Your new employee orientation checklist should have the proper paperwork needed for the employee to start working. This includes Federal and State Income Tax Withholding Documents, Federal Employment Eligibility Documents and an employee contract that outlines job duties and title.
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Failing to define hiring-team roles
If team members don’t know what they’re responsible for, they may inadvertently double-up on tasks — wasting time and drawing out the interview process.
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Recruiting for a small business can have a big impact. When your team is smaller, every hire is important — and the wrong hire can keep your entire business from growing. You may not have a corporate-sized budget or brand recognition, or even a recruiting team with HR processes to streamline hiring. But as a small business, you can be more nimble, responsive, and personalized in your approach.
Here are steps you can take now to start engaging qualified candidates that will help your small business flourish:
Know the budget you’ll need. LinkedIn found that the average small business spends around $1,600 a year on hiring.
Interview past and present teammates to build out exact qualifications for this role. Understanding the role as thoroughly as possible will help you make better candidate matches. Map out your hiring timeline with milestones. Almost half of small businesses take about a month to make a hire. Sync with teammates about their individual responsibilities to streamline the hiring process. Everyone on your team should wear a recruiter hat (see step 5 for more information).
You need to screen out unqualified candidates even as you post the job. Required questions about availability, tool expertise, and language proficiency can help the right candidates make the short list faster. We recommend a minimum of two to three screening questions.
You don’t have time to manually reply to every single candidate — especially those who don’t qualify — but you should use an automated solution to deliver prompt, professional responses when an application is received or dismissed.
When researching and interviewing candidates, determine if they have the top five soft skills (creativity, persuasion, collaboration, adaptability, and emotional intelligence) that are especially critical on a smaller team.
Small businesses offer something that large corporations struggle with — a more unique, intimate culture. Your company’s employer brand should attract candidates who feel like large corporations are impersonal and indifferent.
Humanize your team with a company page. Showcase your achievements, reinforce your unique company vision, post expert tips, and ask questions that engage your ideal candidates. LinkedIn Pages are free, and followers are 81% more likely to reply to InMail outreach.
Create a personalized career site, not only to post jobs but also to connect with candidates who want an authentic view of daily life at your company. Your career site should surface the right job postings for the right visitors based on their individual professional experiences.
You may not offer the same compensation as larger companies, but you can offer a tailored career growth path. Small businesses attract ambitious candidates who are eager for new experiences and skill sets — and who would rather rise quickly on a small team than wait years to advance at a larger business.
Emphasize how open and accessible your leadership is. Small business candidates appreciate an environment where every voice is heard regardless of rank, and where every individual has an opportunity to make a significant impact on the company every day.
Encourage employees to share your company content on their personal and professional social media networks. This further humanizes your company as well as increases exposure.
Get leadership on board. Articles, videos, and original content from leadership can offer unique insights that engage more passionate and dedicated candidates.
Have teammates add links to your company and career pages on their LinkedIn profiles. This shows enthusiasm and unity to candidates who research their potential teammates before applying.
As a small business, you can be more authentic in your recruitment. Write friendly job posts that emphasize the company culture and strong growth path that you established in the previous steps.
While you want your job post to stand out, you should also be clear and descriptive so qualified candidates can understand the opportunity.
Because they don’t have the budget to compete with large companies, hiring teams at small businesses feel compelled to rely solely on word of mouth or their existing network to source talent. However, job posting sites can add life to your candidate pool — especially sites that offer candidate matching and screening capabilities.
Post to a site with cost-per-action options that stay within budget, targeting and screening capabilities that save time, and a user-friendly candidate management system.
Got a strong candidate on your radar? Use the right channel for your initial outreach to ensure a quick connection. A compelling InMail message has a 300% greater response rate than a regular email, so you can engage with serious candidates faster.
If you’re sending paid InMail messages, you’ll get credit back when a candidate rejects your message, stretching your budget further.
Use candidate profile details, discussion history, and engagement data to keep the conversation personalized, interesting, and moving forward.
Remember…Small teams can still attract big talent. You may have a humble budget and only a handful of people on your team, but you can still find solutions to turn talented, eager candidates into the new hires that carry your company forward.
SOURCE: LinkedIn Talent Solutions
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More and more jurisdictions are passing laws requiring employers to provide paid leave to employees, and the COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated this trend. When new laws are enacted, employers often have questions about the impact on their existing policies. Here are answers to some frequently asked questions on paid sick leave, vacation, and paid time off.
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This list of common small business mistakes ranges from things as simple as not doing things you’re not good at to not mistreating suppliers and not letting customers mistreat YOU.
Here are the top 10 mistakes new business owners make.
You know your business, but you’re not an expert at everything. So, stop doing things that you don’t do very well and instead focus just on the things that you do best. Doing things you don’t do well is one of the most common small business mistakes because it’s so easy to try to do everything yourself. But really, it’s beneficial to hire experts to help you. This can mean hiring someone to do your payroll, file your taxes, send out emails, fix your trucks, key in orders, or arrange for travel. If you’re doing stuff like this, you’re probably wasting your time. Yes, there’s a cost to hire someone. But it costs you more in time and lost opportunities to do everything yourself.
