You can start a company on your own, but it’s nearly impossible to grow it without great employees. No matter the size of your company, it’s vital that you have a talented workforce in order to build and maintain a thriving business.
Though the importance of hiring the best employees cannot be unstated, the challenges business owners face in this department cannot be ignored either. It’s hard to find and hire top talent, but when you use these seven tips, hiring the best employees will become easier.
Define Your Ideal Candidate
To be able to find and hire your ideal candidate, you must know exactly what you’re looking for in the first place. Study the best and brightest at your company and determine which characteristics differentiate them from the mediocre workers. Figure out which skills, experience, education, and talents are needed for employees to succeed in your business environment. Only then can you create job postings and a strategic hiring process that can zero in on these ideal candidates.
Always Be Recruiting
Waiting until your back is against the wall isn’t an effective way of hiring the best employees. The chances of top talent walking through your doors on the first day you start looking are slim to none. You should always be accepting resumes and interviewing candidates, even if you don’t have open positions. Use social networking and emailing to keep in touch with and develop relationships with the candidates you may want to hire once you have an open position. When you’re always recruiting, you’ll have a bigger pool of qualified applicants to choose from so you don’t have to settle for the best of the worst.
Start a Referral Program
Referrals are one of the best ways to find and hire the best employees. Offer incentives for your employees to refer people they think would be a good fit, and ask your colleagues and professional contacts for recommendations.
Consider Culture
Words on a resume can only tell you so much about your candidates; you need to delve in deeper to understand if they’d be successful in your company.
Your company has a unique culture—the way people act and interact with each other in the workplace. This company culture is based on your expectations, values, goals, policies, and procedures. They influence the way your leaders and employees behave. The best employees will be the ones who reflect your company culture. They will be the ones who will be truly happy in your work environment, will stay for the long haul, and who will give it their all, because they actually care.
Market Your Company as the Employer to Work For
Marketing should be part of your recruitment strategy. You need to get your brand out there. Let people know what you’re about, what the perks are of working for you, and why they should want to work at your company. When you market your company as a great employer to work for, you’ll be inundated with resumes from qualified individuals who would be great assets.
Get a Real Reference
Candidates can put down anyone they know as their references; if you’re not careful, you might be fooled by friends or family members pretending to be their supervisors. Rather than calling the references the candidate provided, do some research and locate references within the companies by yourself.
Try before You Buy
To reduce your risk of making bad hiring decisions, consider engaging a staffing agency to help. You can use its services to try before you buy—by employing temps on a temp-to-hire basis. You’ll get to see how they work out before you commit to hiring them on permanently.
Your employees are the backbone of your company. It’s up to you to hire the best. Use these tips and be on your way to hiring top talent.
