Hiring the right employees for your business can be one of the most challenging aspects of running a small business. Certainly, there are plenty of ways to get it wrong. So what do businesses need to consider when developing their recruitment approach to improve their chances of hiring the right employees?

Go slowly

If you’re not 100% sure about a recruitment decision, it’s often better to hire a temporary employee to fill a gap rather than make a rushed decision you could come to regret later. While finding the right employee can take time, hiring the wrong person can lead to bigger issues including impacts on productivity, problems with client relationships, cultural concerns and not to mention can be very costly.

 

Take a thorough approach

Taking an instinctual approach (otherwise known as ‘going with your gut’) is useful, but only when it is combined with a thorough recruitment process. Suhail Doshi, CEO of Mixpanel advises getting a clear understanding of the functional capabilities required within roles, particularly specialist roles. In some instances, this might involve learning how to do the role yourself. While you don’t have to become an expert, you can get a clear understanding of how the role operates by speaking with some of the contacts within your network.

 

‘Good enough’ is not good enough

While recruitment isn’t necessarily a ‘forever’ decision, it can be challenging ‘undoing’ a recruitment decision that doesn’t work for your business. It’s important to start the process with a clear understanding of your company goals, values, strengths and having a rock solid recruitment process. It’s important to select the right candidate based on a mix of functional capability and cultural fit.

 

Hire for cultural fit

While there are aspects of a role that can be taught, it’s near impossible to change someone’s personality traits. According to Suhail Doshi, CEO of Mixpanel, the first 5 people within a team will determine the culture for the rest of your business, make sure it’s the right one.

 

If in doubt, leave it to the experts

While some view the cost of outsourcing the recruitment process to Recruitment Consultants as high, it can be a costlier exercise to manage it internally. When you want to make the right decision, it’s best not to cut corners on screening and interviewing candidates. If you want to manage part of the recruitment process internally but outsource certain parts, you can elect to use recruitment process outsourcing, which is essentially getting a recruitment firm to manage certain parts of the process for you.

If you want advice on recruiting for your business, speak to the Recruitment team at Flexi Personnel.