IBA, as the premier business brokerage firm in the Pacific Northwest, is firmly established as a respected professional service firm in the legal, accounting, banking, mergers & acquisitions, real estate, and financial planning communities. Periodically, we will post guest blogs from professionals with knowledge to share for the good of owners of privately held companies & family owned businesses. The following blog article has been provided by Dalip Jaggi, co-founder of Revive (https://www.revive.realestate/):
Why Scaling Hiring is the Key to Scaling Your Business
Building a business from the ground up is a rewarding experience, but it comes with some challenges along the way. You need patience and creativity to develop unique products or services that bridge a market gap, strategic thinking to weather the highs and lows that are common in early startups, and top-notch talent that can help you achieve your goals.
Many entrepreneurs focus on capital, product development, and marketing in the early stages. While these aspects of the business are important, building a dedicated team of talented individuals can make a huge difference, not just in the beginning, but when you’re ready to scale.
Hiring a few employees is easy, but hiring as you scale is a different story. As your business grows, you need to be able to meet your staffing needs and recruit top talent at scale. Here’s how.
Assess Company Culture
Many companies sacrifice company culture when they undergo rapid growth. Before you can begin hiring to accommodate your needs, you need to take a look at your organizational culture, define it, and decide how you’ll ensure it’s preserved as you grow.
Your company culture is defined by your core values and beliefs that set you apart from your competitors. It’s also a crucial part of attracting and retaining talent. Having a strong culture will help when you hire at scale by attracting candidates who share your own values and belief systems.
There are many ways you can assess your company culture and determine your company’s direction as you grow. You should be focused not just on performance but values for the future, allowing you to improve on the culture you’ve already built.
Consider Batch Hiring
If you’re scaling your hiring and recruitment, batch hiring can streamline the process. Batch hiring is when you hire two or three employees for similar roles and onboard and train them simultaneously.
Once you have suitable candidates for a position, you can schedule interviews for the same day to streamline the process for your hiring team. They can focus and prepare for the interviews instead of getting caught up in other work.
When you scale hiring, it’s best to use structured interviews that include the same questions, giving you an “apples to apples” comparison of candidates for more objectivity and less subconscious bias.
Once you’ve selected the successful candidates, you can onboard them at once, check in regularly, and monitor training to ensure that they’re fitting into their new role.
Create Candidate Personas
Candidate personas are a fictional representation of the ideal candidate for a position. Similar to buyer personas, candidate personas help you determine the ideal candidates and tailor your job listings to attract the right people.
Create personas for each open position. For example, the ideal candidate for a contractor position for home remodeling services may have a general contractor certification, 15 years in the home remodeling industry, and an extensive background in residential renovations with strong design and planning skills, technical expertise, and project management skills.
Include information on background, qualifications, and skills. While you can include some demographic information, be careful not to limit your talent pool too much. Focus more on the traits and characteristics that are important, rather than details.
Once these positions are filled, you can use your candidate personas in the future hiring process.
Use Applicant Tracking Systems
Applicant tracking systems (ATS) combine all your recruiting tools into one streamlined platform to assess candidates efficiently and improve the hiring process. A robust ATS will help with building a pool of qualified candidates, reduce the time and money involved in the hiring process, and create a careers page that can attract applicants. If you have existing hiring tools, some ATS will integrate with them to give you a more efficient tech stack.
Use Skills Tests to Screen Talent
One of the keys to scaling hiring is identifying top talent quickly. Pre-employment skills tests are one of the most effective ways to do so. You can compare candidate skills and abilities at scale while reducing bias.
There are many ways to conduct pre-employment skills tests, from assessing cognitive abilities to language skills to role-specific skills. You may want to add a personality test to better understand your candidates and select the ones that align best with your culture, no matter their background.
Shortlist the Best Candidates
Only invite the top candidates to interview, which keeps the process as fast and efficient as possible. Creating a shortlist of criteria for candidates keeps you focused on the ideal candidates and reduces the risk of bias that can cause you to pass over the best choices.
Different types of unconscious bias can affect the hiring process, including racial, cultural, gender, and confirmation bias. Every effort you can make to reduce bias will make a huge difference in building a strong and diverse team.
Keep Candidates in the Loop
Some candidates won’t be the right fit right now, but they may be for a future role. Keep the candidates that didn’t make the cut informed throughout the process to ensure they have a positive experience.
Candidates are less likely to apply in the future if they were left hanging during the initial hiring process. Applicants also talk to each other, so you can expect them to communicate that bad experience to others in their network. You can lose opportunities quickly through word-of-mouth referrals.
Hire the Best Applicants
Once you completed the screening tests and interviews, you should have a short list of ideal candidates for job offers. If they accept, welcome them to the team and start the onboarding process.
When you’re scaling hiring, you have to make hiring decisions fast to extend offers to the top candidates before they’re snapped up by your competitors.
Track Performance
Tracking your new hires’ performance helps you optimize your hiring process. This helps you determine what’s working and what isn’t to make any necessary cuts – and possibly change some aspects of your hiring process.
Using real estate as an example, you can lose money selling a home as-is. A little upfront work could give you an excellent return on investment and a higher sale price. As a business asset, your candidates are similar – you can get back what you put into them.
Scale Hiring with the Right Approach
Hiring top talent at scale is a crucial part of maintaining your business during a rapid growth period. Knowing how to scale hiring the right way not only saves you time and money but ensures that you’re building a team that’s supporting your corporate mission.
If you have questions relating to the content of this article, Dalip Jaggi would welcome the opportunity to answer them. Mr. Jaggi can be reached at (949) 573-4399 and dalip@dalipjaggi.com.
IBA, the Pacific Northwest’s premier business brokerage firm since 1975, is available as an information resource to the media, business brokerage, mergers & acquisitions, real estate, accounting, legal, and financial planning communities on subjects relevant to the purchase & sale of privately held companies and family-owned businesses. IBA is recognized as one of the best business brokerage firms in the nation based on its long track record of successfully negotiating “win-win” business sale transactions in environments of full disclosure employing “best practices”.