When you are the owner of a business, hiring staff is a considerable investment. It can be a really daunting thing to do – what if you choose an unsuitable person or get the recruitment process wrong? As many of you know, my background is in HR – specifically recruitment and learning & development. Here are a few recruitment tips I have picked up on over the years that may help you to make the right decision for your next hire.
Recruitment Tips for Business Owners
Focus on Transferable Skills
If you’re looking for someone who has worked for a company exactly like yours before, you’ll often be out of luck. However, many skills are highly transferable across industries, especially soft skills like leadership, communication, and time management.
Consider putting more emphasis on finding someone with the relevant abilities rather than a person with the perfect experience. You may end up hiring an ideal recruit who you might not have otherwise considered. The ability and willingness to learn about your industry is a lot more important than actual experience in your industry, in my opinion.
Take Your Time
Hiring the right person the first time around will save you a lot of time and money in the long run, so don’t rush the hiring process. One of the best recruitment tips I can give you is that if you don’t find a suitable candidate the first time, readvertise rather than hire someone you’re unsure about.
The cost of hiring someone unsuitable and dealing with low performance or a quick turnover is far greater than just waiting a little bit to find your next fantastic employee.
Diversify Your Company’s Skill Set
When interviewing and recruiting someone for your business, people have a tendency to gravitate towards those who are most like themselves. However, any good team is made up of a diverse group of people with a variety of skills.
For example, if you are a big picture thinker, you would be much better off hiring someone who is more detail-oriented who can implement your ideas. Hiring another dreamer could result in lots of great ideas but not much getting done!
Use a Resume Parser
If you don’t already use a resume parser to sift through applications, I’m about to save you a whole lot of time and effort! Using a resume parser like Affinda allows you to sort candidate information into relevant categories to more easily compare and contrast applicants’ skills and experience.
The best part? All you need is a CV from each candidate. That means no lengthy questionnaire during the application process. You’ll need a developer to integrate the parser with your ATS, or you can just upload CVs to the online resume parser tool.
Write a Killer Job Description
When you write your website content, you’re writing for the relevant audience, right? The same should be true when you write job descriptions. Sit down and think about who the right person for the job would be and what type of skills that person would have. Then you need to write in a way that would appeal to that type of person.
For example, if you’re looking to hire someone who is super analytical, you need to lay out all the facts and write in a to-the-point way. If you’re looking for a sales superstar who’s really outgoing, they may respond better to a more informal and exciting job description.
Hopefully, you’ve found these recruitment tips useful and are taking away at least one idea to implement. If you need help with writing job descriptions, job ads, or even your company website to attract better candidates, get in touch with me. I love writing about all things recruitment and HR.
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