11 Recruitment Tips for Small Businesses
A primary problem small businesses face is hiring the right people. While many think that raising money or finding clients will be the biggest challenges, successful recruiting is actually a number one issue for the vast majority of small businesses. Not having a strong team is also a main reason that small businesses fail.
Issues making recruiting difficult include limited company recognition, lack of employee feedback, little hiring experience, and lower salary offers.
However, finding incredible talent as a small business is absolutely possible! By following a few easy recruitment guidelines, there’s no reason why a new and growing company cannot ace the hiring process.
The following list of 11 recruitment tips for small businesses will allow any new company find qualified and long-lasting talent to help their company grow exponentially.
11 Top Recruitment Tips for Small Businesses
If you’re looking to add to your team, then the following 11 recruitment tips for small businesses will help considerably in finding the perfect fit for your growing company.
1. Build a Recruitment Plan
You didn’t launch your small business without a business plan. If you had, it’s unlikely you would have been successful. So, don’t jump into hiring without a recruitment plan if you want to find the best talent.
To implement this recruitment tip for small businesses, keep the following in mind when creating your plan.
Create a Recruitment Roadmap: think about where you are now with your hiring needs and recruitment strategy and how you will move forward with that as you grow.
Think About What Ideal Candidates Look Like: make a list of qualities you’d like all candidates to have plus what candidates in each department or type of role need.
Craft an Interview Process: plan what the interview process will look like, including what types of questions you need to ask, how you’ll rank candidates, and where this will occur (for example, a phone interview and then an in-person interview.) If you need some help with this, check out our blog on interview tips for interviewers.
Know What you Want!
As mentioned, you must think about your ideal candidates. Before you even post a job or start considering candidates, make a detailed list of what you’re looking for. This list should include skills, experience, education, plus a few general personality traits.
Of course, don’t ask for too much, especially if you don’t have the salary budget to back those requests up! Be reasonable, but don’t find yourself making too many compromises on what you want in the new hire either.
Having made a list of everything you’d like, split them into “must-haves” and “nice to have.” This process will make writing a job description and evaluating candidates much easier.
Consider creating an interview checklist too. Check off skills, qualifications, experience, and personality traits as candidates display and mention them.
Make a list of what you’re looking for in candidates, including skills, experience, and general personality traits.
2. Don’t Put an Excessive Amount of Focus on Experience
Every new business would love to hire a candidate with a great personality, amazing work ethic, and bags of experience. Unfortunately, as a small business, you may not be able to afford an employee with your ideal amount of experience.
Some highly experienced employees may take a pay cut to work with a growing company where they’ll get lots of responsibility and help build the brand from the ground up. But most won’t see it as worth it.
Therefore, another recruitment tip for small businesses is to shift from focusing a lot on work experience to giving a good amount of weight to the attitude and potential of candidates.
This hiring practice includes choosing candidates based on work ethic, motivations, and future career goals. Ask them lots of questions relating to these and rely on references to back this information up.
Try not to put too much importance on industry experience either. Just because a candidate doesn’t have experience in your industry or niche rarely means they won’t succeed in the role.
In addition to this strategy, consider the following two ways to make up for a lower salary when attracting top candidates.
1. Offer Stock Options
You may not have the means to offer large salaries, but you can give financial incentives like shares in the company you’re building. Setting up a profit-sharing program is another way to make up for a lower base salary.
2. Offer Flexibility
You may be lacking in comparison to other larger companies with the salary you offer, but you can make up for that by giving employees flexibility.
This includes flexibility in:
Hours worked per week
Workday schedule
Where they work
Their tasks and responsibilities
You could also add incentives like extra paid vacation days or finishing an hour early on Fridays.
These flexibility measures are low to no cost but can do wonders for attracting talent, even if your salary range is a little lower than other companies.
3. Craft Job Descriptions that Stand Out
A crucial recruitment tip for small businesses is to learn how to write job descriptions that attract top candidates.
In today's digital recruitment climate, candidates get inundated with job postings. To reach the best of the best, you need to stand out.
The following are just a few ways to make your job description stand out among the competition:
Use visual elements like images and video
Avoid boilerplate descriptions
Mention what the candidate will get out of the role
Include as much detail as possible
Another must-do when writing your job descriptions is to make it incredibly clear what you want. Highlight the skills and experience that an applicant must possess. Then also mention some nice-to-have qualities.
You'll always get some people applying who aren’t qualified. However, making your job description as clear as possible helps reduce the number of people who apply thinking they’re qualified based on what you wrote, but aren’t qualified based on what you really want.
Spending time going through lots of unqualified candidates loses time you could be spending on other tasks within the company.
Offer prospective hires flexibility, like working from home or following their own time schedule.
4. Showcase your Company Culture
Most employees don’t just look at salary when evaluating job positions. They want to work in a fun and friendly environment that’s rewarding and meets their career needs and way of working. That’s where promoting your company culture to prospective candidates comes in.
Use your job posting, website, and social media accounts to share more about office life, your team, events you hold, and generally why it's great to work for you!
Showcasing your culture also involves mentioning flexibility, as previously discussed, and if you have a flat hierarchy. These are both extremely appealing to employees. Many big and more established companies often have a multi-level hierarchy, and each employee has minimal responsibility relating to the whole output. There’s also little flexibility on work schedule and location.
However, employees today want more freedom to manage their work and collaborate with other employees in a team environment.
