7 Step Guide: How to Hire & Keep Great Employees

Your business is only as good as the people who keep it going. It’s worth spending time to improve your hiring process, onboarding process, and retention strategies because if you don’t, you will lose employees to your competitors. In this guide, we cover what you need to focus on to attract and retain top talent.

Posting jobs and keeping track of resumes can be stressful and time-consuming, especially for small businesses. Freshteam is an applicant tracking system that lets you post to multiple job boards with just a few clicks. You also get 50+ job description templates and the ability to see which sites are sending you the most candidates. Best of all, Freshteam is free for 1-50 employees.

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Step 1: Be The Employer People Want To Work For

The first step in successful hiring doesn’t involve new hires directly. It’s making sure your company is the type of firm high-quality candidates want to work for. You wouldn’t hire someone based only on a resume, and candidates aren’t going to decide based only on a job description.

Create A Strong Employer Brand

Employer branding is how your company is perceived by prospective and current employees. Positive employer branding can help you attract and retain the best employees. It can also help reduce hiring costs by attracting more candidates per job opening.

Generally, employer branding includes defining the cultural and management values your company stands for, explaining how employees benefit from working for you and getting the word out in job descriptions, your Indeed company profile, and general marketing communications. For more information, read our article on employer branding.

Employee Branding-Related Benefits Ad on Glassdoor (Source: Glassdoor)

Provide A Good Benefits Package

According to a 2017 study by Harvard Business Review and Fractl, the top 4 benefits workers seek are health benefits, flexible hours, vacation time, and work-from-home options. Newer benefits may include helping employees with their transportation costs.

Make sure you communicate your benefits package on your job description or on the careers page of your website:

Facebook Careers Page Talks Authentically About Culture (Source: Facebook)

Set The Right Compensation Level

While employer branding and benefits are key, everyone still pays attention to salary and perks. You should make sure you set the appropriate compensation level for all roles at your company. You can find salary data across job titles and regions using this Indeed salary tool.

Step 2: Describe The Successful Person, Not Job Applicant

Next, you’ll need a great job description in order to find employees and attract qualified applicants. When you create your job description, make sure you’re describing the most successful individual in the role, not just listing job qualifications. That means focusing enough on soft skills necessary for success. A recent LinkedIn study showed that good communicator, well organized, and team player were the most sought after soft skills that employers were looking for.

Top 10 Most Sought After Soft Skills By Employers (Source: LinkedIn)

When describing your company and the position, make sure the personality and culture of your company come across. A fun, provocative voice will be more enticing than the standard dry voice of most job descriptions. Highlight why your company is a fun place to work and how it’s organized. Highlight key benefits, like employee self-management, and/or your company’s unique mission. And, don’t be afraid of using humor.

Here are a few great career pages and job descriptions to give you some inspiration:

Example Career Page with Personality and Humor (Source: Meetup)

Help Scout’s Job Description Talks In A Real Voice About Successful Qualities (Source: Help Scout)

Step 3: Get The Word Out, In The Right Way

To get the word out about your open position, you should use a combination of channels, starting with employee referrals. According to a Silkroad survey, employee referrals topped the new hire source list at 22 percent. Job search sites are another great source. Read here to learn more about how to get the most out of your job posting.

Source: Silkroad

Use Employee Referrals

Candidates who are referred by existing employees are often more knowledgeable about your company and, if hired, they stay for longer. Create an employee referral program if you don’t have one already, and give special attention to this channel.

Here are some tips on making the most of employee referrals.

1. Make sure you’ve spent time on Step 1 in order to make your company a place that people enjoy working at. That’ll make them more likely to recommend jobs to others.
2. Communicate a lot of enthusiasm when talking about open roles with your employees. Hopefully, this enthusiasm will transfer when they speak to their network.
3. Emphasize what a great opportunity the role is for candidates and the importance of the position to the company.

Post On Indeed & Other Job Boards

According to the Silkroad survey, Indeed was the next largest source of interviews and hires after employee referrals, accounting for 52% of interviewed candidates and 43% of hires.

Despite the success of Indeed, you don’t need to put all of your eggs in one basket when it comes to posting jobs. An applicant tracking system like Freshteam makes it easy to post to multiple job boards (including Indeed and Monster), engage with candidates, and collaborate with hiring team members, all from one dashboard. It’s also free for up to 50 employees. Click here to sign up.

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Sources of Interviews and Hires After Internal Referrals, Source: Silkroad 2016 Survey

Consider Hiring A Recruiter

The third most common source of hires is recruiters. Typically, small businesses try to handle recruiting all internally. However, it might be useful to leverage an external recruiter in certain cases. They can be especially useful for hires that you need to make quickly or senior positions. Read our article on HR Managers vs. Recruiters if you’d like to learn more about when to stay in-house and when to use a recruiter.

Step 4: Filter Candidates To Find the Best

If you followed our steps so far, you should have a nice stack of applicants to sift through. Here’s where you’ll want to put your filtering hat on to make sure you’re spending time only on the best candidates. As you do so, be aware that recent labor law updates at the federal and state level may restrict the kind of questions you can ask — such as criminal background, salary history or sexual orientation. In addition, new anti-discrimination laws are being added in some locations, like New York that bans discrimination based on hairstyles.

Conduct An Initial Phone/Video Screen

Set up a 5-minute initial phone or video screen. It’s the most time efficient initial filter. An easy tool for this is something like Google Hangouts, Zoom, or Skype. Here’s what to ask in your phone screen.

