[00:00:00] Fiona Johnston
If you're a small business owner who is trying to recruit staff at the moment, this episode is for you. I see so many business owners getting this wrong. Nobody cares about your business anywhere near as much as you do. You might find working in your small business to be the most amazingly exciting thing.
A candidate doesn't have that experience of you. When you are trying to recruit, you actually need to be selling your business to the candidate.
Money Secrets intro
Are you a small business owner who'd love to be making more money while making positive change in the world? You're in the right place, friend. Hi, I'm Fi Johnston, a chartered accountant and money coach obsessed with small business. In The Money Secrets Podcast, I share strategies that you can use to make more money without working harder. You'll hear successful small business owners share what they've learned about money and business, and I'll help you to think differently and shift your [00:01:00] perspectives about money so you can grow your business and your impact. My mission is to get more money into the hands of good business owners, like you.
Acknowledgement of Country
This podcast episode was recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation, and I'd like to acknowledge them as the traditional owners and custodians of this land and water that I live, work, and play on. I'd like to pay respects to elders both past and present, and note that sovereignty has never been ceded. This always was, and always will be, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land.
Fi
I'm Fi Johnston. I'm the host of The Money Secrets Podcast. I'm a chartered accountant, and I am freaking obsessed with small business. And if you don't know me already, I am somebody who can help you make more money, pay yourself more, grow your business without working harder, and doing [00:02:00] it ethically. So now into the episode.
You are a small business owner who is trying to recruit staff. Okay. I see so many business owners getting this wrong. Let's explain why. First of all, nobody cares about your business anywhere near as much as you do. So whilst you might find working in your small business to be the most amazingly exciting, you know, exhilarating thing, a candidate coming to look for a job with you doesn't actually have that experience of you.
So when you are trying to recruit, you actually need to be selling your business to the candidate. Now, this is showing my age. I'm definitely Gen X. In my day, back in my day, um, when you were going for a, a, a job interview, it was actually your job to sell yourself to the boss But [00:03:00] things have changed pretty dramatically in the last 20, 30 years, and candidates actually have a lot more choice of work, and they're looking for something more than perhaps you were looking for the last time that you applied for a job.
You might be a business owner who's been self-employed for 10, 15, 20, 30 years. So it can be easy to think about your business as being the most exciting, awesome, great place to work. But from the candidate's perspective, you are one role in a sea of roles. Okay? So we need to think about, how am I actually putting myself out there as an employer?
Now, there's quite a few things that we can do to make ourselves more appealing to a candidate. The first thing is to talk about being an employer in your branding. So you might wanna start... If you already have team members, you might wanna start including them in [00:04:00] your social media, or your LinkedIn, or on your website.
Now, that doesn't mean that you start including them without their permission. Of course, we need to have people's permission to share any stories about them. But you could even just be talking about, "Hey, I love working with my," insert job title person that works for you here, "and these are some of the things that she does in my business that make a really big difference to me."
Or you could talk about some of the wins that you've had together. Anything that you can do to showcase the fact that you are an employer and that you are an employer who cares about your team. It's also really great for your employees in a lot of cases because you are promoting or shining a spotlight on them within your organization, too.
So that's the first thing, is if you wanna find great staff, start making it really obvious from your external-facing [00:05:00] marketing that you are an employer and that you care about your team. Another thing that you can do is have a page on your website dedicated to careers. Now, that page is where you get to showcase, these are the values of our company.
These are the things that really matter to us. This is how we walk our own talk. So a lot of organizations will put forward that they have values of integrity, and respect, and trust, and it's like, cool, the first look at your Facebook comments is all I need to know that those things aren't actually happening in your business.
So are there ways that you can demonstrate not just the values that you have as a business and as an employer, but how you're actually living those out and how your employees get to experience those values in their every day? On that website page for careers, you might also showcase some of your other staff and what you've done together.[00:06:00]
You might share some of the perks about working for you that might be different from other employers that they're considering. Some of the, um, perks about working with a small business that I think a lot of us forget is that working in a small business gets you closer to the action. So that is a perk that your staff get is that if they were working in a really big organization, there's lots of perks there too, but getting to be close to the action, close to the decisions, close to what actually happens in that business strategically, that is one of the most underrated perks of working in a small business is just that proximity to the boss, the decisions, the strategy.
So that is a really big perk in a small business. You might also be able to offer things like flexibility, working from home, a nine-day fortnight, or whatever it is that works in your business. You might be able [00:07:00] to give them access to, uh, networking and training. You might be able to give them more direct access to working with clients.
