Stop worrying about balancing time, quality, and money!
Hiring great people is a significant factor in the success of a small businesses. These companies often deal with resource scarcity, but the main resource that small businesses lack isn’t always money, or lack of access to the latest technology. It’s people. Having access to great people will help a business achieve its goals — whatever these may be — more quickly, and more effectively. Therefore having great hires provides a huge competitive advantage, and hiring processes should be optimised to get these great people!
The problem for small businesses isn’t that great people aren’t out there. It’s attracting them to the company in the first place.
There are 3 main constraints on hiring for small businesses. These constraints are time, quality, and money. Great hiring processes balance these three elements well, however, in a small business this balance becomes much more difficult to achieve.
1) Time
Why is time a pain point in the hiring process? The financial condition of a small company is often unstable and inconsistent, i.e. if a company has 5–10 people employed, it’s likely that every single one of those people maintains various responsibilites. Hence, if one employee were to leave the effects and ripples of the departure would be felt instantly and have tangible consequences; a loss of productivity, reduction in team morale can all negatively effect the company.
Unfortunately, it’s taking longer than ever to fill vacancies (source), with mean vacancy duration at an upward trend.
Bigger companies allow for a greater balance and spread in workload which can be easily shifted if an employee were to leave without an immediate replacement. Therefore losing one employee — while it still has an impact — has less of a net effect in a big company than it would in a smaller one.
Companies ideally want to fill the vacancy in the fastest time possible, minimizing downtime and temporary loss in productivity. However, it’s a well-known fact that it’s extremely difficult to find the right candidate, at the right time, in the right place. In many cases the perfect candidate was on the job market a week ago, or maybe another perfect candidate will be available in 2 months. A small business doesn’t have that privilege, making it ever more crucial to have the capability of knowing who is available, and being able to contact that person right away.
2) Quality
Another key pain point in hiring is the risk of not finding the right talented person for the job.
Bloomberg found that businesses in the US are reporting that they have trouble filling job vacancies for high skilled positions — tech roles, engineering roles, and certain construction roles all fall in this group. This could in-part be associated with modest wage growth, yet it also points to a bigger issue with the staffing and recruiting industry and a lack of quality people for hire on the job market. Either way, an inability to hire people quickly will often cause problems!
Businesses can be forced into a hiring decision due to necessity, due to a talent shortage or lack of access to the top talent because of their limited resources.
But, hiring fast doesn’t have to mean you lose out on quality! A company with great leadership and a clear direction should be able to attract the right people to drive that forward. An effective hiring process starts with incorporating this company vision into the process.
Hiring people who work well in a similar workplace culture — for example, if a workplace values collaboration over autonomy— can greatly benefit a company. By hiring with ‘Organisation-Person’ fit in mind, all parties benefit. A good Organisation-Person fit can help with long term job-satisfaction, and organisational commitment!
Many current hiring processes don’t allow recruiters to access those active or passive candidates who could be the perfect choice for the job vacancy, and they often miss out on having a good fit. This can lead to more rapid turnover and lower job satisfaction.
As well as this, a removal of unconscious bias in hiring leads to a fairer process that means the most suitable candidates get through the early stages of hiring, and anonymous hiring is proven to increase diversity! David Hausman of Stanford University recommends Congress encourage the implementation of anonymous hiring practices to reduce job discrimination.
3) Money
Time equals money, and unfortunately, money is a finite resource for small businesses. The pain points in hiring are all interlinked, so if a small business has to hire someone and the process takes a long time, the more it will cost.
Research done by the Society of Human Resource Management in 2016 found that the average cost-per-hire in the U.S was $4,129, and the average time that companies took to fill a position was 42 days.
Part of the cost is the actual posting a job advertisement. Unless a company is already well known, it’s very unlikely that they have many prospective candidates visiting their careers website, necessitating the usage of services like Indeed or Monster to get the word out. Unfortunately, these aren’t cheap, and don’t offer good value for money. Anyone and everyone can and will apply, and a company won’t receive many suitable applicants due to the nature of job boards. If you want to find out more about why job boards just don’t cut it anymore, you can read this blog post (click here!).
If a company could post a job somewhere and instantly receive the top matching candidates based on not only skills but also their preferences towards work style and culture — like with SymbaSync — it will save time, money, and improve the quality of the hiring process!
The faster a good hiring decision can be made, the faster a company can invite a candidate for interview and proceed with the recruitment process.
A company is the sum of its parts, and the most important parts are its people! It’s worth investing in people. Therefore it makes sense to invest money in training programs or employee well-being initiatives, rather than spending unnecessarily on job boards that provide little real world value to a company.
—
