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hrbytara

Helping you hire

When you’re the owner or manager of a small business, finding and choosing the right people to join the team can be really challenging. Recruitment can be time consuming, involve lots of boring admin and yet you know that making the wrong decision can be so damaging for the business.

So, what can make it easier and more likely to go well….?


 

Define Your Needs: What Role Do You Need to Fill?

First of all, start with thinking really carefully about what you actually

Think about what you want someone to do

  • what tasks will they complete?

  • what responsibilities will you give them?

  • what are you expecting them to achieve for the business?

Then, think about what skills, experience and knowledge someone will need to be able to do the work well, plus what your values are as a business and what qualities someone has to have if they’re going to thrive in your team.

Lastly, think about the practicalities of working for you.

  • Where will they need to work - office, home, hybrid, travel?

  • When will they need to work - full-time, part-time, fixed hours, flexibility, evenings, weekends?

  • What are you looking to pay - fixed rate, range, depending on experience?

Be honest with yourself. If there are restrictions on how flexible you can be with any of these areas then be clear about them, so you can be clear with candidates.

All this will help you describe your requirements.


Be Attractive to Candidates: What Makes Your Company a Good Fit?

Next, remind yourself that you need to be able to attract people to apply for the role. Recruitment is a two way process. You have a job to offer and they have time, energy and expertise. What’s going to make this a good deal for both of you?

Think about what’s good about your company, your products and services, your team, the job itself. What will the successful candidate get out of working for you - beyond what they get paid? If someone has more than one job offer on the table, what would make them choose yours?

You can often get good ideas about this by talking to your current team. What do they enjoy? How would they describe the job to someone if they were trying to get them to apply?

All this will help you describe what you have to offer.


Advertise Effectively: Craft Your Message and Reach the Right People

Once you’ve got all that straight, you need to tell people that you’re hiring.

There are so many different ways to advertise, but it’s important to start by getting your message right. Many people have short attention spans these days, so you’ve got to communicate what you need and what you can offer in a concise and eye-catching way. As Colin Barnett (CB Talent Consulting) often says, you have 8 seconds to make an impression.

If you already have a captive audience on your social media then you may be able to get the word out easily that way - but be wary of ending up with all the applicants being people just like you. Every business needs some diversity of thought and background - so don’t just recruit clones.

There are many recruitment websites out there to choose between. It’s worth pretending to be your ideal candidate and go looking for a job on each one. That will help you work out which site might be best for you to use. It will also help you understand what people might be searching for on the site. Costs for a basic advert can vary from free (although that may not get you much exposure) to around £300. There are also companies that will post your job advert on multiple websites for one fee, often around £450.

Write a great advert (or get someone to help you do that) and post it in all the right places. But also think about what candidates will find when they go and look you up. Does your website give the impression you want? What about the Facebook or LinkedIn profiles for your business, or your Instagram feed? If you’re the business owner, lots of candidates will look you up personally on LinkedIn, so it’s worth having a profile that makes you look like someone they’d like to work with - whilst still being honest, of course!!!


Streamline Applications: Make the Process Easy for You and Candidates

Finally, for now at least, think about how they’ll apply. For several good reasons, you ideally want them to apply in a way that all the applications are in one place for you to review. You need to think about things like data protection and keeping application records - boring as it is, you don’t want to get into legal hot water.

Some of the recruitment websites (or job posting companies) have an “applicant tracking system” that will enable you to do this, or you can use a HR system that has recruitment functionality (like Breathe).

If you can, we recommend that you set up some screening questions for candidates to respond to when they apply. This can make it so much easier for you to identify people who clearly don’t meet your requirements.

Next month, we’ll talk about ways in which you can assess people against your requirements in an efficient and effective way - making it more likely that you’ll choose the right person for your team.

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