The ultimate guide to hiring the best talent for your small business

Recruiting the best talent for your small business should not be difficult if you develop and implement good processes and systems to hire from the beginning.

The average cost per job is $ 4,129, while the average time required to fill a given position is 42 days, according to the new Human Resources Comparative Human Capital Analysis report. (SHRM)

According to Jörgen Sundberg, CEO of Link Humans, a branding agency of the employer, 75% of hiring is due to staff turnover.

Whether you hire your first employee or your 100 ^th employee, you should develop strategic plans to hire good employees and prevent staff turnover.

What is the cost of a bad rental?

According to a CareerBuilder survey, many businesses lost an average of $ 14,900 each time they were hired in the past year.

Some of the reasons they were bad hires were because:

• 35% thought they could acquire new skills faster than they did
• 33% say the candidates lied about their qualifications
• 32% said they tried their luck on a nice person
• 30% felt compelled to fill the role quickly
• 29% said they focused on skills and not on attitude
• 25% said they ignored some of the warning signs

All of these things could be avoided through methodical, standardized and effective hiring systems.

Although your hiring practices for small businesses are not fully developed, here are some steps to make sure you hire the best people:

1. Develop an employee manual . If your small business does not have an employee manual in place, make sure to create one. Your manual can be the backbone of your business and can set the expectations of your business. Include policies that are mandatory for compliance and those that your employees need to know. Everything you write in a manual must comply with all federal, state, and local laws and be enforced by all managers. If you have already developed a manual, you should consult it every year for legal changes or topics that you would like to add.
2. Write a very good job description . Writing a good job description can provide clarity and expectations for job seekers. You should develop a job description for each position within your company, even if you have already hired for these positions. The job description will outline the expectations for new and current employees, help you understand the key qualities you are looking for, and help you develop a comprehensive compensation package. If you make changes to a job, be sure to update your job descriptions.
3. Find and keep your best talent . Once you have developed a good job description, you will start advertising for these employees. If you have good employees in place, have them help you spread the word and offer a referral bonus to employees. Organize job fairs on site and advertise on job sites and in other sectors. Be sure to implement best practices to keep your employees and process them properly. If your small business has a staff turnover problem, you will have a bad reputation in the community, which will make it difficult for you or your recruiter to hire. Finding and keeping the best employees is a process that takes time and effort, but ultimately pays off.
4. Determine their status of exemption or non-exemption . Make sure your workers are classified properly based on their exemption status and whether they should be paid overtime or not. Many states adhere to a typical calculation of overtime pay that anything beyond 40 hours a week. But some jurisdictions, like California, are stricter. Know your state and federal laws on how to classify exempt or not – except to make sure you pay your employees properly.
5. Develop a complete screening process. Before hiring your best employees, you should develop a screening process to determine the candidates you would like to interview. If you receive a large number of resumes or applications, you must develop a spreadsheet to ensure that you cover each step with each candidate correctly. Again, follow all federal and state laws to make sure you are in compliance
6. Structure your interview process . Then you want to start interviewing. When interviewing candidates, develop a structured interview process to find your players. Once you know that the candidate has the skills to do the job, you need to make sure you interview them for non-technical skills (eg, communication, leadership). You want to make sure that the candidates match the culture of your organization.
7. On board your new employees. Most of the turnover occurs in the first 45 days. By integrating and properly training your employees, you will have a better chance of keeping them. Employee integration is not a fast process and many times, new employees feel overwhelmed by all the information given to them. By developing an extensive orientation program, they will engage more quickly. Assign mentors and make sure they understand their performance goals.
8. Make sure your employees are hired. Once you hire them, you should make sure that they become quickly engaged in your small business. If your employees are not engaged, productivity suffers and customer service expectations are not met. Employees who do not like their job or their manager will not stay long and they will only do what is basically required until they find another job. Make sure you hire the best leaders in your company and put systems in place to ensure employee engagement.
9. Prevent your employees from leaving. Design and implement plans to ensure you keep your players A. Hire senior leaders, pay good salaries, provide good benefits and provide additional benefits. Be sure to listen to comments, whether from employees who have resigned or employees who are currently working there. Put in place good performance evaluation systems and develop succession plans with each of them to show that you are committed to their future with your business.