They might be allowed to be part of the decision-making within your organization. You might be able to include them in discussions about the strategic direction of your business. They might be able to come up with new services, new offers. They might be able to bring their own clients into your business.
They might be able to design their own product range. So there are lots of perks that can happen inside a small business that big corporates just cannot do. So we've got this page on our website where we are explaining our values as an employer, the perks of working here, the kind of people that we're looking for, the opportunities that are here, and it's great to have a contact form on that page so that people can contact you if they find out about you, but there are no open roles.
Sometimes [00:08:00] some of the best candidates can come through those kind of open forms. Even if you're not looking for someone at that time, it can be great to go and meet with candidates and think about whether there might be a future role for them in your organization. The next thing that we need to do is to think about the actual job ad itself and the placement of that job ad.
So in the job ad, again, we need to be really selling the role to the candidate. Think about somebody searching for a role. They're on SEEK or one of the other platforms, and they're scrolling and scrolling through all of these different opportunities, so we need it to really stand out. This is where copywriting and really thinking about the words that you are using Is gonna help you to stand out to the right candidate.
So making sure that the title of the job is appealing, that you've [00:09:00] really talked about, like, what's in it for me in terms of the candidate. I see so many job ads where the whole thing is just about, "Here are your responsibilities and tasks. We expect you to have these qualifications and experience. You know, if you don't have attention to detail, please don't apply."
And it's like, cool, we can ask for all of those things as an employer, but what, what have we got to give? What are the reasons why we want a really great candidate to apply for our job, right? So really thinking about the job ad itself as being an ad for your business, because it is, right? So thinking about, am I selling this role to the person who's potentially going to apply?
Then there's the actual distribution of the job ad. So I actually think it can be a great idea to publicize that you are [00:10:00] recruiting on your active marketing channels. That might be Instagram, it might be LinkedIn, it might be your website, it might be your email or your EDM. So recruiting from within your existing community can be a great way of finding team members, and I think a lot of employers or potential employers forget that there could be an amazing person who's been buying your, you know, beautiful earrings for 10 years, and actually would be an amazing marketing manager in your business or whatever it is that you're recruiting for.
So make sure that when you're recruiting, you are telling your existing community about that. And then you also wanna really think about, am I actually investing some money into getting this job ad into the right places? So it is worth investing in Seek or LinkedIn or whatever the bigger platform is in your space.
Ethical Jobs can be a really great job platform too. [00:11:00] Um, we need to put money into this, because getting the right person and being able to get the best person you can for the role is gonna make a huge difference to your business. Okay? So we've thought about how to sort of brand yourself as an employer through your external channels.
We've thought about having a careers page on your website that you update as often as possible. We've thought about how we're writing the job ad so that it's actually appealing to a candidate, and then we've thought about where we are distributing that ad to. Now, you start to get candidates coming in.
This is where I think it's really interesting to have a process. Now, I'm not a recruiter as such, but I have helped- Many of my clients to recruit staff because I actually have a HR degree, which I sometimes forget about, but I have a whole degree in HR. But I also have been around small businesses for [00:12:00] 25 years, so I've done a lot of recruiting myself in, um, past roles.
I've recruited for my own business many times. And yeah, I s- I often help my bigger clients with recruitment when I'm the right fit to help them with that. So the process that I go through there is that we start by filtering. So we get our candidates coming in through whatever platform we're using, and we start filtering down.
We can let, you know, the ones that aren't suitable go, and then we wanna come down to a shortlist. Now, what some people do wrong here is they go straight to organizing an interview. I think that is a mistake.
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What I do instead is I pick, let's say, 10. Let's say I pick the top 10 candidates, and I offer all of them a phone call. That phone call is only 15 to 20 minutes, and we book it in so that they are prepared and they know that I'm calling.
I actually don't think it's a cool thing to [00:14:00] call somebody without any kind of warning because they don't actually know who you are until they answer the phone. They may be applying for multiple jobs at a time, and I actually think... Personally, I think it's great to plan when these phone calls are going to happen.
So say I've got 10 people in my shortlist that I'm going to call, and I try to ask pretty much the same questions on that call for each person, and I make a shit ton of notes. So what I'm trying to do there is I'm trying to sense check, is this person the right fit for this organization? Do they have the right salary expectations?
Are there any kind of peculiarities, like they can't work on Wednesdays or They're unable to work from the office, or, I don't know, they can only work two days a week and it's a full-time role, or whatever. I try to get those kind of questions out of the way, because by the time you get [00:15:00] somebody in for an interview, you're actually both investing a lot more time.
