If you own a business, then your recruitment goal is simple: Find people who are capable of filling your vacant positions and get them to start work.
As simple as this goal looks, how easy is it to achieve?
The recruitment process is not ‘a walk in the park’ thing for small business owners. It can be a tedious and tiresome process.
Without an allocated in-house HR team, getting your job adverts in front of job seekers, scanning through CVs, reading loads of cover letters, and finally communicating with candidates can seem like an everlasting task.
This is why it is important for small business owners to set up a formal recruitment process.
Do you know that the cost of recruiting a wrong hire is far higher than the cost of hiring a great fit? In fact, you could lose as much as $7, 000 to $10, 000 just by hiring the wrong person, depending on the role.
While some hires may add value to your business, others may contribute to making the business sink. This is why business owners should be thoughtful about their recruitment process. That is why we created this article to help you.
In this guide, we will be looking at how small business owners can hire the smart way. We will be considering the following:
Recruitment is the strategic process of identifying, attracting, evaluating, and hiring qualified candidates to fill job vacancies within an organisation. It goes beyond simply advertising a job opening. It involves understanding workforce needs, sourcing suitable talent, assessing candidates, and selecting the individual who best fits the role and the company's culture. An effective recruitment process helps businesses build high-performing teams, reduce hiring costs, and achieve their long-term objectives.
The recruitment process is a structured series of steps an organisation follows to find and hire the right employee. It typically begins with identifying a hiring need and creating a job description, followed by sourcing candidates, screening applications, conducting interviews, assessing skills, checking references, extending a job offer, and onboarding the successful candidate. A well-defined recruitment process improves hiring efficiency, enhances the candidate experience, and increases the likelihood of making successful long-term hires.
For a business to recruit successfully, it has to follow these steps:
The first stage of recruitment is planning. Recruitment planning involves the following: Understanding the need for the job position, drafting a comprehensive job specification for the vacant position, outlining the responsibilities, skills, experience, and qualifications needed, pay grade, starting date, employment type, employment condition, etc.
All these are factors that should be considered in relation to the particular role that you are recruiting for.
Note: Recruitment planning should start even before you advertise the vacant position.
After you have planned your recruitment and discovered the qualifications of the candidates, the next step is for you to devise a strategy for recruiting candidates to fill the vacant positions that you have identified.
You should consider the following when planning your recruitment strategy:
All these questions are questions that you have to answer when you are setting up a recruitment strategy.
Setting up a recruitment strategy may not be an easy thing to do, but having the right strategy will help you attract the right candidates. These are the following steps involved in developing a recruitment strategy:
This stage involves the process of attracting job seekers to the organisation. There are broadly two sources that can help you attract candidates, which are:
Internal sources: Internal sources of recruitment refer to hiring employees within your organisation through the following:
External sources: External sources of recruitment refer to hiring an employee outside your organisation through the following:
Screening starts after you have successfully decided on the medium you want to use to source candidates. Screening is the process of filtering candidates’ applications for further selection.
To successfully screen and shortlist candidates, you will have to follow these processes:
a. Reviewing resumes and cover letters
In this process, you would have to review and check the candidates’ education, work experience, and overall background, matching the requirements of the job.
b. Conducting a Telephone or Video Interview
Conducting a telephone interview is the second step in screening candidates. In this process, after screening the candidate’s CV, the candidates are contacted by phone or video by the hiring manager.
This process helps you verify whether the candidate is active and available to work. It will also help you get a quick insight into the candidate’s attitude, ability to answer interview questions, and communication skills.
c. Identifying top candidates
Identifying the top candidates is the final step in the screening process. In this process, you select the top resumes. Selecting the top resumes will make it easy for you to make decisions.
This process will help you do the following:
Considering the cost involved in the recruitment process, it is important to evaluate the processes and strategies that you have used throughout your recruitment plan and set up control measures.
Evaluation simply has to do with checking how effective your recruitment strategies are in comparison to the cost of recruitment. Control has to do with setting up solutions to curb whatever problems or challenges that you would likely encounter.
It is good for you to set up a recruitment process to ensure you maximise the resources that you would have to invest to hire a candidate.
A good recruitment process will save you time and resources while setting the platform for a smooth selection process.
You achieve the following when you set up a recruitment process:
Having great employees is the ultimate goal of any business, whether large or small. Setting up an effective recruitment process can make your dream of hiring the best candidate for your position a reality.
