Carving an effective hiring strategy for a small or medium-sized company is not as simple as one assumes. Medium-sized businesses need to understand and overcome a few pitfalls before they embark on the right hiring strategy. It’s interesting to note that medium-sized businesses tend to hire faster than their larger counterparts, due to simple hiring strategies, less complex processes or even the passion to build a great workforce within a short period. However, with a lot of hiring challenges to abound, mid-sized organizations have started identifying the gaps in their hiring processes and set up a mechanism to revisit their hiring process for better outcomes.
It cannot be denied that the biggest challenge faced by the small and medium-sized businesses today is finding the right talent within the shortest possible time. As bigger companies have their HR departments, established branding and resources to reach out to a cross-section of their candidates, often it is the small and medium-sized companies, who face the music to hire the skilled talent.
In this blog, we present five hiring tips for medium-sized companies to select the best talent, given their limited resources and infrastructural constraints.
- Define clear cut expectations upfront
To get the best candidate to join your company, it’s a common practice for you to paint a rosy picture of your company and the benefits that the potential candidate can expect. While this is a great start to bring in the right talent, however, you need to clearly state what your company expects from the potential candidate. For instance, some companies expect their associates to maintain a strict schedule, while some might be flexible with timings. Such policies should be properly communicated to the prospective candidates upfront including consequences they might face if they fail to comply. Additionally, it’s also helpful to define what qualifies a candidate needs to have to be effective in the job before the recruitment process even commences.
- Leverage the right talent assessment tools
It’s not about the great qualifications or experience, you might look into the prospective hires; you also need to dig deep into their personalities to assess their attitudes, energy levels and the passion that they bring to your organization. When an associate fits in within your company’s culture, he/she tends to exhibit higher levels of job satisfaction, be more productive, perfectly gel with co-workers and also exhibit loyalty to your organization.
In the present technological landscape, employers have a wide range of options to collate and analyze data that lets them filter the prospects to include only those who could be their right fit for the position. Fortunately, even mid-sized organizations can have access to such low budget tools to devise customized questionnaires to assess the suitability of the candidates.
- Develop a consistent talent acquisition strategy
Hiring practices differ, based on the industry, organization’s size or even organizational culture. You need to establish a proper system in your organization to hire the top talent, wherein the processes defined within this system should be consistent for hiring candidates across any position. Requiring one associate to face an exhaustive hiring process while another being hired, based on a simple telephonic round can lead to utter confusion and frustration. Hence, a uniform recruitment strategy enables employers to make perfect choices, while minimizing the risk of hiring a bad fit within the shortest time.
- Take adequate time and don’t rush
Don’t compromise on the quality of the hire, just to fill the position within the shortest possible time to impress your leadership team. Slow down your recruitment process and perform a thorough screening before you even schedule an interview for the prospective candidate. Remember, the time and cost of high turnover are much greater than devising a perfect screening and selection process.
- Prepare well to ask the right questions to your prospective associate
It’s not a surprise that as an interviewer, you too need to be prepared to ask the right questions to the interviewee to arrive at the right hiring decision. Though you might have got an idea about the potential candidate, having a face to face interaction can be a major influential factor to get the basics right. You need to establish a frank discussion stating the real facts about your organization, the job role and what is being expected from the person who fills it. Apart from that, you need to ask questions to get a clear picture of the prospective associate to assess whether he or she comes with the right attitude and experience, needed to perform the job perfectly.
With the above tips, we hope you establish a strong hiring strategy including robust planning and screening processes to select the right candidates to help build a strong organization.
