The last few years have proven a struggle as a number of small businesses have been forced to shut up shop and join the army of unemployed across the UK. So it’s positive news to hear that so many small businesses have their sights set on company growth for rest of the year.

But challenges still lie ahead.

As someone who works in a small business, you’ll understand the difficulties of recruiting someone for your team. With fewer hands to manage the hiring process and limited resources, small business recruitment quickly becomes a costly and time consuming task.

Yet the advent of online recruitment has now made it possible for small businesses to compete with the large corporations and big brands for the best available talent. Not only that, but it can all be achieved whilst keeping costs to an absolute minimum.

How?

Here are some solutions to your small business recruitment challenges to help get your hiring down to a tee using the web.

1. Recruitment is too expensive

First and foremost, there’s a common misconception that recruitment is too expensive for small businesses. This is not the case.

Obviously your small business recruitment is going to require expenditure, but it doesn’t need to break the bank. By using a fixed fee or flat fee recruiter, you’ll be paying one upfront, low cost fee with no hidden costs, but the benefits are endless.

2. No one even knows about us

This may have been true back in the day, but the internet, and ultimately social media, has paved the way for anyone and anything to be known throughout the world.

Research your ideal hire, find out what platforms they use, and make sure you’re on them. Make yourself visible online and ask your employees to write a blog sprinkled with keywords relevant to your industry. Provide the type of thought-provoking content your perfect recruit seeks to help make you visible to prospective employees.

3. It takes too long

In some instances, small business recruitment can become very drawn out, but there are plenty of tools out there to help reduce your time-to-hire (and they don’t have to be expensive either).

For example, online automated video interviews and online skills tests are the perfect way to dwindle down your shortlist of potential employees without having to invest too much time.

As the perfect supplement to an initial face-to-face interview, you can gauge candidates’ interests and skills before inviting them to your office.

Whilst there might be a number of hurdles the small business owner must overcome to find their perfect hire, it doesn’t mean that you can’t successfully recruit.

It may initially take a bit more effort and time, but it is definitely worth it. Employees are at the heart of any successful business. And if you want your company to fulfil its potential, then it needs the right people.

For more assistance with your small business recruitment, you might find our latest guide of use: Online Recruitment for SMEs. To access your copy, simply click on the button below.

Take Webrecruit for example.  Last month alone we received an average of 70 applications per customer service role. That’s a lot of CVs to sieve through to determine the right person for your company.

So how do you identify one CV from the next when looking to recruit customer service staff – let alone who you should invite for a face-to-face interview?

Introducing automated online video interviews – the perfect first round interview tool

Starting with high tech businesses, the use of web-based video interviewing has taken the recruitment industry by storm as switched on hiring managers become increasingly aware of its benefits.

Just a few of the benefits include:

- Reduced hiring costs and time-to-hire

- Improved candidate experience

- Boosted employer brands

- Better talent brought on-board

But whilst automated online video interviews make it easy for almost anyone to use, knowing what to look out for and how to assess a candidate’s ability and aptitude for your role can be tricky.

Here are 3 key tips for getting the most out of automated online video interviews to help your customer service recruitment.

1.  Ask questions that will help you not only get your answer, but also give you a glimpse of the prospective employee’s personality, communication, presentation skills and more.  If you’re looking for some good questions to ask in your automated video interview, you may want to read: What questions should you ask in a video interview.

2. As the world becomes a more technological place, businesses increasingly look for those who can readily apply themselves to a computer and can quickly pick up new skills. The fact that you’re interviewing via automated online video interviews (and that they’re still relatively new) means you already have a head start in assessing your interviewee’s IT literacy.

3.  Ok, so it’s a little bit cheeky, but when replaying the candidate’s interview answers, take a peek at their living arrangements. Is there anything that could be deemed unprofessional showing up? Are their clothes strewn across the room? Is their desk area clean? This will tell you a lot about the individual’s habits, such as organsiational skills and attention to detail.

By using automated video interviews for your customer service recruitment, as opposed to a traditional ‘CV only’ technique, you can get your shortlist down, ensuring you don’t miss out on the excellent candidates.  What’s more, you can identify talent whilst saving time during the recruitment process – meaning you can focus on getting the right person for your team, sooner.

If you’d like to find out what other tools will help reduce your time-to-hire when recruiting customer service personnel, you might find our latest guide of use, 5 ways to reduce your time-to-hire. To download your copy simply click on the button below.

At a time when even those employers in non-niche markets can encounter skills shortages in their candidates, finding the right man or woman who possesses certain rarer skills and experiences can be overwhelming and frustrating.

There are many things that the clients of Webrecruit (http://www.webrecruit.co.uk) can do to make staff recruitment easier, however.

