Building your dream team: expert tips for smarter, more effective recruitment

Experienced business owners know that the popular idea of the lone entrepreneur building up a successful business is often not quite accurate. In business, it is an effective team of people that make things happen, not a single person. Realising an entrepreneurial vision requires you to recruit the right people into your business.

Amogelang Montane, Human Resource Business Partner at Business Partners Limited, offers the following tips for business owners to sharpen their recruitment practices:

1. Define the job: Good recruitment starts with being clear about the job in the recruitment ad that you post. It helps to clarify, for yourself, the nature of the work and who it is that you are looking for. It can even prompt you to rethink the structure of your organisation into a more efficient machine.Don’t just cut and paste a generic job ad. Thinking about and investing time in developing a detailed job description means fewer inappropriate applicants, and therefore allows for a quality over quantity list of applicants to sift through. A job description in a recruitment ad can go beyond the details such as tasks, hours and remuneration. It can also describe the values of your organisation and the kind of personality that is best suited for the job. For a small business, it is probably a good idea to mention that a certain amount of flexibility is required. A junior salesperson, for example, may also be expected to do some reception work as well as some data capturing.
2. Build an attractive organisational brand identity: The moment you put the word out that you are looking for workers, you will be googled. The best candidates won’t apply without checking your business online. Make sure that your website and your social media presence not only describes the quality of your products and services but will also satisfy someone who is curious about what it’s like to work at your business. The “About Us” section of your website can feature testimonials from your employees about why they work there.Of course it is not only about your online image, but also about the real atmosphere in your business as a place of work. Happy workers become ambassadors for you as an employer in their network of family and friends.
3. Use data-driven recruitment: A new class of subscription services called applicant tracking systems (ATS) has sprung up that help streamline the recruitment process, rather like a customer relationship management (CRM) system helps your sales team to keep track of thousands of customers and their needs.The most sophisticated ATSs have started using AI to learn what kind of candidates you prefer. These are rather expensive subscription services. But even if you don’t have the budget, try to record and analyse the information of your recruitment efforts in order to learn from them.
4. Focus on cultural fit: Almost just as important as work experience and technical prowess is the ability of the candidate to get along with your existing team. It is subtle and difficult to discern from a CV and a job interview, but it is crucial to conduct your search with this in mind. It is a good idea to let key members of your team sit in on the interview so that they can help to decide.
5. Use Internal Referral Programmes: Often the best recruiters are your existing workers. Each of them has a network which they can tap for potential candidates. When existing employees suggest candidates, they vouch for them, meaning that a certain level of sifting and vetting has already taken place, especially when it comes to cultural fit.
   Consider incentivising your existing staff members to recruit candidates through a financial reward for a successful appointment.
6. Embrace diversity and inclusion: Cultural fit does not mean you have to end up with a team that look, speak and think the same. Diverse teams tend to be much more innovative and dynamic and should be built as a business asset.