Where are all the applicants?
It’s no secret that times are tough for hiring managers. Let’s be honest – it’s been hard for YEARS – but the last year has caused dramatic and rapid changes to our working environment. These changes have been hard on small businesses, especially amidst the coronavirus pandemic.
Unfortunately, there’s no magic cure for the lack of available candidates, but there are ways you can make yourself more attractive and have more reach. I’ve summarized a few things you can do to help combat this issue and start attracting the right people.
Look Internally
The best place to find people that align with your company culture and are likely to excel is to look at your current team. Many times, your current employees have recommendations of candidates that would work well with your team and the ability to entice them to work for you, especially if you provide a working environment that is growth oriented.
What’s the best way to entice your best employees to recommend like-minded individuals? Implement an Employee Referral Program! These programs provide benefits (usually some sort of monetary compensation) for employees that recommend applicants that successfully complete the hiring process – helping you bolster your team. You can implement this program just when you need to urgently hire, but I recommend always keeping this program active. You never know when someone will recommend your next superstar.
Look Locally
Outside of looking in-house for candidates – looking locally is your next best bet. If you are trying to keep your recruitment costs low, focus on options like making business cards with links or QR codes to your job application or attending local job fairs. Many local governments host job fairs at little cost to employers and many schools provide job boards for their students to find part-time work, too.
Host a Job Fair
In recent years, Taco Bell has held a large hiring event at their stores making their job fairs more like parties. Does this sound like something that aligns with your company’s culture? Why not try it out? Hosting a job fair is an extremely low-cost option to get good candidates – your customers may be looking for work, too!
Re-Evaluate your Job Posting
Are you using the same job posting that you’ve used for years? Are you just doing the quick ‘copy-paste’ of your job description? STOP! One of the most important things for you to realize when you are posting jobs – online or otherwise – is that you are competing with tons and tons of other job postings and there is only a limited amount of time you have to capture your candidate’s attention. Use that time well – make them want to work for you.
Track Your Stats
It doesn’t matter if you are desperately hiring or just hiring a few people here and there – tracking your statistics will help you save money and allocate costs in the right places. There are many, many solutions created for small businesses to use to help track their recruitment costs and make decisions on exactly where to post and how much money to spend on recruitment, but you don’t have to spend a ton of money here. Making sure that you have a method to track these numbers is the most important part.
Utilize Job Board Services
As mentioned earlier, there are many solutions for businesses to track their statistics and these solutions sometimes provide options for companies to post to many job boards at one time. Job board services typically come with costs associated with them and these costs can vary by platform. I recommend exploring your options here as there are many benefits to each platform and sometimes your payroll provider has partnerships with certain companies that may provide you with hefty discounts or helpful integrations.
Focus on Retention
It’s obvious that retaining your employees is the best way to avoid recruitment costs, but there’s another reason why you want to create a working environment with retention in mind – customers. Your customers are an incredibly helpful source of potential applicants, especially if they can see how awesome it is to work for you just by interacting with your team. Applicants will remember how happy (or disgruntled) your employees were during their last interaction and that will be one of the measurements they use to decide whether they want to apply.
Recruitment is an extremely important part of your business and ensuring that you are using the right tactics is crucial. Using some (or all) of these methods and tracking how each of them attribute to the success of your next hiring goal will set you up for success and give you the knowledge you need to know where to allocate your time and money.
Do you need help with recruitment? Contact Prism Consulting VA today to see how we can help you and your team!