Setting up a recruitment process helps you plan for the position you want to fill by;
You may feel like you can hire anyone when you want to hire, but setting up a recruitment process will help you work through the hiring process.
For example, if you are a furniture maker and you need to hire a Digital Marketer who will help promote your product on the internet, which option would you choose:
Would you go ahead and employ any digital marketer that you can see, without knowing if the person is good or not?
Or
Would you rather sit down and carefully create a recruitment process that will address the fact that you don’t understand digital marketing, and still help you hire a good candidate, regardless?
It is up to you to make your choice depending on how far you want your business to grow.
Going through the process of setting up systems (like setting interview questions, creating a skills test, etc.) to determine if the candidate will be able to do the job will eventually save you time and resources. You want to know how?
Setting up a logical process that candidates will have to follow before they can finally be selected will ensure that you select candidates based on defined metrics rather than emotions or feelings. Candidates who are selected based on defined metrics will end up becoming a great fit for the position.
Hiring the right candidate will save you the time you will spend replacing an employee over and over after a bad hire. Employing the right candidate through defined means will also save you the resources of training multiple candidates for the same position without results.
There are costs and time spent putting out job vacancies, screening and training new people. Taking the time to choose properly the first time helps minimise this risk.
If you have a systematic recruitment process that you follow when you want to recruit any candidate, it will help you to conduct a free and fair candidate selection process that will affect how candidates will see your company.
If candidates know that your recruitment processes are clear and free from any form of discrimination or recruitment malpractice, they will be attracted.
Setting up a systematic process will help you prevent legal issues like asking a personal question during the interview, being biased in your selection process, which may lead to disqualifying a qualified candidate.
Keeping your interview process professional can help prevent some legal recruitment issues.
As a business owner, it is important for you to get the timing right when it comes to hiring a new employee.
There are negative effects when you hire a new employee too early or too late. It is good for you to get the timing right if you want to achieve your organisational goal.
If you hire too soon, your profit can decline, and your revenue will be affected. If you wait too long before you hire a new employee, you will start having a pile of unfinished work that can lock your revenue down.
You should hire new employees when there are enough tasks that demand additional help, and also when your organisation’s finances are stable enough to manage the additional cost of hiring a new employee.
It may not be easy for you to know exactly when you should hire a new employee, but these tips will help you decide when:
One of the factors that you would like to consider when you want to hire a new employee is your financial growth.
To do this, you can take a look at your business's financial report. Take a close look at your company’s revenue and see the changes that have occurred from time to time.
If your business revenue has been growing steadily over several months, then it is a good sign that your current employees are working efficiently to drive the business revenue. This kind of report suggests that you need to hire new employees to continue the pace of growth.
Another factor that you may decide to consider to determine when you should hire a new employee is your employee capacity.
Taking a look at your current employee capacity will help you evaluate whether it is time for you to hire or not.
Talking to the manager who oversees your employee workflow or talking to the employees themselves will help you understand their current capacity.
If you notice that your employees are unable to take on a new task, or they are struggling with their current workload, then it is a signal that you need to create a new job position.
Aside from evaluating your employee’s capacity, an increase in overtime can be a signal that you need to hire.
If you notice that your employees are working overtime to handle their workload, then that is an indicator that you need to hire soon.
You can also assess your employees' attitude when it comes to doing extra work. If working overtime is making your employees burn out and get tired fast, then hiring new employees can be an option for you to grow your business in a way that is both good for you and your staff.
When you notice that opportunities are opening for your business to offer new products and services, then it may be a great time for you to hire new employees.
When your company starts offering new products and services, it may be a signal that you need to hire new staff to accommodate the expansion of your business.
If you think your business is already busy with a lot of workloads, you will need to take on more employees to help with the increased workload of expanding your products and services.
If your business expands to provide new services in order to grow, then you have to look at the skills and experiences of your current employees.
If the new services that your business is providing require a skill set that is lacking in your current staff, you’ll need to hire new workers who have the expert knowledge in the skills that you need.
A recruitment mistake may not cost a big company a lot. If you run a small business, you can’t afford to make a mistake.
Every product, service, customer interaction, and recruitment will reflect on your company. Building a small company requires your maximum attention because one mistake can break your business.
Deciding on the kind of people who should join your business is one big decision that you have to make when you are growing your business. That is why you have to avoid these recruitment mistakes:
Before you start searching for the right person to fill a position, you should first check your hiring motive. You may think, “I have a busy season in my business, and I need people to give extra support.”
