Multitasking comes naturally to you as the owner or manager of a small, growing business. But when it comes to recruitment, many small and medium enterprises (SMEs) find themselves stretched. Without an internal recruiter or a dedicated HR team, it’s difficult to know where to start.
That’s especially the case if your budget can’t accommodate the fees that recruitment firms charge to find talent on your behalf. If you’re a busy business owner or manager, spending countless hours drafting job ads, sifting through CVs, and interviewing candidates can seem like a frustrating drain on your time.
Yet in a small team, every new hire is important and the risks of rushed, inconsistent recruitment processes can be high. Making a bad hiring decision won’t just dent your budget. It could also disrupt your team culture, derail your growth strategy or impact your relationships with your customers.
Without a structured recruitment process, it’s all too easy to miss out on great candidates, hire the wrong fit for your business, or spend ages looking for the right person. By contrast, taking a more strategic approach to recruitment can help you find the right talent to develop a healthy company culture and accelerate your growth.
Automation, easy access to online information resources and digital platforms have transformed how SMEs operate over the past couple of decades. Recruitment is no exception, with small businesses able to use a range of digital tools and technologies to run a smooth, professional hiring process. These hiring platforms and solutions aren’t just for big companies.
Today’s tools are built with small teams in mind. Features like job description templates, job ad performance reports, candidate filtering tools, and application insights help you work faster and more effectively, even if you don’t have an HR department.
Here are some ways to get it right:
- Smarter job advertising
When you decide to add someone new to your team, the natural starting point is placing a job advertisement. Crafting a good job description detailing the responsibilities for the role, the necessary qualifications and experience, and the remuneration and benefits is key to attracting the best talent.
- Choose the right platforms for your ads
It might be tempting to rely on word of mouth or turn to recruitment agencies when hiring – but both come with drawbacks. Word of mouth often limits your reach, while agencies can be expensive and may not always understand the specific needs of your business. Many SMEs find they get better results by choosing the right online recruitment platform. A platform with a strong local focus and powerful filtering tools can provide targeted access to candidates with the right experience and skills, helping you hire more efficiently and cost-effectively.
- Source from online candidate databases
An online platform like Pnet gives you access to a database of millions of South African jobseekers across a wide range of roles, experience levels, and skill sets. This allows you to actively headhunt candidates, helping to reduce time-to-hire especially since job ads typically need to run for two to four weeks to allow applications to come in. In practice, many recruiters post a job ad and then immediately begin searching the database, using both channels in tandem to identify strong candidates faster.
- Use screening tools to make life easier
Your screening process should allow you to filter out candidates that do not meet your criteria for the role in terms of qualifications, experience or skills. This task can be very labour intensive if you don’t use sophisticated job-matching and filtering tools to reduce the manual work of sorting through dozens or even hundreds of CVs.
- The right partner can help you handle the process
If you’re busy selling to customers, getting your financials ready for year-end and putting out operational fires, sifting through CVs, shortlisting candidates and conducting interviews may feel like a distraction. Some portals offer end-to-end recruitment solutions which include a response handling service to help you get to the interview stage faster.
This team will source suitable candidates, reach out to them to ascertain interest and submit shortlists to you to begin the interview process. This can be a real time saver for a busy SME but costs significantly less than working with a recruitment firm.
- Run structured interviews
A structured interview process will ensure consistency and objectivity as you assess candidates. Ask each candidate the same set of pre-defined, job-relevant questions – ideally a mix of behavioural and situational prompts. This will help you assess how they’ve handled challenges in the past and how they might approach future tasks. Use a scoring rubric to evaluate responses to minimise unconscious bias and compare candidates fairly.
- Don’t skip reference checks
Don’t treat reference checks as a formality. Speaking with a candidate’s former supervisor or colleagues provides valuable insights into their work ethic, performance, communication skills, and ability to collaborate. It helps you verify claims they made during interviews. Thorough reference checks can prevent costly hiring mistakes.
Here are some final tips for time-strapped SME recruiters:
Focus on quality over quantity: Be strategic about where and how you post roles.Communicate promptly: Quick, professional replies help maintain a strong employer brand.Create a positive candidate experience: Even if you don’t hire someone, how you treat them matters because they could be a future customer or candidate and will talk to others about their experience. Some platforms allow you to send bulk regret letters to unsuccessful candidates.Standardise what works: Build a basic hiring checklist so you’re not reinventing the wheel every time.Create a talent pipeline: For roles with consistently high demand, like sales for example, businesses can use Pnet to build a talent pipeline by regularly recruiting and keeping track of strong candidates, including previously shortlisted applicants who may be a good fit for future vacancies.