Finetune Your Interview Process

Once a candidate has made it to the interview process, it’s the best practice to do a structured interview. A structured interview lets you compare candidates applies-to-apples by asking each applicant the same questions and giving them the same assignments, evaluation, etc.

Lazlo Block, Google’s SVP of People Operations, did extensive research on Google’s hiring process and recommends structured interviews.

“Assess candidates objectively. Include subordinates and peers in the interviews, make sure interviewers write good notes, and have an unbiased group of people make the actual hiring decision. Periodically return to those notes and compare them to how the new employee is doing, to refine your assessment capability.”

— Lazlo Block, SVP of People Operations, Google

Our interview guide has more information. Remember to communicate just as promptly with those who didn’t make the cut as those who did. For those that you’re going to be turning down, send prompt rejection letters.

Step 5: Set Up An Efficient Onboarding Process

Once hired, getting new employees onboard is the first step in making sure they’re successful and more likely to stay. What’s the key to the onboarding process? Make it a priority. New employees can tell when you’ve just thrown together some documents versus having spent the time to create a great onboarding experience.

There are a number of forms that you’ll need to get from the candidate. Here are a few examples.

• Signed offer letter
• Tax forms, e.g. W-4s or W-9s
• Identification forms, e.g. I-9
• Payment forms, e.g. direct deposit
• Signed employment agreement
• Signed non-disclosure (NDA) / confidentiality agreement
• Signed non-compete agreement
• Policies and procedures employee handbook

Keep in mind that not all of these are legal in all states. For example, an NDA won’t hold up in California or New Jersey. Some states won’t let you mandate direct deposit. And, about a dozen states — like Utah, Georgia and South Carolina — require employers to use E-Verify.

Step 6: Hire Slow, Fire Without Surprises

In a study of over 5,000 hiring managers, Leadership IQ found that nearly half of new hires fail within 18 months. The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that the average cost of a bad hire is 30 percent of the employee’s first-year salary. The intangible costs, such as lost management focus and hits to morale, mean a bad hire is even more expensive than that. Here are a few tips to avoid costly bad hires.

Hire Slow

While there is pressure to fill an open position quickly, the cost of a bad hire is usually worse than the cost of waiting. A useful strategy is to not wait for an immediate need to look for candidates. Be on the lookout for good candidates over time so that you can hire without unnecessary time pressure.

Fire Without Surprises

It’s a common saying to “hire slow, fire fast.” While it is important to terminate a bad employee soon after you determine that things aren’t working out, you also don’t want the termination to come as a surprise. That can tarnish your employer brand and reputation. Here are some tips on terminations:

• As a general rule a firing should never be a surprise. Give troubled employees official written warnings well before you need to fire them.
• Before firing, create a final workout plan. A workout plan identifies areas that need improvement, details steps to be taken to improve, and specifies the time allowed for improvements to be made. If employees are having personal problems, an Employee Assistance Program (EAP) can help.
• If the workout plan doesn’t work out, terminate as soon as that is apparent and make sure you document the reasons for the termination.

Here are a few tools that will help you get through firing an employee:

• Guide on terminating employees
• Termination letter template
• Severance agreement template
• Exit interviews
• How to avoid being sued for wrongful termination

Step 7: Develop Employee Retention Strategies

When you take into account hiring and new employee training costs, retaining good employees is the most profitable way to keep your business well staffed.

Give Employees Good Feedback

Everyone likes to know where they stand. Employees value getting and providing personalized feedback on their strengths and areas in need of improvement. A strong performance management process or annual 360 performance reviews will help them feel more secure and happier in the long run. This will lead to them staying longer.

Performance management software makes it easier for you to keep tabs on performance.

Make Sure They’re Well Trained

Employees value relevant, high-quality training. It increases their chances for success and shows that you care about their professional growth. And some training requirements are mandated at the state level, such as anti-discrimination training in New York and Delaware.

The key steps for successful training include:

• Don’t just train on hard skills. Help new employees acclimate to your small business’ culture and norms. This is especially important in areas such as customer service roles.
• Leverage mentors and cohorts. New employees learn best when they have others in the organization they can turn to for tips and help.
• Training needs to be a continuous process, not just something you offer in the first few months. Design it as a career-long process.
• Have a regular check-in mechanism. Make sure you or your HR folks follow up with new employees on a periodic basis to make sure they are doing well and are happy.

Make Sure Employees Know They’re Appreciated

One thing that can demotivate employees is not being appreciated for their hard work. Have a program that provides employee recognition when appropriate. This could be personal recognition directly to the employee or, even better, recognition that’s visible to the entire company, like during a holiday party.

Make Sure Employees are Engaged and Motivated

A more engaged employee is a happier employee. Have an explicit program to make sure employees are engaged and motivated. This could range from learning opportunities for growth to culture-building team events.

Bottom Line: How to Hire Employees & Keep Them

Here’s a recap on the 7 steps to hiring and keeping great employees:

1. Be the employer people want to work for
2. Describe the successful person, not job applicant
3. Get the word out in the right way
4. Filter candidates to find the best
5. Set up an efficient onboarding process
6. Hire slow, fire without surprises
7. Develop employee retention strategies

Casting a wide net is an important part of finding the right candidates for your positions. Freshteam makes it easy to post to multiple job boards and comes with over 50 job description templates to help you get started. You can also collaborate with your hiring team and engage with candidates, all from one dashboard. Sign up for free today.

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