One vital part of business that many small business owners find extremely challenging is hiring new employees. A recent NFIB survey said, “Sixty-three percent reported hiring or trying to hire, but 55 percent (87 percent of those hiring or trying to hire) reported few or no qualified applicants for the positions they were trying to fill.”
There are lots of ways how a business can hire, but finding the right candidate can be a challenge.
LinkedIn recently introduced a new tool, Recommended Matches, which helps you zero in on the right candidates for your needs and gets more intuitive and smarter based on your guidance. It uses machine learning to help you not just find 347 candidate but to help you find the 3 or 4 that are best suited for your needs.
Liz Maples, product marketing at LinkedIn shared that LinkedIn’s latest feature for business Recommended Matches is part of a newly redesigned LinkedIn Job Posts that was crafted specifically with small business owners in mind.
To use Recommended Matches you simply post the position to LinkedIn, being sure to include specific skills, years of experience, and whatever else you look for in an ideal candidate. The more specific your post is, the more relevant your candidates will be. A stream of profiles will show up, and with a click of a few buttons you can either reject them, schedule a meeting, or add them to a list of candidates you would like to look at later. You can even share potential candidates with your entire team and work together on the hiring process.
What’s nice about Recommended Matches is that you now have a “partner”, albeit a digital one, to help you narrow down your list of candidates.
Many small business owners tend to shy away from online platforms not realizing that small business is “hot market” right now. In fact, Liz’s team researched and discovered that 87% of LinkedIn professionals are looking to work at “smaller or medium-sized businesses.”
Many candidates, the majority of which are millenials, are looking for more opportunities to grow and further their experience, and small businesses offer such golden opportunities. When looking to hire millenials, Liz advised that employers should “have upfront conversations with them about how they want to grow.”
While larger companies, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, Amazon and hundreds of others “brand” names get the media’s attention, there’s a great opportunity for your business to find great candidates by touting that you ARE a small business. Being small means a candidate can probably have more opportunities to learn more at your company than a bigger one.
One part of hiring that you should pay attention to is your website and any other “hiring” areas. Be sure it’s welcoming, has your core values, even photos and videos that give candidates a peek inside your company. Remember, hiring is a two way street. YOU the business owner/manager must choose the candidate but the candidate must also choose you.