Improve the brand of your employer

One of your goals is probably to ensure that your company's reputation is respectable to existing and potential customers. You want customers to like your business and appreciate your products or services so that they can talk to others and make them known. Well, as an employer, you should also worry about the same thing.

According to a recent survey:

• 49% of employees would recommend their employer to a friend.
• 87% of organizations cite culture and engagement as one of their key challenges, and 50% view the problem as "very important".
• 69% are likely to apply for a job if the employer is actively managing his employer brand (eg, responds to reviews, updates his profile, shares the updates on the culture and l & # 39; working environment).
• 76% want details on what makes the company an attractive place to work.
• 69% would not take a job in a company that had a bad reputation, even if they were unemployed.

You can hire better recruiters, human resources managers, spend thousands to recruit ads and even offer huge sponsorship bonuses, but you will not get better employees if you are considered a bad place to work. on Glassdoor. You should be concerned about the candidate's experience and current employee experiences for your employer brand to be good enough for candidates to consider you in their job search. You should also strive to have a business culture that is so good that it sells to candidates.

Make sure your candidates have great experience

Candidate experience is defined as the way job seekers perceive and react to the recruitment, interview, hiring and integration processes of employers .

What makes a bad candidate experience? If you are rude to the candidates that you have no interest in pursuing, do not respond to e-mail or phone call requests, or do not inform them of decisions regarding the status of # 39; employment. These are just a few things that create a bad experience for your company's candidates.

Before the Internet, if someone had a bad experience, he was talking to some friends about his experience. But now, because of social media and companies like Glassdoor, candidates are telling others where to apply and where to not to apply.

Here are some tips to make sure your candidates will have a great experience:

1. Facilitate the application process. Do not ask candidates to upload a resume and ask them to fill in the same information again, such as the task history. Applicants are more likely to complete an application when it takes less than 15 minutes.
2. Be sure to always be polite with the candidates . Even if candidates are rude or difficult, you should always be calm if you are the point of contact. Sometimes they have been donated by other companies and they take it from you.
3. Contact your candidates. Inform them quickly if you have decided to go ahead with more qualified candidates. If you know that you are going to take some time to recruit, be sure to let each candidate approximate time so that he does not expect to call the next day. Some companies even have websites where a candidate can log in to see where they are in the process.
4. Make sure all interviewers are trained. Have you ever had an interview with several people and there was someone who was different or did not understand why she had to interview you? Or they just joked and did not really ask questions? If you have several people interviewing the candidate, make sure that he / she knows how to communicate with the candidates, that they know the process and that they have interview guides. Sometimes you can ask someone to "fill in" in case someone is missing. Make sure they are trained too.

Learn from the best

When developing your hiring plans, investigate and implement the best practices of other companies and people to make sure you hire good employees. A bad manager or another member of the team can hurt your business.

Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Group, says, "Most skills can be learned, but it is difficult to train people about their personalities. If you can find people who are fun, friendly, caring and who love to help others, you are a winner. "

Before embarking someone, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, poses these three questions:

• Will I admire this person?
• Will this person increase the level of efficiency of our company?
• Where can this person shine?

Ford's Lee Iacocca says, "I hire people brighter than me and I get in their way."

Steve Jobs from Apple said, "When you have very good people, you do not need to bring them into the world. While waiting for them to do great things, you can get them to do great things. A-plus players enjoy working together, and they do not like it if you tolerate level B work. "

Some companies, like Netflix, use interview techniques designed to look for cultural fit and even give presentations to show candidates more about their culture and what they are looking for. This can help reduce turnover by being completely transparent about cultural fit – on both sides.

Michael Gerber, who is the author of the best-selling E-Myth series with Awakening the Entrepreneur Within and The most successful small business in the world suggests you to bring people with less experience and teach them your way to business. "If that person can not learn our way, she can never get to the point where she can start the process of innovation, quantification and orchestration, which is the real, ongoing process of developing the business. 39, a company. "

Effective and accurate hiring methods are not difficult if you develop a standardized approach in the beginning. Whether you are a small or a large company, you should analyze your work culture, your brand, your comments and your experience, and look in detail to make sure you are a top employer where others want to work. Make sure you have systems in place when you hire good leaders will greatly reduce turnover. By recruiting A players as managers, you will make sure that they will want to hire A players who will work for them. Study best practices, develop good interview questions and if something does not work, change it.