Hiring a new employee is a difficult operation for the small business. It is a hard to find the right person, qualify them, convince them your company is the right place for them and arrive at fair compensation and benefits for you and the new employee.
Many small business owners look to their personal acquaintances for leads and referrals to new employees and avoid traditional channels of finding employees such as placing an ad in the newspaper or on one of the many job websites or even hiring a employment agency. Referrals from acquaintances have two perceived advantages; it is cheaper – no advertising fees - and a personal recommendation. While it may save an advertising fee it is likely that the recommending person more often has little or no knowledge of the person's professional abilities, they just like them. If they do have professional knowledge it is still more likely they will recommend a person on personality than professional abilities.
Hiring relatives is likely even a bigger mistake that is often made by family businesses. Managing family members has a whole host of difficulties and mixed dynamics. If you hire you own relatives it is nearly impossible not to mix family and business relationships. If you hire family members of employees and you need to discipline or even terminate one member of the family it will likely impact the relationship between the company and the other family members who are employees.
The problem with placing an ad particularly on one of the websites is particularly in the current job market you will get so many resumes that it will be difficult if not impossible to sort through them. We placed and ad for a bookkeeper and within hours we pulled the ad because we received over two hundred resumes. One was from a guy working at a burger restaurant who was willing to learn the job and on was from a country that I could not even locate by continent. They would work cheap as long as we got them a work visa. We narrowed the list down to ten and set up interviews. After interviews we had three that appeared more of less equally qualified.
An associate of mine recommended a on line personality test. I was skeptical but had the three potential employees complete the on line test my friend recommended. Remember this was a personality test not a skills test for a bookkeeper. The results pointed clearly at one of the potential employees. The test her personality was best fitted to the job description. Whether it was the test or dumb luck she was indeed very well suited to the position. On line personality tests are a great tool to determine if an applicant if suited to the position.
Original Content copyright 2010 Thomas Robinson