Even if this is the situation, your motive for hiring can still be out of desperation, which can be wrong. It is one thing to recognise that you have a busy season in your business and look for extra hands. It is also another thing to recognise that your business is experiencing a busy season and you require extra help right now!
From the scenario above, you will notice that the former is out of need and the latter is out of desperation.
As a small business, hiring out of desperation is one mistake you should totally avoid. Hiring when you are desperate may make you boycott your recruitment process. Boycotting your recruitment process can make you hire the wrong person. Hiring the wrong person can cost your business time and money.
One of the first steps to hiring a great employee is creating a clear job description that outlines what you are looking for in a prospective hire. It should also be one that will show the prospective employee what they should expect from the job.
Writing a good job description does not just benefit the employee; it will also benefit your business. It is important for you as a business owner to understand clearly what you expect from an employee who will take up the position.
When you are creating an expectation for a specific role, you should ensure your expectations are realistic and tangible. Don’t assume that you would like an employee who can do A, B, and C when it is not stated in the job description.
One tip that can help you create a clear job description is understanding the role and the person currently performing the role. This will help you understand the person’s ability in relation to the role, and also help you know the things you would like to see in a prospective hire.
We talked about creating a clear job description as one of the many processes that are involved in the recruitment process.
Skipping creating a job description and other recruitment processes and jumping right into hiring a new employee is one mistake that you should avoid.
Not being thorough enough in your recruitment process can make you hire the wrong people. We understand that starting your business comes with a lot of responsibilities that might tempt you to rush your recruitment process and get people to start working.
Many small businesses end up hiring the wrong people because they skip some crucial recruitment processes like background checks, follow-up interviews, reference checks, etc.
One of the mistakes that many small business owners make is that they hire a job candidate based on their feelings instead of defined metrics.
It could be tempting for you, as a business owner, to hire a candidate who is a replica of you, or someone who appeals to you physically. If you hire based on these feelings, then there is a probability that you will hire the wrong person.
As a business owner, be careful that your reason for selection is based on the candidate’s talent and skills. Hiring candidates who are replicas of you will still leave the gap of your weakness that will never be filled.
Your recruitment choice should attend to your business needs and not your emotions.
Most business owners would like to wait to grow their older employees and make sure they have more than enough to do before they get new hires.
When some companies expand, they fail to bring in the number of people that can do the work; they bring in people who can just get by the job.
It is common for business owners to push their existing employees too far before they decide to get new people. Do you know what happens when your business is understaffed?
When your business is understaffed, your services suffer, existing staff get burned out, and new employees are not onboarded properly.
New employees who are brought into this kind of system will likely fail, and existing employees will get tired and overwhelmed enough to start looking elsewhere.
One mistake that business owners make is that they fail to anticipate that a great employee can decide to leave.
As much as it is crucial for your business to hire great employees, you should also acknowledge that great employees would love to be in great places.
The fact that you were able to attract a great employee does not mean that the employee should not look forward to growth for himself/herself.
If a great hire decides to leave after a few months or years of employment. It is good for you to know why the person wants to leave, but you should not take it personally and allow it to affect your business.
Instead of taking it personally, you can set up processes that will reduce the extent to which employees leave the company.
Hiring employees can be nerve-wracking, but it is something you have to do if you want to grow your business. Your employees can become the most valuable asset your business can ever have, which is why it is important for you to get it right.
To make hiring easy for you, we created this 10-step checklist to keep you on track:
After you have planned your recruitment and discovered the position that you would like to fill, the next question that may come to your mind may be: “Where can I advertise my job vacancies?” Here are some places where you can advertise your job vacancies:
The majority of job seekers today rely on job boards to show them the latest available jobs when they are job hunting. Job boards like Myjobmag have a variety of free and paid options available to business owners who want to advertise their roles.
With many people active on at least one social media platform, social media has become a great place for brands to interact with their audience and potential employees. Social media platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook have become a great place to search for hires.
Sometimes what you are looking for far off may be right within your reach. You can reach out to your professional network through email and social media platforms and let them know you are hiring.
You can tell them about the position and the kind of person that you are looking for. Who knows? They may know someone or someone who knows someone.
Prints may appear dead when it comes to advertising a job, but newspaper listings are still a very useful way to find hires. If you feel like trying out any of these platforms will be stressful for you, then you can consider using the services of a recruitment agency.
