Where to Find People Looking for Jobs: 11 Channels That Work

TL;DR: Active job seekers cluster in a handful of predictable places: job boards, LinkedIn's open-to-work pool, government employment services, community groups, and your own past applicants. Each suits different roles. The channel most employers underuse is their own ATS, where candidates who nearly got hired last year sit unread. If none of these produce qualified people, the population you want is employed and you need outreach instead of advertising.

Start With People Who Already Applied to You

Your ATS holds candidates who wanted to work for you, cleared some of your bar, and lost to someone else. They cost nothing to contact and convert faster than strangers.

Pull three groups:

• Silver medalists. Reached final stages in the last 24 months. Contact these first.
• Qualified but wrong timing. Passed screening for a role that closed or got frozen.
• Qualified for a different role. Applied to the wrong opening but could do another one.

Send a short note referencing the role they applied for. Recognition beats a template. Most teams find between two and eight viable candidates per open role in this pool, and the whole exercise takes an afternoon.

Job Boards, Ranked by What They Suit

Free listings on high-volume boards produce applicants, not candidates. Budget for the screening load before you post. A single Indeed ad for a warehouse role can return 400 applications in a week, and reading them costs more than the ad ever did.

Seek and Indeed

For most Australian employers Seek carries the professional and skilled trades audience, and Indeed carries hourly and high-volume. Post to both when the role could plausibly sit in either.

LinkedIn's Open-to-Work Pool

LinkedIn lets members flag availability, either publicly or only to recruiters. Recruiter seats can filter on it. This pool skews professional and skews recently redundant, which makes it strong right after a sector layoff and thin the rest of the time.

Industry Boards and Association Registers

Nursing, engineering, accounting, legal, and the licensed trades all have their own boards and member registers. Volume is low and the qualified share is the highest of any paid channel. If your role requires a certification, start here before a general board.

Community and Referral Channels

Employee referrals. Still the highest-converting source at most companies. It only works when you ask specifically. "Know any developers?" produces nothing. "We need a React developer who has worked on a design system, here are three companies where they might work" produces names.

Facebook groups and local community pages. Underrated for hourly, hospitality, care, and trades roles, especially outside capital cities. Free, and the audience is genuinely local.

Specialist Slack and Discord communities. Where technical and design candidates talk. Read the rules before posting. Most allow hiring posts in a dedicated channel and ban them everywhere else.

Reddit. Role-specific subreddits and city subreddits both run hiring threads. Works for technical roles and for anything where candidates want candour about the employer.

Alumni networks. Former employees who left on good terms are a short path to a qualified hire, and they need no onboarding on how the company works.

Government and Subsidised Programs

Australian employers can list through Workforce Australia and connect with providers who screen and refer candidates at no cost, and wage subsidies apply to some cohorts. Similar services exist in most countries. Volume varies by region and by how engaged the local provider is. Worth setting up once for entry-level and high-turnover roles, then leaving to run.

When Nobody Qualified Is Looking

Every list above finds active job seekers. On specialist and senior roles, the people you want are employed, unbothered, and never see your ad. At that point advertising harder does nothing and you switch to outreach.

That means naming the companies your next hire probably works at, building a list of individuals, and contacting them directly. Targeted recruitment covers the process. The honest version is that it takes recruiter hours rather than ad spend, and there is no channel that removes that cost.

Sourcing tools reduce the list-building time. They do not reduce the outreach and follow-up time, which is where most of the effort sits.

Handling the Volume You Create

A wide net creates a screening problem. Post one hourly role across Indeed, two Facebook groups, and a community board and you will have several hundred applications inside a week. The bottleneck moves from finding people to working out which ones can do the job.

Two things help. First, ask two or three disqualifying questions in the application itself: right to work, licence held, availability for the actual shift pattern. That removes a third of the pile without anyone reading a resume.

Second, screen the remainder within a day or two of applying rather than a week later. Candidates applying to hourly roles are applying to several at once, and the employer who speaks to them first usually wins. AI phone screening handles this by letting candidates call in and complete a structured screen whenever suits them, including evenings and weekends, so a Friday application does not wait until Tuesday.

A Practical Starting Order

For a generalist or hourly role:

1. Search your ATS for past applicants
2. Ask employees for referrals, with specifics
3. Post to the highest-volume board your budget allows
4. Add one or two community channels relevant to the location
5. Screen everything within 48 hours

For a specialist or senior role:

1. Search your ATS for silver medalists
2. Post to the relevant industry board
3. Build a target list of individuals at named companies
4. Run direct outreach over two to three weeks
5. Ask employees to review the target list for people they know

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I find people looking for jobs?

Start with your own past applicants, then use job boards matched to the role type: Seek and LinkedIn for professional roles, Indeed for hourly and high-volume, industry boards for licensed and specialist work. Add employee referrals and local community groups. Contact past applicants first, since they cost nothing and convert fastest.

Where can I find people to hire quickly?

For speed, combine a high-volume job board with same-week screening. Most delay in hiring comes from the gap between application and first conversation, not from a shortage of applicants. Screening within 48 hours matters more than which board you posted on.

How do I find someone looking for a job without paying for ads?

Free options include your ATS, employee referrals, LinkedIn's open-to-work filter, government employment services, university career portals, local Facebook groups, and role-specific online communities. Free listings on Indeed also work for hourly roles.

What if nobody qualified is applying?

The qualified population probably is not job hunting. Switch from advertising to direct outreach: identify the companies where those people work, build a list of individuals, and contact them. Reposting the same ad to more boards will not change the outcome.

Which channel gives the best quality candidates?

Employee referrals and industry-specific boards consistently produce the highest qualified share. General job boards produce the highest volume. Choose based on whether your bottleneck is too few applicants or too few qualified ones.

How many places should I post a single role?

Two to four. Beyond that you add screening load without adding meaningfully different candidates, since the major boards share much of the same audience.