How Can I Find the Best Employee to Apply for My Job?

Here is an uncomfortable place to start: the best employees probably are not applying to your job because the best employees are not applying to anyone's job.

The question hides an assumption most small and medium-sized businesses make. It assumes there is a pool of exceptional people out there refreshing job boards, carefully reading postings, and, for some reason, quietly deciding to skip yours. That is not what is happening. The people you actually want are usually employed, busy, and not looking. They are not ignoring your ad. They never saw it.

This is something we think about constantly at Sagan. We help small and midsize businesses hire exceptional full-time employees, often from overseas, and that work has given us an unusual vantage point on where great talent actually lives and what pulls it toward one company instead of another. When you spend your days finding standout people across different countries and roles, you stop believing talent is scarce. You start realizing most companies are simply looking in the wrong place, in the wrong way.

So this article will not tell you to rewrite your job title or add a few more perks to the posting. It will walk through why your current approach may be structurally unable to reach the people you want, and what tends to work better.

Think about the best person on your team right now. The one you would fight to keep.

Now ask yourself: how did they find you? For most owners, the honest answer is not "they responded to a job board listing." They came through a referral, a past colleague, a lucky introduction, or a relationship that existed before the role did.

That is not a coincidence. It is the pattern.

Great candidates usually aren't looking

The strongest candidates are usually already employed and performing well. They are respected where they are, they are compensated reasonably, and they are not spending their evenings scrolling listings. In recruiting terms, these are passive candidates, and they make up the majority of the people you would most want to hire. They are open to something better, but they are not actively hunting for it.

Passive candidates vs active job seekers

This creates a gap that trips up many growing businesses. When you post a job, you mostly reach active job seekers: people who are unemployed, unhappy, or between roles. Some of them are excellent. Plenty are not. But the exceptional performer quietly running the numbers at a competing accounting firm is not in that pool because that person is not looking.

So how do you reach people who are not looking?

Building Referral Networks

Ask your best people who they respect. A strong bookkeeper knows other strong bookkeepers. A sharp media buyer at your agency has former teammates they would vouch for. Referrals carry built-in quality control, because good people are careful about attaching their name to someone who might embarrass them.

Most owners underuse this channel because they ask once, casually, and never follow up. Make it a real, ongoing request, and make it worth people's time to think hard about the answer.

Networking Before You Need to Hire

The people you want tend to gather in specific places: industry Slack groups, niche communities, local meetups, alumni networks, and association forums. A real estate brokerage looking for a sharp transaction coordinator will often find stronger candidates inside a property-management community than on a general job site.

You do not have to spend money here. You have to pay attention consistently before you need to hire.

Why Recruiters Have Better Access

A good recruiter spends their entire week talking to people who are not publicly looking. That is the actual product: access to a network you do not have and cannot quickly build. The value is not that they post your job more places. It is that they can reach the person who would never see a posting at all.

Relationships Beat Transactions

The uncomfortable truth is that the best hiring rarely starts when you have an opening. It starts months earlier, in conversations that had no immediate purpose. The owner who stays loosely in touch with talented people, even when there is no role to offer, is the one who can make a call when a seat opens up.

Posting a job is a transaction. Finding exceptional people is a relationship habit. If your entire hiring strategy is "write a listing and wait," you are fishing in the smallest, most crowded pond available.

Here is a simple way to think about it. If you only hire within a 30-minute drive of your office, you are choosing from a small slice of the available talent in the world. Expand that to your whole state, and the pool grows. Expand it nationally, and it grows again.

Overseas hiring is the same move, taken one step further. It is not a magic answer, and it is not automatically better than hiring locally. It is a way to dramatically widen the pool of qualified people you can choose from. The larger the pool, the higher your odds of finding someone genuinely exceptional for what you need.

That matters most when you are hiring for a hard-to-fill role locally. A marketing agency that needs a skilled paid-search specialist, a growing e-commerce brand that needs a reliable operations person, an accounting firm that needs experienced bookkeepers during tax season: these roles are competitive everywhere. When you limit yourself to your metro area, you are competing with every other local business for the same handful of people. When you open the search internationally, that math changes.

Why Geography Matters Less Than Ever

What makes this realistic today is that the friction has mostly disappeared. A few years ago, working with someone in another country meant clunky calls, time zone confusion, and constant miscommunication. Now the tools that make distributed teams work are ordinary. Shared documents, project management platforms, instant messaging, and video calls are how most teams already operate, even the fully local ones. Many companies discovered during the last few years that half their staff was effectively remote anyway.

