Hiring people is always a bit of a mixed bag, in terms of experience. Sometimes, you’ll get the perfect candidate within your first batch. Sometimes, you can be taking resumes in for weeks without finding what you’re looking for. And, worst of all, sometimes you would be in the middle of the hiring process when your ideal candidate gets swept up and away by a competitor for a fatter paycheck. In any case, hiring decisions cannot be made lightly – according to Recruiter Box, a bad hiring decision can cost you as much as 30 percent of your first year’s potential earnings.

But thankfully, the past few years have made hiring people much easier. Between advances in communication and efficiency, it’s much easier to evaluate people’s skills and competency today than ever before – all you have to do is know how to use these new technologies to make hiring people much easier.

Online Networking Sites

The first in the list is your average networking website – the most common on being LinkedIn, with nearly 400 million members by the end of 2015 according to Statista. These are websites where professionals in any given niche – or all of them – congregate and share their credentials, whether to make contacts for potential deals or to find and hire new and existing talent.

These differentiate themselves from normal social media websites by focusing on the professional persona of any given person, and helping you select the most competent people within your area.

Private Social Media

Having access to social media tools like Facebook and Twitter also gives you a large advantage over the competition by letting you gauge the interests and personality of any given candidate. Social media-savvy applicants can also showcase their abilities through an impressive social media profile, which, especially when working in an unrelated niche, shows a high level of preparedness for a professional life.

Marketers and influencers especially should have a strong social media presence, as it speaks about their ability to produce content that people pay attention to. However, a private account shouldn’t discourage, either, as some applicants put their personal privacy above other things.

Freelance Forums

When speaking about specific niches, a good source for potential applicants is within pre-existing freelance communities. These can be set-up in a classic classified-ads format, allowing employers and companies to ask for interested professionals – or they can feature professionals themselves, looking for work.

Some platforms host the service provider’s work immediately, allowing professionals to offer their services for fixed prices, in exchange for a cut of each sale. These are harder to vet, however, as the fees are usually low enough that a strenuous hiring process is bypassed in exchange for a potentially dubious level of quality. On a shoestring budget, however, such sites – such as Fiverr – are a great way to outsource simple tasks like press release writing or logo graphics.

Email Tools

Despite its age, and the dawn of instant messaging and file sharing, the email remains to be the number one tool for professional communication. Everyone’s got an email – and nearly every form of membership on the Internet requires an email account to be synced to, further warranting the longevity of the online post system.

As such, communicating through email is still a great way to get back to applicants, and to gain information – or to send out notices to eager professionals of a new offer around the corner.

Sharable Documents

Perhaps one of the most effective, if somewhat underutilized tools of today is the cloud-based document. Spreadsheets are a great way for applicants to enlist themselves into the hiring process, and it makes for an easy way to standardize entries and sort them based on easy comparison. Standardization is a difficult task for many in the hiring process because it involves sifting through hundreds of resumes and applications and deciding which ones are worth what based on their individual merits.

Through a spreadsheet wherein any given applicant to add their information, you at the helm of the hiring process can sort through and arrange applications based on information such as years of experience, level of education, number of recommendations, and so on and so forth.

Video Meetings

Although email applications and a thorough online vetting process, combined with spreadsheet evaluation makes for a handy shortlist of candidates, the final and most important step will always be the interview.

Traditionally, job interviews are a very physical thing – after a period of time spent building an expectation of someone based on their professional credentials, the interview is a time when these expectations have to be met or dispelled. But in many cases, job interviews aren’t really possible anymore – companies are doing their hiring online, getting employees and freelancers onto their team from hundreds and thousands of miles away.

That’s where video web conferencingkicks in. Premium services like Blue Jeans can help employers meet applicants virtually as though they were meeting face-to-face, improving upon the job interview by cutting travel time and meeting costs while retaining the same experience.