Niche recruiter status only increases the importance of having an incredibly thorough knowledge of everything relating to your firm and its industry, continually researching and learning.

One key component of such knowledge-gathering is the creation of a sourcing map. Consisting of every relevant competitor, community, conference, niche job board, allegiance, personal connection, connection of connections, group and list on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more, a sourcing map can be a vital first port of call when you next need to recruit staff.

There are always ways in which you can use your sourcing map to generate even more ideas of places to look for suitable candidates, so you should study it carefully, making a note of where the listed people come from, their responsibilities and how they carry them out, as well as who with.

Your sourcing map can be the platform on which so much of your niche company’s online recruitment takes place. You’ll already know just how shallow your recruitment pool is, so you should extract the absolute maximum value from every source that you have. There may be an industry conference at which you can find attendees, or there may be an industry-specific LinkedIn group that you can scrutinise for talent.

As you use such sources, you should strive to maintain and increase diversity in where your candidates come from, so that you always have somewhere new to turn to – just in case.

It’s also a good idea to set up Google news alerts to monitor news relating to your niche market, so that if a major competitor decides to lay off some people, for example, you can get in touch with them via LinkedIn and advertise your vacancy.

Even if you find yourself contacting people who are not being laid off as part of the above scenario, there’s no harm in trying to persuade them to join your talent community – or you could start one, if you have not done so already. This can be a vital part of the online recruitment process for your niche firm, as it gives you an opportunity to promote yourself as a market leader and as the best place to work, via regular newsletters, blogs, social media updates and more.

Finally, of course, it’s also sound advice to simply advertise as widely and as astutely as possible. Webrecruit (http://www.webrecruit.co.uk) can help to ensure that your niche firm’s recruitment advertising is as effective as it could possibly be, so that you attract those all-important candidates.

But without understanding how and why you should use social media when recruiting, you could just be wasting valuable resources.

In fact, one of the most frequently asked questions we hear from small businesses looking to recruit is where should they begin with social media?

Although the social media landscape spans a multitude of platforms such as Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, YouTube, Google+ and more, as a small business, it’s likely you will be able derive massive value from using just three of the main platforms: Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Here are some of the ways you can use these key social platforms to help your small business’ recruitment.

LinkedIn

- Create a strong company profile. Use an impressive headline summarising your company and include plenty of skills and keywords. That way, your company profile will show up in search results when potential candidates are looking.

- Tell your story and catch the eye of prospective talent. Describe your culture, showcase awards and achievements, and outline areas to make an impact in the business.

- Join relevant groups. It’s a great way to network and meet potential employees. Earn the trust of others and promote yourself as a thought leader by contributing to discussions.

- Encourage your followers to share, like and comment on your posts. If they do, your posts will be shared within each of your followers’ network, giving your employer brand even more exposure.

- Update your email signature. Ask employees to hyperlink their email to your LinkedIn company page. Since email is the primary communication tool for many professionals, it’s a great starting point for connecting with others.

Twitter

- Share content that stands out. Without interesting information, your Twitter account will not get a lot of interest. Likewise, when you retweet someone, customise the copy.

- Help never goes unnoticed. Respond to questions by your Twitter followers and go out of your way to help solve issues. It’s a great way to build a relationship with your audience.

- Return retweets. Share other people’s tweets by retweeting posts that will be of interest to your followers. Retweet your most passionate followers and hopefully they’ll do the same for you. Don’t forget to thank them when they do.

- Post your latest vacancies complemented with commentary. Your tweet should encourage people to take action. Experiment with how to catch the reader’s eye and ensure to tweet a combination of messages.

- Repeat tweets. The Twitter stream moves very fast so it’s likely most of your followers won’t even catch your first tweet. If you’re sharing some exciting information, schedule multiple tweets using a platform like Hootsuite.

Facebook

- Make your company page the heart of your audience. Produce a steady stream of engaging content focussed on the people that you want to reach.

- Share photos. Offer a visual of what it’s like to work for your company and showcase your cultures, values, employees and work environment.

- Ask your network to share content and ideas. This will help you to build engagement and relationships with your fans, and ultimately, a talent pool.

- Get creative. Entice people to check out your job postings by linking them to interesting articles or quotes.

- Be helpful. Post relevant, useful content and respond to questions with a human touch. Get your employees involved and let them use Facebook in the workplace as a professional tool where they can build connections.

By following these tips, we hope you have the first steps to using social media as part of your small business recruitment.

If you require further information, you might find our free guide, Social Media Checklist, of use. It’s packed with information and tips on how to make the most of social media to benefit your recruitment strategy.

Access your copy by clicking on the below.