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10 Tips on How to Hire the Right Employee for your Business

Are you about recruiting employees to grow your startup? If YES, here are 10 easy-to-implement tips on how to hire the right employee for your small business. Entrepreneurs are usually faced with fear when hiring their first employee. In fact, one of the business processes entrepreneurs dread most is the process of recruiting employees. A survey carried out recently revealed that finding good employees was one of the major business challenges entrepreneurs face when starting a business from scratch.

No matter how brilliant or promising your business enterprise might be, you cannot grow it all alone. Although you may try at first, you will soon realize that it’s impossible. Every successful and famous entrepreneur built successful and flourishing companies with the aid of great employees.

It is possible for you to invent and even commercialize a business idea or concept all alone. But with time, the tasks involved in getting the business going will become much more than what you can handle single-handedly. At that point, your best bet will be to find and hire the right employees to help you achieve your business goals and entrepreneurial dream.

Why Go Through the Stress of Hiring Employees When You Can Do Things Yourself?

So, get it clear: even if you have started your business as a one man show, you will certainly reach a point when you need extra hands to help; unless you have no plans to grow your business. Finding the right employees is critical to your company’s success. You need hard-working individuals with the skills, attitude, and integrity needed to boost production and sales.

Hiring the wrong person interferes with far more than just the position for which they were hired. Teams must be able to work together productively and amicably. However, it is a well established fact that job recruiting can be a time-consuming, frustrating, and expensive process when not done correctly. These tips will help make the most of your recruitment process, thereby ensuring that your company hires the best person for the job.

How Much Does It Cost to Hire Employees?

The above statements drive home the point that hiring the best people is now more critical than ever. If you make bad or biased hiring choices, you will lose a lot of time, money, and good results. In fact, the cost of a single bad hire was put at anywhere between $25 to $50,000, according to a Forbes article. The process of hiring employees is expensive.

Finding, interviewing, engaging, and training new employees require huge costs. And the only way to get back what you have invested in the hiring process is to select efficient employees that will bring results. Apart from hiring costs, you will also need to get desks, computers, phones, and other related equipment for each employee.

And most important are the largest costs of being an employer—salaries, taxes, and benefits. In essence, employees are a huge investment in themselves. Since the success of your business hinges largely on the quality of employees you hire, you must be very careful during the selection process, so you can hire employees that will turn out to be assets to your business.

What is the Best Way to Hire Employees?

When it comes to hiring employees, there are three ways to go about it. They are:

  • The traditional hiring method-: This involves the age-long process of running recruitment ads, screening applicants face to face, conducting exams and interviews, training chosen prospects, etc. This method is the most expensive and cumbersome of the three.
  • The online recruitment method-: In this case, all the processes listed in the method above will be conducted; but they will be done online. Thus saving cost, time and resources. This method usually favors small and medium scale enterprises, online businesses or stores, work from home jobs, etc.
  • The outsourcing approach-: In this case, the entire recruitment process is outsourced to a third party company, thus allowing the parent company concentrate on their core.

Each of these approaches has its pros and cons; and none can be said to be the best over the other. So it is best to choose which hiring method suits your company based on your objectives, goals, needs, capital at hand, and size of company.

Now, what is the best way to find the right employees with the best skills, experiences, and ability to contribute to the success of your business? There may not be a one-size-fits-all answer to the question, but I recommend a strategy that I call “the 7 C’s formula”. Here are the components of the formula:

7 Key Traits to Watch Out For When Hiring Employees

a. Competence

This is the first factor to consider in a potential employee. Does she have the necessary skills, experience, and education to effectively play the roles expected of her? Remember, an employee can only play her roles well when she has passed through a background that has prepared her for what the role entails.

b. Capability

Having the background required to man a job position is one thing, but having being capable of completing the tasks is another. Your ideal employee must be able to effectively handle and complete not only tasks, but also tasks that require more effort and creativity. For me, capability means the employee has the potential for growth and the willingness and ability to take on additional responsibility.

c. Commitment

A candidate can only contribute to the success of your business if she’s committed to her job. And her willingness to work with you for the long term can help you determine this. If you ask what her plans for the next five years are, and she tells you that she hopes to be with a bigger company by then or she hopes to have started her own small business, then she won’t be committed to your business and she won’t be a good employee.

You can get a clear insight into her likelihood to stay with your business for the long term by simply checking her past employment history. If she’s been hopping from one job to the next, she will most likely leave you for the next available offer.

d. Character

You won’t get on well with an employee whose values and character doesn’t align with yours. During the hiring process, test candidates for honesty, patience, selflessness, integrity, submissiveness, and ability to play on well with a team.

e. Compatibility

Another important factor to consider when hiring new employees is their compatibility with their work environment and people that matter to the business. Can this person get along with colleagues? Can she get along with existing and potential clients and partners?

Can this person interact well with customers? Another critical factor to consider is the person’s willingness to work with you, her boss. If she can’t work with you, there will be problems—even if she gets on well with other employees.

f. Compensation

During the hiring process, ensure that your chosen candidate agrees to a fair compensation package that is in line with market rates. If not, she will feel unappreciated and dissatisfied with the job, and this can lead to serious consequences, as she will not put in the best you expect from her.

g. Culture

Every business has a culture or a way that its employees and management interact and behave with each other. This culture is based on the business’s policies, procedures, and values that influence the behavior of a leader and employees. If a candidate shows signs that she cannot reflect your company’s culture, then she would turn out difficult and disruptive.

10 Tips on How to Hire the Right Employee for your Business

  1. Source for Volunteers

One of the means of hiring good employees for your small business when you are low on cash is to call for volunteers. The truth is that there are loads of competent applicants out there who need a shift in career and would want to go all out to build experience in that career path. This option is highly suitable especially if you run a social enterprise.

