6 Tips for Hiring at Your Small Business

If you're the owner or manager of a small business, the
prospect of bringing new employees into the fold can be
both exciting and anxiety-inducing. On the one hand, it's
extremely exciting to have the budget and resources to
bring new team members into the fold. On the other,
your small business is your baby and your livelihood—so
you can't afford hiring mistakes that affect your success
and productivity.
Consider these six hiring tips as you write job
descriptions, conduct interviews, and train your new
employees.
Related: Here's the Right Way to Screen Potential Job
Candidates
1. First things first: meet state and federal
regulations.
The rules are different when you start hiring employees.
Get started with these hiring steps from the Small
Business Administration . You may also want to network
with fellow owners of growing small businesses to share
advice on the most helpful accountants, background
check providers, and so on.
2. Let your brand's personality shine in the
job description.
If you're not yet a well-known brand and you're trying to
attract the best talent, you must stand out to potential
applicants with a wealth of job opportunities at their
fingertips. One way to do this is by crafting a job
description that showcases what's unique and especially
exciting about your company. Whether you explain how
you're disrupting an industry or share examples of
recent media coverage, your job description has to be
memorable for applicants who are scrolling through
endless job options.
Related: How to Hire the Best Talent and Avoid the
Most Common Pitfalls
3. Building a new team from scratch?
Consider a group interview.
For example, if you're building a new sales team from
the ground up, you'll want a manager, senior-level
salespeople, and junior employees. You may consider
bringing in those who'll need to frequently collaborate for
a group interview, gauging how well they work together
and relate to each other.
4. Be honest about the role's challenges in
the interview.
Small businesses have different challenges and
opportunities from a large corporation. Be transparent
with potential job candidates (without giving away
proprietary details, of course) about the hurdles you
believe will impact them most in that role. These
challenges could be a small or nonexistent advertising
budget if you're hiring a marketing manager, or the fact
that your website and logo need total rebrands if you're
hiring a designer. The best employees—the ones you
really want to hire—will welcome challenges and look
forward to finding solutions.
5. Save the best training knowledge for
next time.
Make your life easier and the next round of training
faster: save training materials. This can include tax
documents to sign, an introductory slide deck about your
company's history, templates that all new employees
need on their computers, job descriptions, and beyond,
all saved on a USB drive or a single "new hire" folder. A
few months after your new employees have settled in,
ask them what information helped prepare them most,
and build on that for your next round of hiring.
6. Think long and hard about the culture
you want to cultivate.
Especially at a small business, every employee has a
huge impact on culture. One person's creativity, negative
attitude, efficiency, or indifference can ripple across the
organization. Even though you may be in a time-crunch
to get offer letters signed quickly and crush 2015 goals,
do take time to truly ponder the type of workplace you
want to manage and the values most important to you.
Prioritize those qualities in the people you hire.
Small business owners have enough on their plates
without regretting an offer letter. Remember to listen to
both your gut and your logic when hiring a new
employee—and always choose employees with whom
you'll genuinely enjoy working.
Related: 5 Essential Ingredients for Making a Smart
Hire