The unemployment rate is at a fifty-year low, which means that the days of dozens of overqualified candidates submitting resumes are a thing of the past.

Getting the right employees for your growing business

The best potential employees have their pick of jobs and in just about any location they want to live.

If you want to snag the right employee, you must up your recruitment game. Of course, that all begins with understanding what your company needs right now.

Figure out what you actually need

It’s easy to think that the solution to any problem in a department is more, similarly credentialed employees. Sometimes, that is even the truth.

Take a look at the department’s overall performance. Is everyone pulling their weight and then some? Yes, it’s time for fresh blood with a similar background.

Sometimes, though, the problem is that the existing staff members aren’t using their time to do work that takes advantage of their skills. If you’ve got a front-end developer who spends most of his time fielding calls for the department, what your business actually needs there isn’t another programmer. Your business needs an administrative assistant helping out in IT.

You must focus on the actual need, not the surface problem.

You don’t expect them to hit the ground running

There is, of course, that exceptionally talented outlier who steps into a role and seemingly masters it in a week.

After a month, it’s like she’s a ten-year veteran of your company. Those employees are exceedingly rare. Expecting anyone to hit the ground running is setting them up for failure.

It takes as much as six months to a year before new employees fully acclimate to your processes and culture.

You need a solid onboarding process that recognizes that fact and offers active guidance for the first 3 months, regular check-ins and mentorship for the second 3-month period, and intermittent check-ins for another 3-6 months.

This makes you attractive to employees who have had miserable onboarding experiences in the past.

Offer the right employee a better pay

Top employees don’t need to take survival jobs anymore. They can demand and receive the highest pay and the most benefits.

If you spend all of your time looking for ways to keep new employee salaries down, you’ll get subpar employees. You must be willing to invest in new employees the same way you’d invest in top-shelf equipment.

Cut-rate employees provide cut-rate performance. They’ll cost your company more in lost productivity than you could ever save on their pay. Paying a little more to get a great employee will pay dividends for the entire time they work for your business.

You make way more off of that employee than you’ll ever spend.

Set up professional development benefits

No one wants to walk into a new job, only to discover that they can’t advance professionally.

It’s a good way to guarantee that they’ll move on after a year or two. While promotion is one way you can help your employees develop professionally, it’s not the only way or even the best way. After all, there’s almost always more than one candidate for any given position. Only one person gets the nod.

What you can do is create opportunities for education. Internal mentorship programs can help employees refine soft skills they’ll need when they do land a leadership job. You can partially or fully fund certification programs, college courses, and memberships in professional organizations.

You can also make a habit of sending employees to professional conferences. These benefits can help push you to the top of a candidate’s list of potential employers.

Getting the right employees for your growing business isn’t a single solution problem. You must understand the actual problems at work so you can hire for the right job. Understand that most new employees won’t hit the ground running.

Be willing to pay for talent and provide that talent with professional development opportunities.

This combination of factors will get you the right employees.

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