This want makes smaller businesses popular with many due to the relaxed, friendly, creative, and innovative team environment they bring. Be sure to use this to your advantage when promoting open positions.
5. Create a Recruitment Brand Image
Every business owner knows that they must build a unique brand identity to stand out and be recognizable when selling products or services. Creating a recruitment brand image can be an effective tool for connecting with incredible talent, allowing you to easily showcase what it's like to work at your company.
As a new or smaller business, you may not be on job searchers’ radars as more established companies are. You’ll also have little in the way of references; candidates cannot go to a site like Glassdoor to see what employees say about working for you.
Therefore, building and promoting this recruiting brand image can be a powerful way to get on the radar of top talent and show why working for you is awesome. Promoting your culture, as discussed above, is a big part of that.
6. Promote on Social Media
There are thousands of articles and tips about using social media to promote your brand to customers, but why not also use it to recruit?
Promoting your company's recruitment brand on social media can include offering insights into everyday work life and what it’s like to be an employee at your company.
Social media is also a great place to promote job openings to another audience. You can post these openings to your main feeds and story feeds, plus add links where candidates can learn more about the job and working at your small business.
Using social media for recruiting allows you to reach those not actively looking for a job who won’t be searching on job boards. It’s often these passive candidates that are the best out there. Grabbing their attention on social media could be the thing to get them interested in your role.
Remember to use relevant hashtags to increase your reach even more.
The best part? Implementing this recruitment tip for small businesses comes at no cost and will take minimal effort, especially if you already have a strong social media following.
Small businesses are popular due to their friendly and creative team environment, so promote that culture to candidates.
7. Utilize your Network and Get Referrals
Your network and your employee’s network can be a great recruiting resource, especially for small businesses.
Ask your current employees if they know anyone who they could refer for the job and actively encourage them to do so. You could even set up a recruitment referral program, where your employees get rewards when applicants they refer apply.
Along with asking employees, look to your network. Ask friends, family, industry contacts, and anyone else you know who may have a great candidate in mind. Having someone who you know and trust recommended a candidate is an excellent bonus, especially for small businesses who can afford less than most companies to make bad hiring decisions.
Expanding Your Network
Networking is a great tool, especially in small business recruiting. Along with reaching out to your existing network, build your network by going to industry events.
The more events you go to, the more people you’ll meet and any one of them could be a future employee or could know someone who would be an ideal fit.
Try to frequent both general industry and recruitment events to get the best results. Even if people you meet do not currently want a new job or know anyone that would be a good fit, they may do in the future.
8. Find Niche Job Boards
When discussing recruitment tips for small businesses, we must mention the use of online job boards. As well as posting on large well-known job boards like Indeed and Glassdoor, look into niche boards for more targeted recruiting. AngelList is a great one as it specializes in small business recruitment.
Do some research to find job boards relating to your specific industry niche too. These boards are full of people with exactly the experience you’re looking for who may be looking to try the challenge of working for a small business.
9. Work with a Recruitment Agency
Working with a recruitment agency can bring great results for small businesses.
It’s unlikely that hiring an HR employee is cost-effective for a small business. But, using a recruitment agency could be within your budget and will save you tons of time that you would otherwise have to spend recruiting yourself. You can use this extra time to focus on building your company and your bottom line.
A recruitment agency is a great partner for any company, especially a small business. The employees have dedicated their careers to finding amazing talent for other companies and will have years of experience doing so.
While large recruitment agencies that cover almost every industry could be a good fit, there are many reasons to use a boutique recruitment agency that focuses on specific industries, sectors, and niches.
For example, Lynne Palmer focuses exclusively on recruiting for the publishing and medical communications industries.
If you operate in those industries, making use of Lynne Palmer’s vast array of contacts and experience hiring in your specific niche should bring better results and attract a higher level of talent than a broad-reaching agency could acquire.
No matter what your industry, you’ll likely be able to find a recruitment agency in your niche that knows what you're looking for and has access to a vast pool of talent matching those needs.
Working with a boutique recruitment agency can connect your startup with incredible talent.
10. Partner with Universities
Local universities will have lots of qualified students looking for jobs. New graduates won’t be appropriate for every position, but they can add a lot of value to your team and get trained quickly.
With no or minimal other experience, they also won’t have habits and procedures learned from other companies that don’t line up with your company's way of doing things.
Going to career fairs and university recruitment events and posting on university job boards are just some ways to connect with new or future graduates.
11. Consult with Others
Never make a hiring decision all by yourself!
Therefore, a super easy recruitment tip for small businesses is to consult with other employees or partners in the company. If you work alone at the moment, consult with friends, family, old colleagues, and other industry contacts, plus investors if you have them.
Getting a second opinion can be eye-opening and help in choosing the best candidate. It can also help in avoiding someone that wouldn’t have worked out.
If you have other employees or partners, have them sit in on interviews as well as viewing applications. Even if this means bringing candidates back for another interview, it’s worth it.
Knowing a candidate is willing to come in again is a great sign too. It indicates that they’re extremely interested and willing to commit to the position.
In Conclusion
Recruiting as a small business doesn’t need to be difficult, and you don’t need to compromise as much as you’d think to get vacancies filled.
By implementing these recruitment tips for small businesses, not only can you fill roles, but you can do so with well-qualified, motivated, and passionate employees that will be an asset to your growing business.
If you would like some help implementing these tips for a small business in the publishing or medical communications industry, get in touch with the team at Lynne Palmer. We’d love to discuss your hiring needs and how we can fit into your recruitment plan.