Recruiting and Hiring Employees

As a small business owner recruiting and hiring the right employees can be one of your most challenging tasks. To build a talented and productive workforce you must first start by hiring the best person to suit each specific job.

Finding top-quality employees for a job is no easy task, and takes time, thought, and proper planning. But in the end, the rewards far outweigh the effort. Your job as an owner, partner, or executive will be easier, and your organization will be more successful if you have the right people in the right jobs.

Follow these hiring and recruiting tips

• Develop accurate job descriptions. Your first step is to make sure you have an effective job description for each position in your company. Your job descriptions should reflect careful thought as to the roles the individual will fill, the skill sets they'll need, the personality attributes that are important to completing their tasks, and any relevant experience that would differentiate one applicant from another. This may sound fairly basic, but you'd be surprised at how many small companies fail to develop or maintain updated job descriptions.
  

• Draft your advert describing the position and the key qualifications required. Although some applicants will ignore these requirements and respond anyway, including this information will help you limit the number of unqualified applicants.

• Place your ad in the mediums most likely to reach your potential job candidates. The Internet has become one of the leading venues for posting job openings, but don't overlook your local newspapers and some targeted industry publications.

• Create a series of phone-screening questions. Compile a list of suitable questions you can ask over the phone to help you quickly identify qualified candidates and eliminate others.

• Review the resumes you receive and identify your best candidates. Once you place your job ad, you will start receiving resumes, and in today's world you may get quite a few more responses than you anticipated! Knowing what you are looking for in terms of experience, education and skills will help you weed through these resumes quickly and identify potential candidates.

• As already mentioned you should screen your potential candidates by phone through a series of questions. Once you have narrowed your stack of resumes to a handful of potentially good applicants, call these candidates to further narrow the field. Using a consistent set of questions in both this step and your face-to-face interviews will help ensure you are evaluating candidates equally.

• Select candidates for assessment. Based on the responses to your phone interviews, select the candidates you feel are best qualified for the next step in the process.

• Schedule and conduct candidate interviews. Once you have selected candidates based on the previous steps, schedule and conduct the interviews. Use a consistent set of 10 or 12 questions to maintain a structured interview and offer a sound basis for comparing applicants.

• Select the candidate. Make your selection by matching the best applicant to your chosen set of criteria and job description.

• Run a background check on the individual to uncover any potential problems not revealed by previous testing and interviews.

• Make your offer to the candidate. The information you collected during the interview process will provide you with important insights as to starting compensation levels and training needs.

Additional Recruiting Notes

Before you start the hiring process, determine your strategy relative to how people fit into your organization. What is your process for making sure they are a good fit with your company's culture? Decide whether your approach to the cultural question should include a second interview. Also, who else, if anyone, do you involve in the interviews to help make this selection and judge the candidate? Your goal is to have a plan that will help you determine whether you have a qualified applicant who will fit into your company's culture. While hiring the most appropriate candidate to work for your company can be a very difficult job, if you have more than one person that fits your criteria, go with your gut instinct.