3 Ways of Hiring Effectively

3 Ways of Hiring Effectively

“Hiring should always be part of your long-term strategy, not a quick fix to an immediate problem.” 
― Steven J. Bowen,

Except for those that start their own businesses after working in formal organisations most entrepreneurs or small business owners like to do things in an informal or ad-hoc manner.

This approach usually backfires, particularly as regards recruitment. You are stuck with a family member or close friend that is not productive and difficult to fire!

Recruitment or hiring has an element of science to it. To be successful you must develop a strategy to help you find the right people all the time.

Essential effective recruitment or hiring involves at least 3 distinct processes:

1.      Job Profiling

2.     Advertising and Interview

3.     Onboarding

A good place to start is for you to list out all the jobs that will be performed from inception to when the good or service is safely delivered to your customer. You will then create a job profile for each role.

Under Job Profiling, you will first define exactly what the “work” is. What are you expecting the new staff to do? Assuming you run a fashion design business, you must decide if its design, cutting, sewing etc that the person is going to be doing.

This will help you to determine what kind of qualification, skill and work experience to look out for. It will also help you determine the character and attitude of the person.

All the above information and a few others like who the person will report to, how much the person will be paid etc will be in a document called a job description. You can find examples on the internet.

The next thing to do is to advertise the vacancy. You can do this by word of mouth, Social media, the Internet or via newspapers if you think the role is worth such an expense.

Once you have a number of applicants you then schedule interviews and depending on the nature of the job the interview can be in multiple stages and it is face to face, online etc.

Once you have the right candidate it is important that you create definite procedures to effectively integrate the new staff into the organization. This is what is called onboarding.

Take the pains to familiarize the new staff with the culture, it will save you loads and loads of trouble in the future.

Recruitment need not be a burden once you take out time to create a process and if you consider it a burden then you can outsource the process, but you must be involved in the final interview stages because the person is going to work with you and not the recruiter!