For many, the start of a new year symbolizes the chance to start anew, introducing new ideas or strategies to improve upon some part of your life or your business. If you’re thinking about what resolutions to make for your small business in the coming year, consider the challenges you faced this past year, and ask yourself how you can turn them into opportunities in 2019. Below are a five suggested resolutions to help make 2019 the best year ever for your small business.
Resolution #1: Create a Robust ERP
Employee referrals continue to be one of the best ways to recruit quality hires for companies. If you’re struggling to find quality employees to fill positions (like half of the companies out there, according to CareerBuilder research), your employees could be the key to unlocking those hidden gems. If you don’t have an employee referral program in place, there’s no time like the present to build one.
Resolution #2: Focus on the Candidate Experience
If you’ve been seeing a lot of candidate drop-off or you feel like it’s taking longer to fill positions lately, it might be worth looking into the type of experience you’re providing candidates. According to a recent survey from CareerBuilder and Silkroad, 68 percent of workers believe the way companies treat their job candidates is a reflection of they treat their employees. Make it a priority in 2019 to keep consistent communication with candidates (82 percent of job seekers expect employers to provide a clear timeline of the hiring process and keep them updated), and streamline your application process as much as possible to prevent application drop-off.
Resolution #3: Go Mobile
If you want to create a better candidate experience, keep in mind that more and more job seekers today are searching for and applying to jobs from their smartphones or tablets. According to the same CareerBuilder survey, 43 percent of job seekers have applied to a job from a mobile device, and 21 percent of candidates using a smartphone will abandon the application if it takes longer than two or three pages. While it may technically be possible to search for jobs or even apply from your mobile site, it might be an extremely frustrating experience if you’re constantly adjusting the screen size or waiting for pages to load. Find out for yourself by going on your site from a mobile device, and see what applicants see. If you find the experience leaves much to be desire, put your energy into optimizing your career site and application process for mobile devices in 2019. You might just see your applications increase as a result.
Resolution #4: Embrace AI
If you think artificial intelligence (AI) is best left to big tech companies like Apple or Google, think again. More and more companies of all sizes are using AI in every aspect of their business - including recruitment. AI-enabled recruitment technology has been shown to help small business employers find better candidates faster, increase the efficiency of their hiring process and improve the candidate experience (see resolution no. 2, above).
Resolution #5: Make Retention Your Intention
Don’t get so caught up in recruiting top performers that you ignore the ones you already have. Reaching almost 20 percent at one point, workplace turnover hit an all-time high this year, according to a recent report. If you’ve seen or anticipate an increase in turnover, stay interviews can give you insight into why employees are leaving and what you can do about it. Because employees often leave for better pay, you may need to consider increasing salaries or offering cash bonuses to entice employees to stay in 2019. While that may be a tough pill to swallow, consider the fact that it costs about $15,000 to replace one worker earning a median salary. The investment you make to retain employees now will pay off in the long-run.
Is hiring good people on your list of 2019 resolutions? Let us help.
