Almost every successful small business reaches a point in time when hiring new talent becomes a necessity for the business to continue growing. Finding the right candidates to interview and potentially hire can be a seemingly daunting task. Fortunately, there are ways to simplify the recruitment process in order to find the best possible employee to fill your job opening.
Create a Detailed Job Description
For those of you who run a small business, take a moment and attempt to formulate a job description for exactly what it is that you do.
…Not so easy, right? Small business owners tend to where a lot of hats in order to ensure their businesses run smoothly and their customers remain satisfied. And your future employee will most likely need the ability to multitask as well. Once you’ve figured out the tasks the job will encompass, try to sort them out in terms of which require expert knowledge and which of them only require a novice understanding of how to accomplish them.
You’re going to be using this job description on all of the places you’ll be posting this job offering so it’s important to get it done right the first time.
Essential Job Description Aspects
- Job title
- Job overview (try and keep it concise but informative)
- Responsibilities and essential tasks (list them in order of importance)
- Skills and qualifications (once again, list these in order of importance)
Listing Your Job for Optimal Candidates
Once you’ve finalized the job description, it’s time to let people know you’re hiring. As with many things in life, this part of the process is about quality not quantity. If you throw your job opening up on every recruiting website, wanted section and social media platform you have access too, you’ll end up wasting time being bombarded by an influx of unqualified candidates.
Solely uploading the job description to a job listing site usually isn’t enough to ensure you’ll start receiving applications from top prospects. Many job recruitment websites enable you to create preliminary questions or even quizzes in order to help weed out inadequate candidates. You should take advantage of tools like this; the more time you spend on this preliminary work the less time you’ll be spending conducting pointless interviews.
The Interview Process
Every business owner conducts job interviews in his or her own way; however, there are still some best practices that all small business owners should follow in order to get the most out of each part of the interview process.
Note: Depending on the size of your business and the position-level being hired, the interview process may include additional steps.
The Phone Interview
Some business owners opt to move directly to the in-person interview but including an initial phone call within the interview process is another effective way to minimize wasted time and find the right candidate quicker. Also, you’ll get a sense of the interviewee’s phone etiquette which can be another valuable litmus test.
The Face-To-Face Interview
Just as the interviewee is (hopefully) going to be well prepared for the face-to-face interview, it’s important for the interviewer to be equally prepared. You should be ready with a written or printed out list of questions you can refer to throughout the interview; but also, be ready to improvise when necessary.
The Final Decision
Once you’ve interviewed all potential candidates, how do you decide which one is the best hire? Sometimes employers get lucky and end up finding someone who they could tell was tailor made for the job half-way through the interview process. But most times you’ll need to sit down and carefully evaluate each candidate in order to pick the one who is going to get the job done right and has a genuine interest in growing with your company.