I don't like wasting anyone's time during the recruitment process. So let's say we've had our 10 phone calls, and now I wanna try to cut it down to maybe three or four applicants and no more for an in-person interview. Right? So this might be where you bring a second person into the mix. Uh, by the way, if you're one of my clients, I am always happy to be involved in this with you.
So this might be where you get a second person involved, maybe another team member, maybe your business coach or somebody who knows your business might be when, uh, somebody that you bring into that first interview. Or you might decide to interview three or four people yourself for a first go. And again, you want to be trying to ask similar questions so that you can get a feel for, you know, how can I actually compare these candidates?
Because essentially [00:16:00] that is what we are doing when we're recruiting. We're looking at a bunch of skills and experience, personality, and kind of that sort of je ne sais quoi, the indescribable kind of essence of what a person feels like to be around and how they communicate and, and, and those sorts of things.
So we wanna have that first round of in-person interviews, and we wanna try to be able to compare apples to apples. Once we've gone through that, sometimes there's already an absolute standout candidate, and if that's the case, awesome. You have just won the recruitment lottery, and you should hire that person.
Often, though, we might find that there's two people who are... it's really hard to differentiate between them. You kinda wanna hire both of them, and that's when you need to do a second round interview, and that's even more of a reason to bring an extra person into that process. So once we've decided [00:17:00] on who it is that we wanna hire, we make an offer, we get the sort of paperwork in process.
Hopefully, you already have employment contracts, and if not, please go and get employment contracts. And make sure that from that point on, you actually really think about how to onboard that person into your organization as well as possible. One of the things that's usually missing during that onboarding process is context.
You may have been in your business for five, 10, 15, 50 years. That person who is coming to start working for you does not have any of that context. So you kind of need to overexplain things in order to be able to get that context through about- How you do things, why you do things a certain way. Here are the processes.
Here's where to go to look for this information, et cetera, et cetera. So the onboarding process is just as important as everything that happened before that. So I don't want [00:18:00] to take this episode into an hour-long conversation about what to do with that person next, but if you like the idea of that, please let me know.
You can send an email anytime to hello@peachbm.com.au and let me know if you want me to do more content around how to onboard and get the most from your team, because it's something that I actually spend a lot of time with my clients talking about. But back to this recruitment process, and I wanna go back through these steps, and then I wanna make another point about what we are missing when we are trying to recruit people into our business.
So the first thing is we've thought about how we are positioning ourselves as an employer externally. We've thought about having a page on our website where we talk about ourselves as an employer and we talk about the perks and the benefits and the values and how they, how those values show up in the workplace on that page.
We have then written an [00:19:00] amazing job ad which really thinks about it from the perspective of the candidate, not just from your perspective about what is on your wish list. We've thought about how to distribute that job ad. We've thought about how to filter that job, those candidates down. We always start with a phone call rather than straight to an in-person meeting because honestly, you can cut so many unsuitable candidates just in a quick call, and that's better for the candidates and for you.
Nobody wants to have their time wasted. And then once we have made the decision about the candidate and we are getting them started, we really need to think about how are we gonna give this person as much context, as much training, as many kind of ways to embed themselves into the role as possible. But if we go right back to the start of recruiting for a new person, what is missing for so many business owners [00:20:00] is a strong brand.
When you have a really strong brand as a consumer brand or as a business-to-business brand, it makes recruiting so much easier. Uh, for example, one of my clients, Mount Zero Olives, who I've worked with for a really long time and I help with quite a bit of their recruitment, they have an amazing brand.
They're very well known as a really high quality food brand. So when we recruit, we get amazing applicants. So this is just another way to think about the importance of your external facing brand. If you are a consumer facing brand- Have you actually thought about what you look like from an external perspective?
Are you actually attractive as an employer? Are there people in your community already who may actually love working with you and might be amazing employees, [00:21:00] but you're not presenting yourself with that kind of air about you like you are somebody who is a great employer and somebody who is always looking for great talent?
So yeah, I'm sure the brand strategists listening to me will love me talking about the fact that having a really strong brand has incredible benefits when you are trying to recruit for any role in your business. I hope you found this exploration of trying to find your next employee useful. I will see you in the next episode.
Outro
Thank you so much for listening right up to the end. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Money Secrets, where we talk about the money secrets of successful small business owners. If you enjoyed the episode, I'd love it if you'd subscribe to the podcast, then leave us a review or share this episode with one of your friends.
I hope you learned something. I hope you got a new perspective, and I really hope you enjoyed the listening [00:22:00] experience.
