How To Find The Best Staff For Your Small Business

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It’s the thing dreams are made of – getting to a point in owning your own business where you can start outsourcing work to new colleagues trained in providing the same service, allowing you to focus more on the day to day running of the business. Sounds amazing, right? It is! What small business owner doesn’t dream of expansion to the point they need to employ staff? But how do you go about finding the right staff for your business? Is it hard? What’s involved? Here are a couple of pointers to help make finding your next employee a breeze.

Where To Advertise?

One of the most common problems facing small business owners is where to advertise their new position or positions. Advertising in the wrong place could attract all the wrong people and cause you to have to pour through hundreds of CVs for days to weed out the unqualified or undesirable applicants. Job boards such as Monster.com and Reed.co.uk can be great places but may require you to pay to post jobs to their boards. You can try sites like Backpage, Craigslist or Kijiji if you’re ready to honestly get dozens if not hundreds of applicants, and of course there is always the classifieds in your local paper.

The Use Of Agencies

Using an agency can be a fantastic way to find quality candidates easily as the agency does all the legwork to do with advertising, sourcing, and screening candidates so when you see them for their final interview, you’re literally getting the best of the best. Agencies often will have you sign a contract and pay for their services – sometimes based on a flat rate or there may be other discussions around this. There often is also a hiring clause meaning that if you hire one of the candidates to come onto your payroll full time you need to pay the agency a bonus. It’s worth looking into using an agency if you have the money and not the time to do the recruiting yourself. Additionally, you may want to do your own background check to screen candidates, however, you can discuss this step with the agency to see how deep they go into the screening process. If it is found that the agency only performs a basic background check on candidates, it may be worth hiring a private detective to bring you all the relevant information on your candidate to check if they would be a good fit for your company. 

Tap Your Own Network

Another way of finding talent is to tap your own network.  Social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn are perfect for this. Peter Hyman, founder of an e-commerce incubator called Moonshot Ventures, found a product expert for one his site using Instagram.  The business is an online smokes shop that sells luxury smoke accessories and unique bongs, and they had posted some photos of a very rare water pipe Instagram. One of the commenters showed a lot of knowledge about the item and the company began a dialogue, eventually hiring him to be their inventory manager.

Training

We honestly can’t stress this enough – training is KEY to having a productive, happy and healthy employee. Without proper training you will find that you keep having to replay the same recruitment story over and over again, which will continue to cost you money. Save yourself the trouble and train your employees adequately and treat them well and you will have loyal employees for life. Ensure you have a top notch training plan in place to help create the ideal employee for your company.

Considerations To Make

Some considerations to make include taxes, pensions, bonuses and more. It’s important to identify potential necessities to put in place before hiring employees and as well to get employees expectations of holidays, holiday pay and more to ensure a working relationship that benefits both parties. Having generous allowances can help attract and retain good employees as well.

So if you’re finally taking that step and you want the best for your business and future employees, hopefully this article has helped to put some ideas in your head about how and when to work things out!