  1. Offer Free Training

If you have a special skill as a small business owner, one of the ways of employing good and competent employees without money is to offer to train them on a special skill. This strategy will only attract applicants who are in need of the skills you intend training people on.

Note that this might not work for a long period of time hence the need to make provision for several applicants and if need be put them on a waiting list of some sort. This is because it is easier for people who are not paid or well – paid for the job they are doing to quit as soon as possible, even without getting another job.

  1. Hire Interns

Depending on the industry that you are operating in, you can actually get good employees from interns without paying them. For example, if you run a small medical lab, you can actually recruit interns (medical lab students) who can turn out to become good employees.

The fact that they are interns does not mean they cannot be trained to become good employees. As a matter fact, some interns would want to come back to your company as soon as they graduate so as to build the required experience that large corporations require.

  1. Target and Recruit Fresh Graduates

Although you are not expected to get highly skilled employees from people who are just graduating from college, but you are sure going to get people who are willing to collect small pay for the sake of acquiring on-the-job experience in their chosen career paths.

So part of what you have to do to hire good employees for your small business is to target and recruit fresh graduates. The catch should be that you are willing to train them and also give them a platform to launch their career. In order to get the best from this idea, you can partner with universities and colleges within the location of your business.

If you have good rapport with the university or college, you can be allowed to conduct recruitment tests from a pool of final year students. With that, you can easily screen and hire only the best who most likely will become good and competent employees.

  1. Negotiate with Shares in Your Company

No doubt, there are job descriptions that can only be carried out by core professionals, and as a small business owner, you might not have the financial capacity to hire core professionals to occupy such roles in your organization. Part of what you need to do in order to get such employees into your organization is to ensure that you negotiate with a share in your company when recruiting.

This is how it works, when you advertise for such role, you should make it clear from the onset that whoever will be occupying such roles will be entitled to a certain number of shares from the company and that automatically makes them part owners of the business. The truth is that if the business is a promising one, core professionals will be willing to join you in building the business even if they are going to be taking a drastic pay cut.

Take for example, when Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook, he did not have the needed money to hire top notch programmers, but one thing that worked for him then was that he promised them shares in the company and today many people that started with him are all millionaires.

5. Improve Recruiting Results with Detailed Job Descriptions

You can obtain more productive and faster recruiting results if your organizational structure and specific job descriptions are clearly defined. This includes more than a simple list of tasks. A detailed job description lists responsibilities along with expected, measurable results. Key performance indicators may be in the form of sales quotas, production performance, or some other quantitative measurement of reaching company or departmental goals.

6. Use a Talent Management Staffing Agency

What Can a Talent Management Staffing Agency Do for You? A talent management staffing agency focuses all of their efforts on matching your firm with skilled individuals who are knowledgeable, ethical, and compatible. Job recruiters are trained professionals who have learned how to winnow through the masses to find skilled personnel, whether your company is offering engineering jobs, healthcare jobs, IT jobs, executive jobs, oil and gas jobs, or something entirely different. Delegating the task of finding suitable new hires can save you valuable time and money.

  • Traditional Recruitment and Its Flaws

Traditionally, when companies have decided to expand their workforce, the first step taken is to advertise, sort through submitted resumes, and interview a select few to try to find a good match. The problems associated with this method of recruitment are that job descriptions are often inadequate, resulting in unqualified applicants that must be sorted through.

Also, advertising open positions does not allow your HR department to go into any depth regarding the culture of your company or to include any performance indicators specifically related to the position. These factors combine to mean a lot of time and money go wasted when they could be used more productively.

7. Add Your Own Recruiter Efforts

To reduce the amount of time spent analyzing various potential employees, social media profiles can be used to learn a good deal about an individual. Online searches can show if the applicant has been published in a trade journal, if they have already demonstrated measurable results at previous jobs, and can help you learn if their personality is compatible with your company’s environment and culture and the position’s teammates.

8. Create a Positive Company Climate

One of the best ways to attract and retain high quality employees is to create a climate in which they feel valued, challenged, and appreciated. Potential employers and recruiters alike have learned that applicants are often more interested in a positive work environment than salary. Making work a more enjoyable, personal experience leads to hiring better employees and keeping them. Disgruntled employees may not “go postal” but they are less likely to present a positive face on your company and they are highly unlikely to do their job well.

Today’s Gen Y workforce values learning, career building support, and being heard at least as much as the paycheck. Integrating this knowledge into your company’s climate can make the difference between attracting revolving-door replacements and retaining top-notch professionals.

9. Step Up Your On-boarding Process

The job of hiring and retaining quality employees does not stop at the first handshake. Integrating new hires into the culture and ideals of your company, as well as in job performance expectations, can lead to long term success for both sides of the relationship. Since people learn in different ways, it is important that your training procedures use a variety of methods.

Also, collaboration occurs more readily when communication, both laterally and vertically, is made easier. You can also make work more fun with tea, challenges, team-building events, and special social events. Building a stronger rapport between individuals and teams makes everyone more productive. Taking advantage of today’s trained job recruiting professionals, identifying job specifics, and creating a positive work environment will help you find the help you need to expand your business successfully.

These are some of the ideas you would need if you want to hire good employees for your small business even though you don’t have the money required to do so. The ideas stated above might not work for all small businesses, but just ensure that you read through them and you adopt the one that perfectly fits into the kind of small business you run and what is obtainable in the industry you are operating in.

This is so because some industries only require people with license or some form of certification to occupy some sensitive roles hence you won’t be able to get fresh graduates or interns to occupy such roles. With such roles, you can only source good employees from volunteers or via negotiating with shares in your company.