Talent acquisition is a crucial part of every business’ growth and success. An engaged staff is one of the most valuable assets a company can have. Knowing how to hire employees and make strategic hires can propel your business forward.
How to evaluate your staffing needs
What are your hiring needs and how can you identify which roles you should prioritize? It’s important to remember that maintaining a happy staff and keeping your employee morale high is the key to staying productive. You don’t want to overextend your team to the point of burnout. So before hiring, consider how you can optimize your existing resources.
Begin by figuring out where you have opportunities to cut costs and examine your financial goals and vendor relationships. Additionally, you can streamline your own responsibilities by delegating to your existing team when appropriate—of course, be careful not to add too much responsibility to anyone’s plate.
Once you’ve split up responsibilities in a way that makes sense and freed up time for yourself to handle big-picture tasks like hiring, you can accurately assess your staffing needs.
How to develop a hiring strategy
Every business has its own hiring strategy, and you should measure your strategy’s success against several key performance indicators (KPIs). These can include cost-per-hire and turnover rate.
Analyzing this information will help track and evaluate your hiring process. This can also help reveal where your best hires are coming from and the associated costs. Use this data to identify where you can improve and streamline your efforts, so you can develop the efficient strategy for hiring the best talent.
Be sure to review your KPIs regularly and continue to assess where you can optimize your hiring efforts.
Hiring tips for SMBs
Follow these four smart tips for how to hire employees.
1. Boost your digital presence
Unless you have a brick-and-mortar store where people can see an ad through your window, walk in, and apply in person, chances are that you’ll be doing most of your recruiting and hiring online. So, it’s important to maintain a website that showcases your business to customers, potential partners, and prospective employees.
For recruiting purposes, be sure to carve out a space on your site for job openings, as well as a page that highlights your company values, mission, and culture. People want to work somewhere that aligns with their beliefs and values, which is why more and more organizations use their websites and social media channels to display their company events, sustainability efforts, and more.
Speaking of social media: LinkedIn and Instagram are a great way to engage current employees and prospective hires, especially through employee spotlights and recognition.
2. Review your job descriptions
Each job description should detail the specific role’s responsibilities, required skill set, and compensation range. Being upfront about this information is mutually beneficial—you’ll get more qualified and interested applicants, and they’ll have more realistic expectations as they move through the interview process. It also paints your company as an honest and trustworthy employer in the community.
When posting open roles, you should use traditional job titles so job seekers can easily find them. This may require some research on platforms like LinkedIn, Indeed, etc. to see what the industry standards are.
One more important thing to include in each job posting is an explanation of how the role will fit into the bigger picture for your company. This context is often overlooked by employers, but it’s something most candidates will ask about during the interview process—so it’s good to be aligned internally before you need to answer the question.
3. Treat job seekers like customers
It may surprise you that a majority of customer engagement strategies transfer well to the hiring process. If you’re trying to attract top candidates they’ll almost certainly have offers from other companies—so, put on your marketing hat to gain a competitive edge.
In your job descriptions and during the interview process, flip the narrative from “What can you bring to our company?” to “Why should you want to work for me?”
Respect each candidate’s time and maintain clarity about your brand’s mission and expectations throughout the process. Transparency can go a long way.
4. Revisit your employee benefits
Employee benefits can include everything from health benefits and retirement to paid time off and education opportunities. The beginning of the year is typically the best time to revisit your employee benefits package, if you offer one. You’ll want to include this as part of your budget planning, so you may actually end up doing this in Q4 to plan for the upcoming year.
Regardless of when you review, competitive benefits are a strong recruitment tool. Prospective hires will likely consider benefits in addition to salary, workload, commute (if applicable), and company culture.
After hiring: Engage and retain your employees
Hiring is just the first step in the process. To set up every new employee for success, you’ll want to build a thorough onboarding program so they can get acquainted with your brand, product/service offerings, and the rest of the team. Internal processes and tools can be overwhelming at first, which is why new hires are typically given a few months to ‘ramp up’ their work.
Once onboarded, retention should be your top priority. The best way to retain your top-performing employees is to keep them engaged, show them recognition, and reward them with competitive and fair compensation. Be sure your team is getting what they need on a daily basis—i.e., access to resources and tools not only for their jobs but also for their physical and mental health. It’s important to consider their long-term needs as well, like upward mobility, opportunities to learn new skills, and flexibility around family planning.
If you plan to grow your team in the coming months, make sure you fully understand your staffing needs. Then, you can develop a strategic hiring plan to prioritize open roles and fill them with the best talent possible.