That’s your name on your tax return, your name on the articles of incorporation, and your name on the front door. It’s your business. You get all the riches and glory. But you also get all the headaches. That’s because every problem—every issue, every challenge, every mistake, everything that goes wrong—is ultimately your fault. You hired the people. You bought the tools. You sold to the customers. You chose the priorities. This is your show and if anything happens, it’s your responsibility. This is just one of the common small business mistakes entrepreneurs can easily make early on.
So, you’re selling something for $125, so what’s your margin? How many of these things do you have to sell in a month to break even? How often does your inventory turn? What happens to your debt maintenance if interest rates go up a point? What would be the impact of a 5% rise in your supplier’s costs? What percentage of your sales is overhead? What percentage of your labor represents health and retirement benefits? These are the things that the most successful business owners know off the top of their heads. They’re boring, mathematical, numerical facts that drive the success (or failure) of every business and not knowing your profit margin is one of the top 10 mistakes new business owners make. Not interested? Then hire someone who is or go work for someone who is.
Your employees have lives. Really, they do. They have children. They have car troubles and sick parents and dental appointments. Believe it or not, they would rather be at home with their families than working in your office. But, when they’re in your office, they’re doing something important: making you money. Don’t take this—or them—for granted. Offer competitive compensation, good benefits, and, most importantly, an ear for when they want to vent about a professional or even a personal issue. They are, after all, people—and they all want to do the best job they can. Your job is to give them the best environment to accomplish this.
It’s not right when people say to delay paying suppliers in order to help cash flow. How would you feel when this happens in reverse from your customers? When that does happen, you resent it and you give those slower-paying customers less attention than the ones who pay on time. Don’t monkey around with your suppliers. Treat them well. Pay them early. Take discounts if they offer them. But behave as a partner would, because you may need that key supplier in a pinch and, if you’ve got a good relationship, that person will come through.
Some customers aren’t great customers. They treat your people poorly. They complain unreasonably. They pay late and haggle too much. Your goal—elusive as it is—is to do business with people that you enjoy doing business with. You should not fire a customer because let’s face it: We all need customers. But you can price those customers that you would like to see go away a little differently. If they want to behave that way, then they should pay more—that’s your compensation for putting up with their nonsense. Otherwise, let it be their decision to leave you, not yours.
You work hard to get your customers. So, don’t ignore them. Ask any first-year business school student and they’ll tell you that their professor told them that it’s much, much more expensive to acquire new customers than it is to grow your revenues with existing ones. And they’re right. Are you staying in close touch with people who have bought from you in the past? Are you making suggestions or offering them additional products and services that can improve their lives or businesses? Are you showing enough gratefulness with special discounts or incentives for loyal customers? Focus on your existing customers first and the new ones will come.
You hate it. So, does everyone. But it’s a fact of life: taxes are due every quarter. Just because they’re “estimated,” and the IRS isn’t sending you an invoice, doesn’t mean that you’re not required to pay them. You are. When your accountant tells you to pay, then pay. Meet with your accountant a few times a year and maybe you can adjust those estimates, depending on how your business is doing. But do not ignore your tax liabilities—they will quickly grow and could potentially bury you. And it’s not pretty.
OK, maybe someday you want to go public, or your exit plan involves selling your business for zillions to some big tech company. To do that, you need to bring in investors, venture capitalists, partners, and high-priced employees – then equity would be an important part of doing business with those people. But most of us don’t have these dreams. We want to grow our companies, earn a nice living, build some value, and then one day either pass the company on to another generation or to a buyer. Try not to give up ownership in your company too early or for too little. The more equity you control, the more of your life you will control.
One of the common mistakes entrepreneurs make is investing too much in technology. If the tech giants had it their way, you’d not only be upgrading their software every month, but you’d also be buying every new gadget that comes on the market as soon as it comes on the market. Don’t do this. The smartest owners use technology effectively and treat purchases like the purchase of any other capital investment: with return on investment in mind. Just because a piece of tech is cool, or fun, doesn’t mean it’s going to benefit your business. Measure the cost of it over a five-year period of time with the benefits it will produce more business, better productivity, and lower costs. If you can get yourself a good return on your money, then buy that tech. Otherwise, invest somewhere else.
So avoid these mistakes from the beginning and don’t learn more about them the hard way!!
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SOURCE: The Hartford SMALLBIZ AHEAD
By Gene Marks
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Are you constantly checking your phone and refreshing your email? Whether you find yourself scrolling through status updates or disrupted by your coworker in the next cubicle — who suddenly decided to hold a conference call on speakerphone — it can take up to 23 minutes to recover from even the smallest distraction.With all the demands on your time, it can be nearly impossible to stay focused.
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