Hiring For A Larger Business vs Smaller Business
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Hiring is a necessary task for any growing business. Although small and large businesses will have different concerns when hiring, as long as employers are able to perform three critical balancing acts, any level of business can hire and retain excellent employees to help the business remain on course.
Depending on the size of your company, this can be a large or a small undertaking: a small hardware store may be able to get by with a "Help Wanted" sign and an interview, while a national software firm might require rounds of hiring assessments, personal recommendations and a number of interviews with various HR executives.
Whatever your business might be, though, two facts are clear: you can't expand your business without employees, and you need to make sure that your employees are talented and dedicated enough to carry out your instructions effectively and efficiently. So one of the keys to business success is, and always will be, hiring excellent employees.
The same principles we discussed for hiring employees in small businesses hold true for larger businesses as well: skill and experience are important, but character is just as vital to a good employee. Larger businesses, however, have a few additional concerns and options when hiring good employees, all of which should be taken into account.
One major concern is that once your business gets sufficiently large, you'll find that you need to spend less money on advertising job positions: people will start to know about you and seek you out on their own. This gives you a larger applicant pool to choose from, of course, but it also insulates you to a far greater degree from your employees. Additionally, larger companies typically have to delegate much of their responsibility for hiring to lower-level managers and supervisors, or to a dedicated HR staff. This gives you a much less direct role in hiring, and much less control over the basic character and skill levels of your employees.
Even a low-level employee at a faraway branch office can cause major productivity problems for your company, so it's vital to make sure that your hiring process is secure. Make sure you train your HR representatives and managers on what to look for in prospective applicants, and make sure that you have a well-documented procedure in place for hiring, including the bare minimum of one resume (or application) and one interview.
However, don't go overboard--with your procedures or HR hiring
tools--to the point that your individual HR employees and managers don't have autonomy to hire applicants that they find deserving. If you've been hiring effectively all along, you should have a dedicated, qualified staff of employees empowered to make hiring decisions, and who are more than capable of making good decisions about people. Let them make those decisions! Sometimes a manager's sense for people can outweigh all the checks and balances you put into your hiring procedures, and can gain you a valuable, productive asset for your business. There's a line to walk between ensuring the validity of your hiring process and allowing your HR people autonomy, and only you can decide what you're comfortable with in the end.
Although larger businesses require you to make these kinds of decisions about your hiring process, they also give you the advantage of having more to offer qualified employees. Once employees have several years of experience in a marketable field, they start to become much choosier about the companies they'll work for, and you want to have a way to attract good employees to you. One excellent way to do this is through employee motivation programs. If you offer retirement funds, medical and dental benefits, paid vacation time, and other company perks, you'll be able to promote yourself as a good company to work for and attract people who can help your company grow even further.
This does make each individual employee at your company more expensive as a whole, true, but it also makes the quality of your employees far greater and drastically increases the chance that you'll exceed your production goals--and thus your profits--for a given quarter. Again, you have a balancing act between cost and quality of employees, and one for which you have to make the final call based on your comfort level. But as the saying goes, penny wise and pound foolish: don't be afraid to spend some money to get a dedicated, talented employee.
Hiring excellent employees is, and should be, the primary concern of any growing business. If your employees aren't good, you can't guarantee your company's products or services at all levels of the business, and your company will start to suffer as a result. But as long as you make sure you can manage the many balancing acts of effective hiring--applicant pool vs. applicant quality, strong hiring procedure vs. managerial autonomy, and cost vs. quality of employees--you can hire the employees you need to make your business grow that much faster, and that much more reliably.
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