AI Has Changed Remote Hiring

AI has pushed this even further. Capable professionals anywhere in the world can now use the same tools your local team uses to research faster, draft faster, and handle routine work more efficiently. Distance is no longer the barrier it once was to doing excellent work together.

One thing worth being clear about: expanding overseas is about access, not just cost. Yes, the economics can be favorable. But if you approach it purely as a way to pay less, you will hire cheaply and manage poorly, and you will get exactly what that mindset produces. The businesses that win with overseas talent treat it as a way to reach outstanding professionals they could not otherwise afford to hire full-time, and then they invest in managing those people well. That is the difference between a bargain and a genuine advantage.

Salary matters. Nobody works for a company for long that underpays them relative to what they bring. But if you believe compensation is the only lever, you have misunderstood what ambitious people are actually optimizing for, and you will keep losing candidates you thought you had won on money alone.

Talented people weigh a whole set of factors, and several of them routinely outrank a marginally higher paycheck.

Leadership Matters More Than Salary

They care about whether the work is meaningful, or whether they will spend their days on tasks that feel pointless. They care about growth because a smart person can feel within weeks whether a role will stretch them or trap them. They care about leadership, because almost everyone has left a job not over pay but over a manager who made the work miserable.

They care about flexibility and about culture, not the ping-pong-table version, but whether the place is sane, respectful, and clear. They care about learning new skills, and increasingly that includes real exposure to AI tools, because they know those skills compound over a career. They care about the quality of the people around them, because strong performers want teammates who make them better, not colleagues they have to carry. They care about stability, and about purpose, and about whether any of this adds up to something.

Here is where many American owners underestimate their own appeal. You may see your business as small. To a talented professional in another country, a full-time role with a growing American company can represent exactly the things they are chasing: serious career growth, exposure to how leading companies operate, long-term opportunity, and the chance to build skills and a track record that open doors for years.

That is not so different from what your best local hires want. A skilled bookkeeper who joins a small firm over a big one usually does it for the responsibility, the growth, and the sense that their work matters, not because that firm out-bids everyone. Ambitious people, wherever they are, tend to trade a little short-term pay for a lot of long-term opportunity when the opportunity is real.

The lesson is not "pay less." It is that if the only thing you are selling is a salary number, you are competing on the one dimension where you are least likely to win, and ignoring the ones where you could.

After enough hires across enough places, a pattern shows up. The things that attract and keep exceptional people are remarkably consistent, whether they are two miles away or across an ocean. It is worth resisting stereotypes here in both directions, because ambitious people everywhere want strikingly similar things.

• They want clear expectations. Nothing frustrates a high performer faster than not knowing what winning looks like. The owner who defines the role, the goals, and the standards plainly will attract better people than the one who keeps it all vague and hopes for the best.
• They want strong leadership. Strong leadership mostly means someone who communicates honestly, makes decisions, and has their back. You do not need to be a charismatic visionary. You need to be reliable, fair, and clear.
• They want room to grow and to learn. Increasingly, that means being trusted to use AI tools well rather than being told to avoid them. The professional who gets to sharpen their skills, take on more, and work with modern tools will choose that role over a slightly better-paid dead-end job almost every time.
• They want autonomy with accountability. Great people do not want to be micromanaged, but they also do not want a free-for-all. They want to own a real outcome, be trusted to figure out how, and be held to the result. That balance, freedom paired with real responsibility, is one of the strongest things a small company can offer.
• They want to work with competent teammates, and they want to feel that their work matters. A strong transaction coordinator at a brokerage will stay in a location where they can see the deals they helped close. A sharp analyst at an agency will stay where their work visibly moves the account forward. People stretch themselves for work that connects to something real, and they drift when it does not.

Notice that almost none of this is about geography, and almost none of it costs a fortune. These are the things that pull exceptional people toward you, and they are as true for someone you hire down the street as for someone you hire through a partner like Sagan on the other side of the world.

If you take one idea from all of this, let it be this: finding great people is far less about luck than it feels in the middle of a frustrating search.

The owners who consistently hire well are not luckier than you. They are doing three things differently. They widen the search instead of fishing in the smallest pond. They build a company that ambitious people actually want to join, on the dimensions that those people care about. And they stay open to talent coming from places they had not previously considered, including well beyond their own zip code.

Your next great hire is out there. They are probably employed, probably not looking, and almost certainly not going to stumble onto your job posting on a random Tuesday. Reaching them takes a broader approach than posting and waiting.

If expanding your talent pool is part of that broader approach, that is exactly the conversation we enjoy having at Sagan . Whether you are weighing your first overseas hire or just rethinking where your next great employee might come from, we are happy to talk it through . No pressure, and no obligation to hire anyone. Sometimes it just helps to think out loud with people who look at this all day.