It is often said that your employees are your best resource. Perhaps a more accurate statement is that the right employees are your best resource. Everything else is most likely your biggest waste.
Getting the right people within the right time frame is a major and ongoing concern for small businesses. Creating hiring processes is a smart way to mobilize your recruitment and improve its effectiveness.
In this article, you’re going to read about 8 tips for creating hiring processes for small businesses. These will help you identify the right person for your business while ticking all the compliance boxes needed.
1. Scale Up With Software
Recruiting software is going to allow you to execute your recruitment on a scale that suits your business. A lot of time can be wasted posting jobs online to multiple websites, and then receiving all that information back and sifting through the applications. Software will allow you to identify your recruitment channels once and post to them anytime you need to recruit.
Second, you will be able to closely define your criteria for accepting an application. This is going to save you a lot of time working with applications you’re not interested in and focus on the applications you want to advance. You may notice software for recruiting is the method adopted by some government organizations because of its efficiency.
2. Create a Recruitment Workflow
This is about getting your ducks in order before you start. For example, at what point in the process do you want to meet your candidates.
Do you want to set up a brief video call first before you proceed to a full interview? Mapping out your workflow will help you narrow down the strongest candidates and match your acceptance criteria more closely.
3. Describe Your Ideal Candidate
This step in your process is very important. If you don’t know what the ideal candidate should be like, then your recruitment is already disadvantaged. Some of your criteria will be common to many job postings in your business but other attributes will be more specific.
If you’re not sure what you want, you can gain inspiration by researching other job postings in the marketplace. Try to be as specific as possible while being open-minded to the fact the most people will meet some of the criteria but not all of them.
4. Estimate Recruitment Impact
This new job may impact other areas of your business. Try to think through how recruitment to this post will affect the wider operation of your business. By carrying out an analysis of this sort, you’ll see if you need to do any reorganizing of existing staff.
5. Calculate Starting Capacity
It’s not realistic to expect everyone to hit the ground running. An important part of your overall HR strategy should be to retain the best people. You don’t want to put your new employee off by burning them out in the first 6 months.
It is a good idea to build into your recruitment process a graduated start that will allow your new employee to adapt and learn in their new environment. That means you need to take into account the capacity of the workforce you have and how to progressively increase the work of your new employee up to the expected standard.
6. Plan Ahead With Turnover
A really important part of your hiring process is to be able to anticipate future needs and have the processes in place and ready to roll when needed. That means analyzing your staff turnover rate and understand what variables affect it. This process will never be perfect but it’s a great way to relieve some of the stress associated with urgent recruitment.
7. Prioritize and Reduce
Another important process is to have a measure or method for prioritizing posts that you want to recruit. Don’t assume that because a post becomes vacant it automatically should be filled.
Think about the shifting priorities of your business and how that maps to the most useful roles. When people leave your business for other opportunities that potentially creates an opportunity for your business to reduce waste and better direct resources.
8. Create a Talent Pool
Attracting people with potential and helping them grow within your business is one of the best ways of retaining staff, boosting employee satisfaction, and giving you a steady stream of talent for the next challenge. This requires organization and begins as soon as you take people on. So your hiring process needs an immediate focus but also an eye on future growth and development within the business.
To be successful, you need effective annual appraisal systems and you need to be open about future opportunities and how in-house staff can work towards those future posts.
This kind of hiring process is super cost-effective and time-saving. You could hire a user experience designer to help you refine your process and make it accessible and easy for your staff to engage with.
Success in Creating Hiring Processes
In this article, you’ve read about 8 tips on creating hiring processes for small businesses. Getting the right people and keeping them begins with a well thought out recruitment process. Being small needn’t prevent you from thinking big.
These processes for hiring new employees will enable you to tap the internal talent you already have while being ready to scale your team as and when needed. If you define and follow these processes consistently you will also be doing all you can to comply with fair recruitment and equal opportunities. Check out other great articles on our site designed to support you in work and in life.
