potential Tech Talent

Now that you have the content that shows what your company does and can offer potential employees, lets look at how to distribute it to your target audience. It’s not enough to just tweet about it a bit. Here’re the first 3 ways you should check out.

1. Facebook Developer Groups

While you might think that developers don’t use social media – you’re actually quite right. A large number of the most technologically advanced developers don’t like social networks and will never set their mouse on Twitter or Facebook, but on the other hand – a lot of them will use these popular platforms to keep in touch with friends, family members and colleagues – like we all do.

The key is to find the right Facebook groups which are in most cases local, specific to a country or city – reflecting the local community such as ‘Developers Croatia’. While most Facebook groups are pretty chaotic and it’s up to the moderators to decide what goes and what doesn’t, most tech talent (especially developer) groups that I’ve been a part of having clearly defined rules. You’ll most probably find the rules ‘pinned’ to the top of the group so be sure to read through them since moderators in these groups aren’t usually the most gentle people around when it comes to banning new members that, in their eyes, spam the group. If it takes using Google Translate to translate it from the local language – RTFM 🙂

After reading the ‘manual’, you’ll know exactly how to post a link that will introduce your company to the community as a potentially great place to work. Can it be your website, or does it have to be a blog post that shows off your expertise? You’ll have to mix and match, test and see what works!

2. Influencers in Your development community

Find a piece of content that really went viral in your local technology and development community. With the link at hand, go to Buzzsumo and use their ‘Sharers’ tab to discover exactly which people were instrumental in sharing that particular piece of content to the whole community. These social media users are influencers, because they either just have a large number of followers, or that for some reason other users react to their content and trust the links they post.

In the case of an article about development on the blog Netokracija, the top users in terms of getting retweets on Twitter were Webcamp Zagreb, the tech event where the presentation mentioned in the article was held, the company account of the author of the article and the web magazine Netokracija itself. What can we learn in this case? For future articles about development topics, we definitely need to contact the team behind Webcamp Zagreb to share the content through its account, while making sure that the author of the article shares it as well.

In most cases, a simple email or DM with a link will be enough to get someone to share it on their account, but it does depend on the type of person you are reaching out. I would definitely recommend starting a relationship with the person or organisation prior to sending them any links to share. You need them to trust you as a person and know that you aren’t interested in them just as an ‘influencer’, even if – you actually are.

3. Facebook and Twitter Advertising

LinkedIn is nice, but it’s expensive and in most cases you’ll have an easier time using Facebook and Twitter advertising to reach your target audience of designers or developers for your startup. It’s far cheaper and especially if you’re using Facebook advertising, you’ll have an easier time targeting users thanks to the ton of data they have on their users. Do they like responsive design and what is their favourite band? Tailor the ads that are promoting your company to the users.

4. Not just yet. It’s time for you to try these 3+3 ways and then we can move on to finding more, creative ways to get you to introduce your company to your next, favourite employee. Think of it as an MVP of introducing your startup to the market!