Small Businesses: Why Do-It-Yourself Hiring is Costly, Time Consuming, and Ineffective

Great Employees Make Great Businesses

Time and time again, you hear the importance of good employees for the survival and success of small businesses. As the saying goes, “a company is only as good as its employees.” Yet too many small and medium businesses fail to allow sufficient time and funding for recruiting. Many small businesses elect to D.I.Y. one of the most important components of their business and leave recruiting to already over-worked managers or staff. 

Research shows, around 46% of Australian small to medium businesses think the time spent on hiring is excessive. 43% consider the cost of hiring as excessive and 46% agree that they struggle to find suitable jobseekers for their roles. With nearly half of Australian small businesses reporting that they spent more time and money than they wanted to on hiring and still got less than desirable results, it’s time to take a hard look at why do-it-yourself recruiting may be harder than you think. 

You Do You

To be a small successful business you must focus on your core competencies and use your limited resources as well as possible. Doing anything else is a waste of money and time. Is finding and hiring talent what your company does best? No? Then why don’t you do something you are good at instead. Whether you install garage door openers, create innovation technology, or sell vitamins - your company has a best and highest purpose that makes it unique and profitable. Everything else is a waste of time, effort, and money.

The fact of the matter is that the time you will spend writing ads and screening candidates is time you can’t spend on your specialty and that’s just the opportunity cost. Add the hourly rates of your senior managers as they troll LinkedIn and Facebook looking for potential hires with the costs of their benefits and office overheads and you’ll easily see how doing talent acquisition on your own can cost way more than hiring a recruiter.

Plus, if you’re already overwhelmed by your day-to-day workload, why add another daunting task? With this sort of overload, you might forget to get back to a candidate or send them an email letting them know they are unsuccessful. What you may not know is that this kind of lax follow-up is bad branding for your business. Potential candidates will tell their friends, family, and colleagues about their experience and that could affect both future hiring and sales. One disgruntled employee or candidate can wreak havoc on your business’ reputation. 

 In addition the cost in terms of effort and time, the costs of a one-off recruit using Seek, Indeed, or another recruitment website are high. When you couple these fees with the hours spent, you could end up spending much more than it would cost to hire a professional.

Leverage a Much Bigger Network 

As professional recruiters, we are experts in sourcing and placing the "perfect” candidate for every role - this is what we do. From years of experience, we’ve learned the right questions to ask to uncover any unsuitable candidates and people that are unlikely to commit for the long run. 

Professional recruiters like Uplift Recruitment have a massive in-house database and access to many external ones. We also cultivate wide reaching professional networks that we can call upon to find the right candidate even if that person is currently employed (and thus not easily found on LinkedIn). We’re across social media, leveraging LinkedIn, paying attention to workplace trends and we’re doing this every day of the year. As a small business, you just can’t have the same reach or put in the time to get it and run your business at the same time. 

As an agency we can attract a wide array of candidates that wouldn’t normally apply to “x” company. Candidates applying for our jobs actually don't know which company they are applying to before they submit their applications. This blind selection based on the job description allows us to meet the candidates and build trust so we can place them without perceived notions of a role or company getting in the way. This in itself opens up a pool of candidates that you otherwise would not have access to.

Get a Professional in Your Corner 

A professional recruiter is essentially your agent. We are an advocate for your business and invest the time to deeply understand who you need and why you need them. As a small business owner or manager, you may be too close to the ground to make a detached decision based on what’s best for the role. As such, emotional involvement often compromises your decision making skills. 

Unless you spend heaps of time recruiting (in which case you may have a retention problem), you likely lack a consistent approach. When recruiting on your own, you don’t have a buffer between you and the candidates. Not only does this buffer make you seem more professional, it also allows us to gather information about candidates that you would otherwise not get. This sort of privy will never be available to in-house hiring managers and can reveal why a candidate declines a position or asks for a better package. 

Of all things that can be a real let down for a company, the worst in the recruiting realm may be when you find and vet the “perfect” person for your role and company only to have an inexperienced manager scare off the person with no feedback as to why. This will never happen when you work with us because we are vested in finding the right job for that person and the right candidate for your role. If it doesn’t work out, we will be on the ground to find out why. 

Therefore, if you want to find quality candidates that continue to provide value for your small business over the years, we recommend hiring a professional recruiter to build your team.

Permanent vs Temp Recruitment

Have you ever hired someone for your business, spent hours and hours looking at resumes, interviewing people to finally have them start and resign within a short space of time?

How frustrating is that!? 

When hiring a permanent staff member through a recruitment agency, you receive a guarantee period (usually around 3 months). If the candidate resigns or is let go due to performance, the agency will replace them free of charge. This adds another layer of protection to your bottom line, knowing that if the person is not suitable or they leave in the first 3 months, the recruitment agency will do all the leg work to replace that person for you.

Temporary Hiring – Many agencies, such as Uplift Recruitment, offer temporary staff for either short or long term contracts. The candidate is pay-rolled by the agency, all the insurances, timesheets, contracts are taken care of. You just need to ensure they are made welcome at your company and pay a weekly/fortnightly invoice.

The agency stays in regular contact with the temp staff member and when you wish to cease the contract, you just let us know and we will take care of it.

This type of recruitment is flexible and if you are wanting to “try before you buy”, it’s a safe bet. From our experience, if you have a temp with you for 3 months and they are offered a permanent role at your company and accept. They will stay onboard for a lengthy period. By this 3 month mark, they are feeling comfortable in the culture and would not take a permanent role if they were not happy.