Employee Recruitment Strategies: 3 Steps Toward Success When Your Business Is Growing
This article was updated on Sept. 5, 2018.
Recruitment can be a challenge when your company is stable, and even more so when you're growing by leaps and bounds. With careful planning, you can achieve your hiring goals. Consider the following employee recruitment strategies to scale up your hiring successfully:
1. Recruit With a Plan
Hiring new staff members can be an exciting process. You may be tempted to jump in and hire quickly, but making a careful plan first can help yield better results.
Before you post your first job advertisement and ask current employees and peers to recommend friends and former colleagues, sit down and think through what you need in a candidate. Your considerations should include:
- Staff inventory. Touch base with members of your staff to see what their roles and day-to-day responsibilities are like. In the meantime, make sure their productivity is being reviewed properly so managers can accurately determine where their needs are. From there, you can clarify what holes need to be filled.
- Job descriptions and salary ranges for each position. Benchmark the open positions with similar jobs in similarly sized companies and industries in your area. Then ensure that the job description is an effective, concise one that includes the essential job functions as well as the necessary skills, qualifications and background.
- Priorities for hiring. Which jobs are mission critical, and which can wait? Even though it might be easier to hire one group of employees than another, prioritize openings that need to be filled immediately. For example, if you need a new customer service team, consider hiring the team lead first and then the customer service representatives. You'll build a more cohesive group that way because the lead is likely to hire people who work well with them.
2. Devote the Necessary Resources
Recruitment is a difficult job that requires careful planning. Assign someone to take charge of your recruitment strategies. Consider balancing that person's other workloads so that they can devote time to hiring. If you're the one doing the hiring, be sure to give it ample attention by restructuring your priorities, responsibilities or schedule. Remember, hiring the right people can help make your business successful, so it's worth the time and money to make it a priority.
3. Hire the Best
Every business wants fabulous employees, and they are critical to your business's success. Make sure your pay rates are competitive and that your criteria fit the role. Don't hold out for perfection, though; perfection doesn't exist. At the same time, some qualities are non-negotiable. If you need someone who can program in a certain computing language, you don't want someone who programs in a different language — unless you're willing to pay for training. But, if your company sells clocks, you might want to consider someone with experience selling jewelry.
Recruiting upswings over periods of several months can be stressful and complicated, but they're a sign your company is doing well. Take this opportunity to construct strong employee recruitment strategies to help ensure your company will benefit for years to come.
