Hiring, creating a job post, training and legal stuff.
Today will be looking at how to setup a hiring process and other important details on maintaining a well staffed and trained ship.
Let’s not waste any time and jump into this pool full of wisdom waters.
In most small businesses that have 3+ employees, hiring is a process that never stops.
There are rarely any employment contracts in place, so it’s basically an employment at will (depends on the state).
Unfortunate nature of retail or small business is that you are not protected from an employee quitting on the spot or simply not showing up to work at any given moment.
The only way to protect business from having shortage of workers is to think of hiring as never ending process.
You must create a hiring and training funnel that keeps new candidates coming through it and becoming skilled workers ready to take the wheel.
Let’s look at the simple funnel:
- Posting an ad.
- Analyzing applications and inviting them for an interview.
- Having an interview
- Inviting select candidates for a training
- Training
- Onboarding
Repeat
As you can see on the diagram every step only some % of candidates get through to the next stage. With 300 applications collected, you might end up with only 1 worker ready to onboard.
That data isn’t the same for every industry and economic situation, but overall it’s very similar.
In order to successfully grow your business, you have to automate this process and keep it running making minor changes over time.
- Create a job post template and keep posting it every week or more frequently. link to our job post template is attached below.
It’s important to know that you can’t discriminate against protected class when creating job post or choosing a candidate: race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, or gender identity), national origin, age, disability and genetic information (including family medical history, all are protected classes.
- Every day, review applications and invite selected candidates for an interview. Create a template interview invitation that you can simply copy and paste to save time.
Dedicate dates for interviews, include the day of the week and time in your template interview invitation.
For example: Every Tuesday at 2 pm. That way if someone wasn’t available this week, they can always come for an interview next week.
- Train one of your managers to do interviews, follow the strict guidelines, questions, and properly document each candidate’s responses.
- Have a dedicated person to train every single new hire, that way you have consistency in training and quality of workers. (creating training videos can help you speed up the training).
- Onboarding process requires a new trainee to fillout W4, I9, handbook (after carefully reading it), getting a copy of social security and driver’s license.
Most small businesses don’t have a handbook that describes all requirements and guidelines of employment, it’s important to mention that a handbook is not a contract and it must be carefully stated in the document. (link to our handbook template is attached below in comments).
It’s best to keep each employee's paperwork in the electronic format in a safe place. You can scan those documents and upload them in the Employee Management for each employee separately.
- Frequently check on their progress, do monthly training sessions and performance reviews for all existing employees, it’s important they keep improving or maintaining their work skills.
Monthly performance reviews is a good way to establish expectations and potentially eliminate workers who fall behind after giving them 2-3 warnings.
Many businesses have fallen into a trap of not continuing to train employees after hiring them.
When an employee is trained and released into the field, no regular checks and meetings happen on the regular basis and after some time, business starts receiving complaints about them.
And of course if you are a business owner you might assume it's the employee's fault for not doing the best, so they should be replaced.
Unfortunately, the reality is that business should invest more time on doing monthly education, reviews and checks to correct these situations before they become a problem.
I recommend using Indeed or Monster for small business and retail jobs. However craigslist still has a significant power when it comes to finding candidates, however it will require much more work in vetting when searching for quality candidates.
Congratulations, you are now equipped with the basic knowledge on posting jobs, hiring employees and maintaining a well trained workforce
