Create A Recruitment Strategy for Your SME

Growing Your Business

As a SME (a small or medium-sized enterprise) your recruitment strategy should be a clear plan that sets out the job roles you will recruit into, when, why and how. Getting your recruitment strategy right is essential and it should be linked to your company objectives as well as to your business goals and targets. It should be realistic to implement and easy to communicate.

Increasing your workforce should enable your business to grow and so determining the areas of the business that will benefit most from each type of hire needs to be part of your strategy. Find a way to measure the potential cost of employing someone new against the benefits. For example, if you want to hire based on an anticipated increase in sales you should be able to quantify your ROI. It is also important to remember that recruiting takes times and resources, so factor that in to your costs. New employees of course need some time to be trained and start making a difference but if that doesn’t happen and you can’t see that ROI you shouldn’t keep them on.

It can be relatively easy to recruit someone but the person who joins your team must be able to add value to the business. In start-ups or small businesses and SME’s hiring the right person at the right time to add the right value at that point in time is crucial.

Temporary Staffing

It can be difficult to decide on how many and what type of employees you need so using a recruitment agency to provide temporary staff can help you expand quickly and is pretty much risk free. It can be a good way of seeing the value a potential new employee could add.

Your business may need seasonal support or need to react at short notice to customer demands so your recruitment strategy should include plans for temporary staffing to cover short term projects that can change quickly. Using temporary staff supplied by a recruitment agency also removes the need for you to manage the payroll for staff you only need for a short period of time.

Recruitment Takes Time

Finding the right person, with the right skills and experience can take time, weeks in most cases, but having a good job description, robust interview and decision making processes will make a huge difference. If you don’t structure your recruitment process you can end up making costly mistakes so spending time planning before you start the hiring process is key. Set aside time to recruit. Good, talented candidates don’t wait around and so creating the best possible candidate experience during your recruitment process will go a long way to ensure you find the best people to work in your business.

If you are a new business, or hiring your very first employees, don’t put too much emphasis on the qualifications and experience you think you need. SME Businesses change within the first few years and so more importantly, employees with the right attitude and enthusiasm, who are eager to learn and have the ability to take on new tasks and grow as the business grows, will be invaluable as time goes on. Think about how a potential employee will fit your company culture. In small teams, employees who are not a good team fit will have a negative impact on morale and ultimately productivity and ROI!

Think about your company objectives and the areas of the business that you need to develop to help you to decide on the skills you will need to evaluate and look for during job interviews. What skills do you already have in the business and what new ones do you need? You will need people with different skill sets depending on what your business objectives are.

Employer Brand

Nowadays most potential employees will check out a company’s social media platforms to get a better feel of what it would be like to work there, so make sure your employer brand gives the right message and ‘sells” the company to job seekers. People want to know about company culture so make sure your posts reflect this.

How can you differentiate your business from your competitors? What about your business makes it a more attractive place to work?

By getting this right you will attract not only the best talent but the people who will be the right team fit, so be honest and post content both on your social media and website that reflects what a normal day is like and what the team get up to day to day.

Review Your Recruitment Strategy

As with almost all business plans and processes you should keep reviewing your recruitment strategy as the business grows. Your strategy, if well planned in the first instance, should remain the same but your recruitment processes may change. Reviewing annually to make sure your recruitment strategy is still in line with your business objectives and goals; making sure everyone in your team understands them and how you plan to reach them and achieve success.