Hiring a new employee can be one of the most stressful things on your business to-do list. Just take a moment to think about how impactful your hiring decision may be—a good employee will help elevate your business to greater heights, while a bad employee could cause financial harm to your business or cast your company in a bad light. Employees are truly the backbone of your company, so you should try to hire only the best of the best candidates.
Someday we might live in a world without jobs, but until then hiring is one of those tedious jobs that you’re going to have to do, and one that you’ll have to do well. If you want to hire the right person for your business, just follow these 5 simple steps before you write up a job offer letter.
Analyze Your Budget
Many business owners make the mistake of not properly budgeting before they begin hiring, and they realize too late that they don’t actually have the funds to hire a part-time or full-time employee. It’s all-too easy to do, especially if your company is overworked and doesn’t have enough staff to handle all the business.
It’s easy to get too hasty during fast business times and begin hiring, but before you start the hiring process you need to pour over your business finances and make sure you’re truly financially capable of paying for another employee.
Advertise Online
If you’re going to attract the best candidates to your open position, you need to advertise your job listing. Jobs sites like LinkedIn and Indeed enable you to post your lob listing so that any online job seeker can find it.
What’s great about these sites is that you can assign keywords and job categories to your listing so you’ll only get applicants who are truly qualified for the position you’re hiring for. LinkedIn lets you see each job applicant’s larger network of associates, and you can see their listed skills that have been “verified” by their network. Indeed, on the other hand, also has features and algorithms that will search through all the submitted job applications and pick the most qualified candidates. This will save you lots of time by finding the best resumes from the get-go.
Conduct Interviews
Interviewing is one of the most important parts of the hiring process because you’ll be able to learn a lot about each of your job candidates. A good job applicant should come to the interview well-dressed, which demonstrates professionalism and self-care. You should also dress yourself well for an interview—if you’re interviewing a great job applicant, you want to demonstrate your company’s professionalism, as well (thankfully, it’s not too hard to look like a million bucks on a budget).
When you’re interviewing the job applicant, try and get a sense of their personality, work ethic, and skillset that they’ve gained from prior work experiences, and try to figure out if the job candidate can bring something truly unique to the table if they were to work for your company.
Run Background Checks
After you’ve interviewed many applicants, you should run an applicant background check on each of the most qualified candidates. A background check will tell you whether or not an applicant has a criminal record. Obviously, you probably won’t want to hire someone who’s a convicted felon—you don’t want to bring an unsafe person into your work environment.
In addition to running background checks, you should also do some candidate vetting on your own. Check each job applicant’s social media profiles and make sure the applicants have a respectful presence and attitudes online—remember, each of your employees represents your business when they’re in the public sphere. You might not want to hire someone who uses excessive profanity or makes offensive social media posts. You don’t want your company to be associated with these kinds of people, and you don’t want those kinds of people interacting with your customers or clients.
Weigh Candidates
After you’ve run your background checks, you’ll have to decide which job applicant(s) to offer a position to. Sometimes, the hiring decision is easy because one particular applicant stood out among the crowd. Other times, you’ll have to choose carefully between two or three job applicants who may be equally qualified. Don’t waste time offering the position to a truly exceptional candidate because that candidate could be sought after by other companies. If you have trouble choosing between applicants, create a spreadsheet and list each job applicant’s pros and cons so you can more easily compare them.
If you thoroughly complete each of these 5 checkpoints during the hiring process, you’re sure to hire a great employee that will boost your business and your profits.
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