When you've got a small team, a limited budget and little time on your hands, it's crucial to streamline every business process to get the most value from your efforts quickly. The process of hiring employees can be one of the most difficult and time consuming tasks for small business owners and HR managers alike.
In a 2012 survey conducted by Aberdeen Analyst Insight, 1,300 business leaders agreed that workforce and talent concerns ranked in half of their top ten concerns for their businesses. It is a common problem amongst businesses of all sizes, becoming less difficult the larger your company becomes.
Small businesses have the biggest challenge before them when it comes to hiring, which is why assembling the right hiring tools is even more crucial for their continued success.
Finding the Right Candidates
LinkedIn: Without a doubt, LinkedIn has become one of the most critical hiring tools for recruiters, HR managers and business owners alike. Small businesses can utilize the extensive network of over 200 million members to find qualified candidates for their organization. Perform searches using keywords related to your industry and open roles to find candidates that match your job descriptions. Utilize the affordable paid version of LinkedIn for recruitment that allows you or someone from your company to contact anyone regardless if they are a connection through InMail. There is also the ability to make a custom experience for potential hires on your LinkedIn company page to ensure that the culture, job opportunities and your product and services offerings are featured in an appealing way to help give an accurate snapshot of your business.
Managing the Hiring Process
Recruiterbox: Once you've built interest in your open positions on networks like LinkedIn, begin managing resumes, interviews and candidates from one collaborative dashboard like Recruiterbox. A similar setup to your email inbox, Recruiterbox is an intuitive, easy to use applicant tracking software for small businesses that helps schedule and manage the various aspects of the hiring process, as well as allow for collaboration on each candidate with members of your team. This tool can help your organization spend less time coordinating the hiring process and more time talking with qualified candidates.
Conducting the Preliminary Interview
HireVue: Managing each step of the hiring process is important to save much needed time for other tasks, interviewing candidates is no exception to this rule. HireVue is a powerful tool for pre-screening candidates before they come into the office for more in-depth interviews. The platform allows a company to send a potential candidate interview questions to answer on their webcam. Once they've answered the questions, the interview is submitted to the employer for review. The employer can watch the interviews of multiple candidates on any device, much like a movie with the ability to skip, play, pause or rewind. These video interviews can also be shared with your team to review. This tool allows your team to view the interviews at their leisure, which saves your company money from the travel costs of bringing in candidates and the time that is typically wasted on traditional phone interviews.
Offer Assessments to Test Candidate Skills
Smarterer SkillSets: It is expensive to hire the wrong person and at times it is entirely possible for a candidate to talk their way through a skill set they are supposed to have for the job, but they really don't. Testing candidates with assessments from Smarterer SkillSets is another way to ensure that a candidate is the right match for the position. The SkillSets database has hundreds of skill tests to choose from including everything from tests on Adobe products to affiliate marketing; making it simple to match the tests to the roles your small business is looking to fill. Testing candidates in this manner can help lower human error and improve the chances that qualified candidates will make it through your hiring process.
What tools is your small business using to keep the hiring process as effective and efficient as possible? Share your thoughts in the comments below.