How to Reduce Hiring Risks for Your Small Business

You can reduce your hiring risks

As the old adage goes, employees are your greatest asset, but they can also become your greatest liability if a wrong move is made. This is never truer than when growing a small business.

When imminent growth calls for an influx of new people, there can be a temptation to try and hire quickly to fill roles and increase reach. But this rapid expansion comes with hiring challenges.

According to Michael Page, the primary challenges facing those recruiting for SMEs include:

• Cost - 43% think the cost of hiring is excessive
• Time - 47% believe too much time is spent on hiring
• Talent - 43% said they struggle to find suitable jobseekers

Alongside all of this is the challenge of competition. In an environment where a small pool of great talent is in high demand from all businesses, it can be difficult for SMEs to keep up.

Cutting corners on due diligence

In an effort to speed things up and keep bosses happy, HR and recruitment teams will often cut corners and simply tick boxes to get a hire through the door.

In doing so, the purpose of the recruitment process is lost and hires are made under pressure, rather than on the basis of evidence.

In this situation, SMEs must take a second to ask themselves, “How much do I really know about the people I am trusting to take my business to the next level?”

A survey conducted by SmartCompany highlighted the dangers of making these swift but ill-informed hiring decisions, with 27% of the SMEs they surveyed admitting they’d lost money due to poor hiring decisions, and 48% saying a key implication of a bad hiring decision was the volume of time wasted on hiring and then training the new hire in their role.

Making great hires, quickly

Although competency is important, culture should come first and cannot be taught. Understanding if a candidate will fit in culturally, requires the right questions to be asked and steps to be taken.

Technology allows you to do this quickly and with confidence, by offering:

• Speed - automating processes such as reference and background checking, saves SMEs from wasting time trying to contact the relevant authorities, schedule times for a call, or chase down responses and results.
• Compliance - entirely human-driven processes come with very real risks of non-compliance due to the manual, often conversational nature of them. Trusted and secure technology platforms ensure processes are conducted consistently, fairly and with accuracy every time.
• Insights - rather than relying on hand-written notes, or excel files passed between colleagues, tech platforms enable SME recruiters to collect verbatim insights during the recruitment process and securely store them for future reference.

At Xref, we recognise that new technology can seem like a daunting commitment, which is why we created Xref Lite, our single-user, self-serve alternative that enables you to experience all the power of Xref right away.

Try Xref Lite for free today - reference your first candidate with a complimentary credit on us - and see how you can turn a slow and inconsistent box-ticking exercise into a cost-effective and efficient hiring tool.