What resources do you use to find good candidates?

What type of position and what level are you having difficulty? My experience is primarily with recruiting Financial Analysts.

Of the last five external candidates I have hired over the last two years, 3 were employee referrals and 2 were found by an aggressive inside HR recruiter using LinkedIn and Monster.

Have you considered transfers to rural areas?

Retail Sales associates primarily. Yes we always leave that door open for someone to move to any of our locations to work. We are pretty spread out so our associates have options.

The smaller towns we are in for some reason we are having major issues finding people who want to work or will fit into our culture. I am not sure when the sales force changed; but everyone wants to clock in and wait for the door to open. The biggest challenge is getting them to understand we have to prospect and dig down to obtain the customers needs to make the most of the sale.

Rural areas can be a challenge. For any difficult to fill positions there is never a single right source. We find it takes "looking everywhere at once." In our rural work success is usually a combination of some postings (linkedin or others), local small town newspapers, email and direct mail campaigns, old fashion cold calling, and sometimes even local radio spots if we have multiple openings in a rural area. Be glad to discuss more if you would like and share success stories from some of our client work.

Have you tried the Financial Executives Networking Group (www.thefeng.org). The Group now has over 44000 members across the country, some of whom may be able to help. Ron has some good suggestions above.

Thanks Ron, Yes we are currently using multiple sites (Indeed, Career Builder, Nation Job, etc. We also pay a referral bonus if a current employee refers someone to us and we hire them. The biggest problem we hear is for example one of our stores is very close to a very large city; so candidates will drive to the "big" city to work rather than work in their small town. It's tough to compete with that.

I will check into that Linda. Thanks for the feedback!