Top 5 recruitment tips for small businesses

This may sound controversial, but your employees are actually more important than your customers. 

Here’s why: they are the face of your business, they can singlehandedly drive your business to reach its goals, and they are your best customers too.

Good staff are worth their weight in gold, so getting good staff and keeping them is crucial for any business to grow and thrive. The recruitment process can be time consuming, frustrating and sometimes fruitless, but if you get it right, your business is better for it.

Here are our top 5 tips to finding the perfect person for your business:

Invest in the people you already have

First of all, take a good look around. If you are recruiting to fill a skills gap there could be an alternative right in front of you. Maybe you already have someone interested in taking on more responsibility or keen to try something new. Finding the personality fit for your business is usually harder than finding the right skills, so if you invest in the staff you already have, you’re halfway there. You’ll also save time and money, and increase job satisfaction among your employees.

Know what and who you’re looking for

Finding the right person for a role is not just about finding a specific skillset. It’s about finding someone who fits with your business too. Take your time with the job description and consult within the team. It’s very costly to recruit the wrong person so be very clear about what you skills you need and what the job entails. Job descriptions change over time, in line with business and market changes, as well as changes within the team, so it’s important to update them regularly.

You also need to ask whether they will fit in with the existing team and whether they share the ethos and vision of the business you’ve built. Fitting into the culture.

Recruit for difference

When we talk about finding someone who fits with your business, we don’t mean hiring clones. It’s human nature that we are drawn to people like ourselves, but when it comes to recruitment, this goes out the window. Successful teams need diversity – gender and ethnic diversity, diverse personality types, backgrounds and experience – they’re all important. A whole team of type A personalities isn’t going to work, just like a whole team of big picture thinkers isn’t going to work if there is no one to provide a reality check.

Take your time

Employing the wrong person is costly and can be damaging to your business, and sometimes it can be harder to get rid of someone than it was to find them in the first place. Therefore, if you advertise and interview, and no one seems quite right, try again. If that doesn’t work, take a break and try again later.

Have a plan B

No one should be indispensable in a business, and that includes you, the business owner. If a business can’t operate without one person for decent chuck of time, there’s something wrong with your business model. If you’re having trouble hiring, think about ways you could buy time. Maybe one of your existing staff members or even someone you know could step into the sharing the role between multiple people.

Good staff are the backbone of every successful business, and for small businesses, getting the right person for the job is even more important as there’s nowhere to hide.


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