October 13, 2020
The Complete Guide to Recruitment for Small Business
Small business owners often find themselves struggling to control their expenses and tackle all their responsibilities. Hiring additional staff or workers can cause a budget strain, but it can also boost your productivity, ultimately leading towards greater profitability.
Finding and hiring competent staff is one of the major challenges faced by small businesses. The process of recruitment and training alone can take up a significant amount of time and money. However, if your recruitment process is carefully and cleverly strategized, you can benefit from qualified human resource without wasting valuable time and efforts.
In this guide, we will walk you through the process of recruitment for small businesses. Here’s everything you need to know:
Identifying need for Staff
Small businesses should only recruit more staff if they identify a need for more workers to manage the workload. If your existing staff is regularly doing overtime, or routine tasks persistently get delayed, you need to recruit more employees. If your corporate venue has started attracting more clients and quieter periods of the day have become busier, consider recruiting more employees.
Being confident about your profitability allows you to
recruit more employees, especially if the workload has become overwhelming and you find yourself outsourcing certain tasks regularly. A shortage of skills will also take you towards the recruitment market.
Advertising Job Openings
Once you have identified the need for a skilled worker or several staff job openings, it’s time to advertise these positions and attract suitable candidates. You can choose multiple mediums of advertising, but since small businesses seek to reduce their costs, social media and online advertising present an efficient alternative. You can post the advertisements on various groups across Facebook or even LinkedIn. Job openings can also be advertised through newspapers, and online job listing platforms.
Shortlisting & Interviewing Candidates
Shortlisting the best candidates from a pool of applicants is always the most overwhelming part. If you do not have a separate human resource department, as most small businesses do not, you will have to ponder over each resume and evaluate the merits of the application. Once you have selected the best candidates, it’s time to schedule interviews.
The interview will allow you to gauge their acumen and confidence levels, and engage in multiple discussion related to their job specifications. This will also give you an opportunity to study the personality types and pick out the best candidates from your shortlisted applicants.
Making Job Offers
Small businesses have the luxury of making different job offers to different candidates, based on their qualifications, skill set and aptitude. Internships and training sessions are a suitable option for employees who are enthusiastic but require experience and skill-building to polish their credentials. However, employees that fit the requirements of qualifications and experience with prefer a salary package and benefits that are market competitive and appreciative of their time.
It is important to understand that there are two kinds of offers: verbal offer and written offer. While a verbal offer is not a binding agreement and can be terminated any time, a written contract is more binding. It will indicate the working hours, salary package, holidays, absenteeism policies and other details of the work arrangement.
Training Sessions
Training is a very important aspect of recruitment, and the first few weeks are spent teaching new employees about the processes and procedures. Small business owners typically tend to avoid off-the-job training camps as they are too expensive, and instead, pursue on-the-job training.
The process of recruitment can be overwhelming and challenging, but as a business owner, it is important to equip your business with skilled and credible employees. All successful businesses have grown and expanded their operations by talent acquisition, which is a significant contributor to organizational efficiency and innovation.