Yes, you should use a recruitment agency. If you own a business, then time should mean everything to you. Instead of you going about trying to figure out what recruitment process works, there are loads of things that need your attention.
Allowing a recruitment agency to handle your entire recruitment may save you time and resources so that you can remain focused on the daily running of your business.
If you have not used a recruitment agency before, these are the services that a recruitment agency will provide you:
You know how important it is to write a good job description, and also how to get your job adverts to the right audience, right? These are tasks that a recruitment agency will take off your shoulders. They know how to write eye-catching job descriptions and where to post job adverts to attract the best candidates.
This is what you would likely do when you are handling your recruitment yourself: You would post your job vacancies and wait for candidates to apply, right?
Here is what a recruitment agency will do: A recruitment agency will take the job directly to the people who best fit the position, rather than waiting for them to find the job adverts.
Shortlisting candidates, conducting interviews, and doing background checks are things that may take you time to do. Guess what? A recruitment agency will do all of this and present to you the most promising candidates for your positions.
Calling candidates and confirming their availability can be a tedious task. Using a recruitment agency can help you avoid these processes.
If you are using a recruitment agency, all you need to do is let your recruiter know when you want to meet with the candidate. The recruiter will handle every other administrative task.
Recruitment agencies provide more services. However, using a recruitment agency can save you time and energy.
It could be tempting for you to cut corners when it comes to recruitment; to jump at any candidate that comes your way instead of searching. This guide will put you on a checklist and help you hire the best-qualified candidates for your positions.
It depends on your hiring needs, internal capacity, and the type of roles you're filling. Recruitment outsourcing is a smart option if your HR team is overwhelmed, you're hiring at scale, need access to specialised talent, or want to reduce your time-to-hire. A recruitment partner like MyJobMag can manage candidate sourcing, screening, interviews, and even onboarding support, allowing your team to focus on core business activities.
Outsourcing hiring offers several advantages, including:
For growing businesses, outsourcing recruitment often delivers better hiring outcomes than managing the process entirely in-house.
The cost of recruitment outsourcing varies depending on factors such as:
Some agencies charge a percentage of the candidate's annual salary, while others offer fixed pricing or monthly recruitment partnership packages. Requesting a customised quote is usually the best way to understand the actual cost for your hiring needs.
A company should consider outsourcing recruitment when:
Outsourcing recruitment can be especially valuable during periods of rapid business growth.
Like any business decision, recruitment outsourcing has potential risks if the wrong partner is selected. These may include:
These risks can largely be avoided by choosing an experienced recruitment partner with a transparent process, industry expertise, and a strong track record of successful placements.
Recruitment outsourcing is when a business hires an external recruitment agency or specialist provider to handle part or all of its hiring process. Services may include sourcing candidates, screening applications, interviewing, conducting background checks, coordinating offers, and onboarding new employees.
Yes. Recruitment outsourcing can be particularly beneficial for small and medium-sized businesses that do not have dedicated recruitment teams. It provides access to professional hiring expertise without the cost of maintaining a large internal recruitment department.
A recruitment agency is often engaged to fill specific vacancies, while recruitment outsourcing (RPO) involves transferring part or all of the recruitment function to an external partner. Recruitment outsourcing is typically a longer-term, more strategic partnership designed to improve the overall hiring process.
The recruitment timeline depends on the complexity of the role, the availability of qualified candidates, and the number of interview stages. Simple roles may be filled within a few weeks, while executive or highly specialised positions can take several months.
Businesses can improve recruitment by:
When selecting a recruitment outsourcing provider, consider:
Choosing a recruitment partner that aligns with your business objectives can significantly improve hiring quality and reduce recruitment costs over the long term.
At MyJobMag, we work relentlessly every day because we believe that there is a better way to match job-seekers with employers. A technology-driven and less expensive way where our customers get value in return, rather than merely buying our services. We are extremely passionate about providing recruitment solutions that work. Our mission is to solve the employment challenge in Africa as well as improve employee quality and talent discovery. We have leveraged our technical expertise to make sure that we serve employers better and ensure that we assist job seekers by providing the latest verified job adverts and career information. We are excited about the job-search and recruitment solutions that we offer across Africa through our technology, career/business advice, and recruitment services.
Hello, we are a team of experienced recruiters and we are happy to help you recruit your next team member.
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