Find and attract the right people to help your business thrive.
Finding and recruiting qualified employees is always a top priority for any small business. Employees are continually aging, switching careers, or becoming unfit to continue in their positions for one reason or another.
What can small business owners do when looking for high-quality employees? Here is some guidance for recruiting that will improve your prospects of attracting (and retaining) the people you need.
5 Tips for Small Businesses when Recruiting Employees
Businesses of all sizes need high-quality employees in order to succeed. But how do you attract and retain employees, particularly as a small business in a competitive market? The following techniques can provide a general view of how to recruit the candidates you need.
1. Determine Your Small Business’s Hiring Needs.
Figure out the precise talents/knowledge your company requires but is lacking. Begin by specifying the actual skills or talent your business needs in order to be successful. This will give you a more useful idea of who you need to attract for the position needed to benefit your small business.
Determine whether you actually need to hire new people or if existing employees can assume additional or different responsibilities. If the abilities or knowledge your business needs is already present among your current employees, you may not need to hire at all. Just be cautious not to overload your current staff with too many responsibilities and cause an unwanted turnover.
Determine how many employees you need to hire, and what type. Assessing how many employees you need to hire is a process of income versus cost. Full-time staff with benefits cost the most. Part-timers working fewer than 30 hours per week (no benefits) cost much less but are less desired by candidates. An evaluation of projected income and costs will help indicate what kinds and how many workers you can afford.
2. Create Job Descriptions that Attract The Proper Candidates
Target distinct skills in your job postings. You’ll reach a larger market of applicants and convey the base qualifications for a position.
Make the job duties and responsibilities clear and realistic. Candidates will have a better view of what their day-to-day roles might look like.
Be transparent and straightforward throughout your job depictions. You don’t want to overwhelm possible candidates with too many details.
3. Offer A Truly Competitive Compensation
For small-business owners, recruiting and hiring is even more difficult when they have to compete with the salaries given by larger companies. Competent candidates are forever in high demand, so they’ll be more likely to pass on wages that don’t fit their needs.
Your first thought may be to establish your salary offers based on budget alone. But the truth is that even small businesses have to present salaries that align with the market rate if they hope to attract qualified talent. To guarantee that your salary offer stays relatively competitive, perhaps check what the average salary is for your industry, in your location.
Also, most employees consider an employee benefit program a necessity, not just a perk. Jobs that offer benefits will almost always beat out those that have none. Furthermore, if you're going to attract a high-quality workforce, your business needs to offer high-quality benefits. If your small business does not have an employee benefits program, discuss setting one up with your insurance company.
4. Emphasize Your Small Business' Culture and Lifestyle
Did you know over half of employees view workplace culture as more important than salary? It’s evident that creating and highlighting company culture can be a compelling recruiting strategy for your small business. Your company's lifestyle and culture are how you can demonstrate to prospective employees what you value as a business. They also show how working at your business will be rewarding beyond the money.
Consider emphasizing things such as volunteer projects that your business partakes in, social gatherings or events your company facilitates to spend time with colleagues outside of work, or moral objectives that your business aims to achieve in making the world a better place.
5. Promote Your Employees' Prospects of Career Growth
Offering opportunities for professional development and career advancement to employees can attract more capable applicants and result in significantly enhanced retention. Options to learn and develop skills are among the top attractions for young talent in businesses. For millennials specifically, adequate training and development programs were ranked as more attractive in an employer than a good benefits package.
There are various ways to foster employee skill development in your small business. Forbes.com shared a collection of strategies for helping employees develop their skill sets:
Establish A Learning-And-Development Team (For small businesses, this could be a part-time role for a person currently working in HR)
Encourage Challenging Experiences
Form Support Groups
Leverage Digital Courses
Reward Employee Loyalty
Attracting Talent to Your Small Business
Recruiting for your small business doesn’t have to be a prolonged and meticulous process. You can draw talent to your small business, nurture your employees’ personal and professional development, and enhance your retention rates by being proactive and developing an effective recruiting strategy now.
Mission Box solutions can help you develop a comprehensive recruitment strategy connected to your overall goals. Contact us to learn more about forming a dynamic yet practical small business recruiting strategy for modern talent acquisition.
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Photo Credit: Getty/Rowan Jordan