SME recruitment techniques can save time, money and get you top talent.
How to rock SME recruitment
Small companies often struggle unnecessarily to hire good talent, the truth is they can compete with large companies and in fact have advantages over them. SME recruitment (small and medium enterprise) is best done by using the myriad resources that correspond with your industry to spearhead the right talent instead of casting a wider net and hoping for a dolphin among the minnows.
In short, then, SME recruitment means thinking carefully and using online resources well. When hiring for a vacancy, reach and process are key. Reach is handled well through online recruitment services, while process is tackled mainly by a web-based software like an ATS.
Fully utilise online resources
Online resources are key, especially for search (publishing and reach), where one can post adverts through websites like ZipRecruiter (a multi-publisher) to over 200 job boards by posting on their system once. Yet, even with a few good job portals, your costs are far below that of a recruitment company’s fees and you have pretty much the same reach. Unlike the property industry, for SME recruitment, online publishing and reach has taken over print by far, making it almost obsolete.
One thing overlooked by most new companies is to use an ATS from the start. Saving CVs in your inbox is not the way to go about things. Many ATSs are web-based SaaS offerings that have very minimal entry requirements and allow almost anyone to start recruiting right away. Later, when you need to search through your database, the ATS gives you much more flexibility to re-activate candidates that are still interested in working for your (now bigger) company.
Choose software that scales
Certain ATSs allow SME recruitment to flourish, since as the company grows, so does the ATS. Some ATS software has levels of usage (e.g. store up to 1000 CVs) that small and medium sized startups can use and even discard later if they migrate to a new system.
SMEs can easily recruit if they use online recruitment resources and the right methods to search for and qualify candidates. This allows them more time to spend on interviews and references, improving the quality of hire and improving things such as onboarding.
The way that small and medium sized companies recruit. In other words, SME recruitment tactics are not rocket science, but simply a way of operating that doesn’t easily work for large corporates, but does for smaller firms that can manoeuvre swiftly and benefit from technology aiding recruitment.
