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According to a recent survey, almost 65% of small businesses say that they're struggling to attract and recruit talented candidates. Recruiting for small businesses is not an easy feat -- budgets and time are something that small businesses don't have an abundance of.
However, the cost of not considering and implementing recruiting strategies exceeds the cost of creating them. Without them, top candidates will be drawn to your competitors instead of to your company.
Read on to learn about six small business recruiting strategies and tips on getting started with them.
It's easy to look at recruiting as a solo exercise, but there are various small business recruiting strategies that organizations can employ to nab the best candidates.
One thing job seekers and applicants hate is an unclear job description. Active job seekers are likely reading multiple job descriptions on a given day, meaning that they run out of steam quickly and need clear, concise, and engaging job descriptions to make them consider taking the time to submit an application.
If your job descriptions are full of jargon or don't contain straightforward information about the aspects of the role that applicants consider most important (such as salary and compensation information and required qualifications), then potential applicants will lose interest very quickly.
Job descriptions are your first chance to capture the attention of some great candidates, so make sure they're written with the applicant in mind, rather than just posting a wall of text from your HR department.
Here are a few tips to help you entice top talent with your job descriptions:
Employee referral programs are a great source of new talent, and should have a solid place in your organization's talent acquisition strategy.
Not only are employee referral programs often cited as being a cheaper, quicker, and more reliable recruiting tool, but referred candidates regularly stay longer with an organization than candidates who are hired via job boards or career sites.
Here are some tips for using your employees' network to identify and find new employees:
Employer branding is all about how you influence and shape your organization's reputation.
Rather than relying on word-of-mouth testimonies from your current and former employees, employer branding relies on you taking an active role in building your unique employer brand, which is often built on the basis of your employment value proposition.
An employment value proposition is a statement of what a company offers to its existing employees, in terms of how people benefit from working there. This often includes compensation, culture, learning opportunities, incentives, rewards, and so on.
When potential applicants are researching your organization, they want to know all of these things, but they don't want to jump from page to page on your website to learn them. They want to know who you are and how working for you is rewarding to them.
Online payment platform provider Stripe has a great employment value proposition that illustrates their brand:
"At Stripe, we're looking for people with passion, grit, and integrity. You're encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn't precisely match the job description. Your skills and passion will stand out -- and set you apart -- especially if your career has taken some extraordinary twists and turns. At Stripe, we welcome diverse perspectives and people who think rigorously and aren't afraid to challenge assumptions."
You don't need to include everything in your employment value proposition, but you need to include the aspects of your company that you think will have an impact on recruiting top talent.
Inviting every promising candidate in for an interview can be time consuming and costly for small businesses. Pre-employment tests help narrow down the candidate pool even further by screening applicants and helping organizations get a better sense of their aptitudes, skills, personalities, and integrity.
This is an especially helpful activity when organizations set out to hire remote employees, as it helps them more accurately gauge their suitability despite the distance.
Pre-employment tests can be a useful filtering tool, but organizations should also be aware of the legal implications. U.S. law states that organizations cannot discriminate against anyone on the basis of personal qualities that aren't job related.
Testing applicants is a great way of comparing seemingly qualified candidates before inviting them to interview. Here are a few tips to help you get started with applicant testing:
Succession planning is an important HR function: It should form a significant part of an organization's staffing plan, and should also be tied with an organization's internal recruitment strategy.
Small business recruiting isn't just about looking at external candidates, but also using succession planning to identify and train existing employees who can fill key leadership roles when they become vacant.
Succession planning is an important human resource planning exercise. Not only does it ensure that your key roles can be filled, but that the employees you want to fill those vacancies are prepared.
It's also an important part of workforce planning, helping organizations align its hiring plans with its larger goals and objectives.
No organization wants to lose their key employees, but succession planning helps them fill those roles quickly and efficiently.
Recruitment can be a very reactive exercise -- it's all about quickly filling vacancies and new job roles. Talent acquisition, on the other hand, is a strategic human resource management activity that helps organizations create a long-term process and plan for finding, attracting, hiring, and onboarding future candidates.
Talent acquisition strategies are built around identifying future talent needs, normally using a combination of workforce planning techniques and workforce analytics.
Talent acquisition strategies are an important component of the recruiting process, as they help organizations build out a talent pipeline, and help reduce time-to-fill, time-to-hire, and turnover costs -- all key HR metrics.
Talent acquisition strategies differ from recruitment activities, but have a large impact on recruiting business plans. Here are a few tips to get you started with a talent acquisition strategy:
Small businesses can't just rely on one recruiting process, and should consider using a combination of the techniques and strategies above. Waiting for the perfect candidate to fall into your inbox is not a strategy that's going to help your business grow and succeed.
Combining these strategies with the right HR software will help you attract and hire the best candidates.
Our Small Business Expert
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