How To Hire When You Start A Small Business By Yourself

Now, more than ever, Americans are trying start a small buisness. The small business is the fastest growing trend in business today. With good reason, being in charge of your own destiny and financial gain is attractive to most people, especially the millennial worker. Being at the helm of your private enterprise, what’s not to love? It turns out, there is plenty to watch out for when it comes to hiring. Not everyone who wants to build a small business is cut out for what it takes to find the right candidates and get them to stay.

When you start a small business by yourself, you are expected to know precisely what you need to make it happen successfully. Plenty of small business owners realize just how underskilled they are, but it usually hits when they are knee deep in the weeds of recruiting. What should you watch out for when you start a small business that could derail your efforts to getting someone to work for you?

To Start A Small Business Successfully Requires Recruiting Well

We’ve all heard of business plans, but only buying the book entitled, Business Plans For Dummies, is not going to cut it when it comes to knowing what to plan for. We are all planning for what we need to be successful, but what about planning to have a successful business? That means you will need to foresee what you will need to scale up.

• How big do you want your business to get?
• What are the funds required to get there?
• What kinds of skills do you need to have to do that?
• Will you recruit help and when?

 “I surround myself with people who have knowledge and talents in areas where I might not be so well versed.” -Richard Branson

Venturing out on your own to start a small business is excellent. In fact, research shows that getting others involved too early may actually hurt your growth strategy in the long run. No matter how efficiently you can manage yourself, growth means at some point you will need to recruit others to help you.

Hiring people can be a real eye-opening and discouraging exercise for the entrepreneur who has never been in that role before. There are plenty of places to find people who are looking for work, but what you do in the hiring process makes all the difference in the kind of candidate you will ultimately have sitting in front of you for the face-to-face. Doing it the wrong way means you will be spending a lot of time and money looking for the right people.

You also need to be realistic about what you are going to offer a new hire to work for you. Make sure the salary or hourly rate you are willing to pay is in line with the current going rates in their field. Aim too low, and you’ll find inexperienced candidates and sift through lots and lots of resumes from unqualified people. It’s best to do this research before you actually need someone so you can keep funds allocated for the right time to be able to pull the trigger when you need it most.

Candidates Are Not Interested In High Hopes For Benefits  

The favorite thing to offer candidates to get them to stay with a growing small business used to be the promise of cashing in on success with the Founder later. There are a plethora of former paper millionaires who can tell you the hope of riding the wave of success for a big payout isn’t worth foregoing benefits and pay.

If you want great candidates to want to work for you, then you will need to bring something to the table besides empty, albeit optimistic promises. Candidates want real benefits. We don’t mean the make-your-own-schedule kind of benefits (although that is a nice perk), we mean the health insurance, retirement kind of benefits.

Before you stop reading and start crying, there is a feasible way for you to be able to present a benefits package to your top candidate of choice without getting laughed out of your own conference room (or coffee shop, or coworking space, or wherever “work” is located). PEOs have grown in great popularity with SMBs. The reason they work so well is simple; you get to offer your employees a whole lot of benefits for a fraction of the traditional investment.

Not familiar with PEOs and how they can help the average small business save a ton of money? Talk to a PEO broker like PEO Spectrum and find out what it will mean for you financially to start being able to offer benefits today. Only a few of you? That’s okay, some PEOs work with small companies as well.

If you decide to start a small business by yourself, you should know there are plenty of others just like you making it happen every day. If you want to see how the successful ones keep great employees over time, talk to us about PEOs today.