Resources to Make Hiring for Your Small Business Easier

Overview

• How you can attract the best candidates
• Why you need a killer job description
• When you might find a template handy
• Where you can find quality applicants

Small business growth is impressive and shows a commitment to excellence and smart management. With this kind of expansion, depending on your staffing needs, you’ll likely need a new employee or two.

The hiring process can pose many challenges for small businesses, but there are hiring resources that can simplify the process for you. Recruiters already know this and use a highly developed hiring process that can help them locate ideal job candidates for job roles. This article will dive into these best practices and discuss how you can implement them into your own hiring process.

Small business owners have access to a number of hiring resources that can attract job applicants. When thinking about your own hiring process, consider what recruiters already know. Human resources professionals offer tried-and-true processes and can suggest ways to quickly and confidently fill open positions.

Some ways these professionals go about finding top candidates are through networking events, job boards, and old-fashioned referrals. Networking and word of mouth are other reliable ways to find candidates who align with your brand and company values. When you hear firsthand about a person’s work ethic, knowledge, and skills, you can make a better judgment call about your hiring decision.

By keeping this tested toolkit in mind, you can improve your onboarding process and increase employee retention through trusted recruitment process metrics.

Joblist provides recruiting tools and hiring resources to help small businesses share open roles easily. This convenient and easy job search platform creates a personalized set of job matches for each applicant, ensuring that business owners or hiring managers gain access to the best candidates for them.

Talent acquisition at the outset can seem simple, but many hiring managers find that filling staffing needs can quickly become overwhelming. Joblist can help simplify recruitment and deliver quality candidates at your fingertips.

Like a great resume, it’s essential that companies keep an updated job profile for the different roles within the business. Good job profiles let job seekers know the responsibilities and metrics for their success. They can also let a potential new hire know the skills and background experience needed for the role that can help ensure their success.

Occasionally, the responsibilities and necessary skill set can change for a role. When you provide updated job profiles, you attract applicants who can complement or enhance the role of your current employees, which can offer better returns for your business.

Writing a job profile isn’t necessarily easy, though. If you’re struggling to develop an effective yet concise job profile, it’s totally acceptable to dig around and research how others approach this task. You can check out sample descriptions on social media platforms or job boards. Avoid a copy-and-paste description if you can; however, this method can help get your creative writing juices flowing if you’re having trouble.

As their businesses grow and bring on more staff, small business owners should develop an employee organizational chart. This chart shows the hierarchy of a business’s employees.

Like any chart you may come across, an employee organizational chart provides visual clues about the working relationships within the business. Ideally, it should visually communicate the different positions within the business and how they relate to one another.

With an employee organizational chart, you can collect information from your observations or current employees who can provide you with a better idea of the core responsibilities needed to carry out the job role successfully. This information you collect can even help you form an effective job description.

Employee organizational charts benefit more than just management and current employees, though. New hires can gain a lot from this resource. They can learn the names of colleagues, their roles within the company, and where they stand in the organization’s hierarchy.

When in a pinch, who doesn’t enjoy a time-saving template? Job description templates can help you save time with pre-filled information. While you want to keep your description unique to the role, you can use the template to autofill information that remains constant over the different job positions.

Things like employer brand or equal opportunity and affirmative action statements typically remain the same across the board. When you pull these into a ready-made template, you save typing and proofing time.

Many job roles and professions require a specific skill set. This can run the gamut from a multi-phone line receptionist to a tech-savvy app developer. These tests are not something they need to study for but can give you a better idea of their strengths and weaknesses.

When creating a skills test, keep it short and sweet. For many, job hunting can prove to be a full-time job, so it’s best to make the questions concise (the applicant shouldn’t need more than 20 minutes to complete them).

Skills tests can be an excellent screening tool and help you find candidates who align with your business needs. There are a number of skills tests that companies can use to help with the hiring process. These tests can be specific job skill questions or a personality and ethical inquiry. Skills tests are an added tool that can help expedite the hiring process for your business.

An interview process can help hiring managers better evaluate or predict an applicant’s job performance. Rather than just winging it, you may find that some structure can go a long way in hiring.

You can gain structure in the interview process by:

• Scheduling an initial phone interview
• Developing interview questions around a skills test that can further evaluate candidate experience
• Asking situational questions
• Avoiding questions or jargon that can get you into trouble, such as asking about the severity of any apparent disabilities
• Training other team members involved in the hiring process

Once you develop an interview process, you can share it online or through email with candidates. You don’t need to give it all away, but sharing ways that candidates can prepare for the interview can help them and your business. Interview preparation can help avoid confusion and let job applicants know you want them to feel confident and at ease.

When businesses create an organized salary structure, they can gain numerous advantages. Not only does this provide a well-researched base to work from, but it can also provide happier employees who feel compensated and appreciated. This means better retention and less turnover for your business.

Establishing competitive compensation can attract the ideal candidates and show how much you value what they offer. This takes some time and research at first but can lessen tension down the road. Each year, evaluate your salary structure and ensure it’s still relevant to the current job economy. You can save money and do this yourself with a wage data check or by outsourcing to a professional analyst.

Get your job post in front of top candidates with Joblist. In just three simple steps, you can fill open roles faster. With no gimmicks and flat-rate pricing, you can get qualified candidates delivered right to your inbox or applicant tracking system (ATS) with no surprises.