For each new hire who does not pan out, your small business could take a $7,645 hit at a minimum. All your searching, onboarding, and training efforts go to waste as well, leaving your team discouraged as you start over again. Wouldn’t it be nice to skip all that trouble and go straight to hiring the right people the first time around?
Well, the great news is that it’s definitely possible with the right approach. The one caveat is that you will likely need to overhaul your hiring process to achieve this important goal. To begin your journey toward optimized hiring practices, use these seven helpful tips for small-business owners looking to get the right hire.
1. Post Informative Job Descriptions
When looking for a new position, people use the job descriptions offered by each company as a self-screening tool. They compare their skills, work experience and credentials to the information on the description to decide whether they should apply or not. If your job description does not give them enough to work with, then your team may wade through far too many resumes as a result.
You can effectively narrow down your prospects and get more interested, qualified people in the door by putting all the pertinent details in your job descriptions. Have more than one person look over the job descriptions and add whatever they feel is missing to ensure each one accurately depicts your expectations. As your job descriptions do the work, you can save on hiring costs and improve your chances of getting the right person for the job the first time around.
2. Promote Your Company Culture
People have to feel like they mesh well with the company culture or they may decline the position or, worse yet, take the job and immediately restart their job search. Avoiding this situation is really as simple as introducing all prospective hires to your company culture from the start. You can do this by weaving your brand story, mission and values into your job descriptions, workplace brochures and website to give people an idea of what your company is all about and what it is like to work there.
During the interview process, you can even dive into this topic a little bit to see what your prospective hires think about the workplace culture. Pay attention to their body language as much as their words to gauge their perceptions and work toward finding someone who will fit in with your brand. Also, look at how each candidate’s qualifications and experience will help the culture improve or evolve in the coming years.
3. Match Jobs to Aspirations
With the creation of each job description, you design a vision of the employee’s role in your organization. However, as your company grows, this vision will likely change. Since you want your new hires to stay on the team for the long term, it is important to know if their aspirations line up with those expected changes.
To find out, you must clearly define how you think the position will evolve in the future. You can then match that vision to each candidate’s aspirations to see how your hopes and dreams align. With this step, you can keep from having to reorganize your team as your company’s growth demands changes.
4. Commit to Reviewing References
Though rather tedious and time-consuming, reviewing references gives you an inside look at how your prospective hires interact with their professional connections. By completing the right interviews, you can acquire enlightening information that helps you determine if those individuals will mesh with your team and company culture.
As you verify their work history details, aim to learn about the applicants’ approach to:
Information about these areas will help paint a picture of your applicants’ suitability for the open positions, helping you make the best hiring decisions possible.
5. Listen More Than You Talk
As you interview references and the applicants themselves, aim to listen far more than you talk to glean as much information as possible from each reference. Embrace the power of silence by pausing for three seconds before responding to see if your interviewee fills in the gap with additional information. Your attention will be well-rewarded with pertinent information that can help you make the right choices.
6. Use Other Evaluation Strategies
Think outside of in-person interviews to make the process more convenient and affordable for everyone involved. You can use other evaluation strategies, such as phone and video interviews, to quickly narrow down your candidate pool before performing a single in-person interview. Through several questions, your team can learn of the candidate’s skills, experience, and more, gleaning enough information to decide if it is worth the investment of moving forward in the hiring process.
7. Resist the Urge to Rush
Although it might seem like your small business cannot survive another day without filling your open positions with qualified employees, waiting it out is often the best course of action. As you take your time in filling the open position, you give the top talent enough time to review and respond to your job openings. You also give your team more time to interview applicants and their references, making sure your company is a good match for their skills, experience and aspirations.
When you use these tips to optimize your hiring practices, you can improve your ability to hire the right employee for the job, keep that person around for the long-term, and be even more successful as a company because of their valuable contributions.
Frank Jenkins, CPA writes for CountingWorks, an accounting news and advice website. Reach him at [email protected].
About Frank Jenkins Jr
Frank Jenkins Jr. CPA is the managing partner of Adams, Jenkins & Cheatham, a CPA practice based in Midlothian, VA. Frank specializes in Consulting services, tax planning, audit & assurances. "I genuinely care about our clients because I have a personal connection with them." He is active in the community and belongs to the AICPA and the VSCPA.
