Know what your employees want before you hire.

Make sure you know what your prospective employees want. This is one of the keys to good recruitment that small businesses fail to utilise, according to specialists.

And if you’re recruiting young people, you need to give them a social environment that makes the workplace fun as well as productive — that doesn’t mean filled with other young people, but it does mean making them part of a team.

Small companies tend to spent too much on recruitment and not enough on retaining their existing staff, but retention can be thought of as part of the recruitment process.

These are the messages from small-enterprise recruitment specialists, who also say that this sector does not conduct recruitment very well. They do it themselves without the necessary skills or they pay too much for commission-based services.

Those who attempt it without any advice fall down in the most obvious ways such as the lack of a good job description, which often stems from a failure to know clearly what they want the new employee to do.

“If they don’t have a really good idea [about that] they’re not going to be 100 per cent focussed in interviews,” says Cally Jackson, marketing and recruitment co-ordinator for Access Management Consultants, “and they won’t be looking for the right skills match.”

“It’s not just a skills match but also a values match — someone who will fit the organisation culturally, especially in small businesses which can be very tight knit,” Jackson adds.

The best way to avoid the pitfalls, Jackson says, is to use an outside consultant, chosen with care.

“Small organisations think that it’s not worth the cost, but it is worth getting extra assistance. External companies do have expertise that small businesses don’t.

“The recruitment industry has a bad reputation that may be well founded because of the practices that go on. When they select an agency or consultancy they need to make sure they have a good understanding of their reputation,” Jackson warns.

Recruiter Toby Marshall, director of Abacus Recruitment, says it is possible for small businesses to learn to do recruitment themselves and save considerably on fees.

“So much recruitment is commission based or involves up-front fees which are not in the interest of small business. Recruiters mainly care about big companies and there are so many small businesses that they can burn off hundreds before anyone notices,” he says, aware that he is not endearing himself to the recruitment industry.

Author of the manual, Get Great People, on how small businesses can recruit more effectively, Marshall says large recruitment advertisements — display ads — are often just a waste of money. “They work for recruiters, not necessarily for clients,” he says.

The manual, about to be published here and in the US, is a do-it-yourself kit. “We have a strong belief that small businesses know their business really well, but need some skills and access to some advice when it comes to recruiting,” Marshall says.

The skills include how to run a relaxed but probing interview. “That’s crucial,” Marshall says. “The interviews also need to be comparable across candidates. That simply means asking standard prepared questions.”

The other essential skill is how to run online advertisements on recruitment sites like SEEK and MyCareer. “Employers don’t know how to do that. [Those sites] are only working for recruiters at the moment, because they do it day by day.

“There’s no question that small companies can do it, but they have to learn. Small companies for example don’t know how to keep their ads prominent by buying enough.

“Big recruiters pay $7 or $8 for an ad while the individual punter pays $150. By day two you’re on page 3 and a few days later you’re on page 10 so your ads vanished.

The big guys keep buying new ads so stay on page 1,” Marshall says.

A company needs to know why a great person would want to join their business and stay. “Anybody can be great if they are interested in the right job in the right place at the right time and have an interest in their career,” he says. “Ask what it is that makes the job you are offering great.”

If you’re hiring young people, have a young person conduct the interview, Marshall suggests. “If you’re after young women don’t put a 54-year-old man in front of them.”

14 November 2006 10:33 am