Hiring the right people can be challenging, especially if you’re in a rush to get extra help for the busy season. With the summer season soon approaching and the increased demand for products and services due to the nation having spent the last few months in lockdown, it's not surprising that many businesses are feeling the pressure when it comes to hiring new stuff head of the busy period.
Reader our 6 top tips for finding the best short term employees in a time-efficient manner.
1. Word Of Mouth Recommendations. If you’re in a time crunch to find the right seasonal hires one of the best things you can do is as your current employees, friends and family for word of mouth recommendations. Typically you can depend on these hires as being more reliable as the person you ask for recommendation will only suggest someone they feel will reflect well on them. After all, you wouldn't suggest someone for a role if you knew they would be incredibly incompetent since your reputation is partially on the line. Word of mouth recommendations is a powerful tool for a variety of decision-making tasks so it's a natural link to use this avenue when looking for new staff members.
2. Reach out to your current loyal customers. If you have a regular newsletter, see your customers in person or are active on social media you can reach out to your customer database to see if anyone is interested in taking on a part-time role. Hiring customers that love your business is a guaranteed way of finding staff members who actually like the service or product you provide.
3. Go through the CVs you keep on file. Chances are you've had a least a few CVs emailed, hand-delivered or posted to you over the past few months, spend some time digging them out and go through to see if anyone there has the right potential to join your team.
4. Be flexible on the type of people you hire. Having a diverse workforce should be something every business always aspires to have, diversity brings new creativity and mindsets to the job which are ultimately an asset to the team. During this need for quick hires, there is less time to be picky and more need to get someone into the role. Of course, they need to be able to do the job and have the correct skill set but leave all prejudice at the door before interviewing and you might find that your options for new staff massively increases.
5. Reduce the overall process of hiring staff done to only the essential steps. If you currently have a long procured in place for hiring staff such as a phone interview, then group interview followed by a 1:1 then you can definitely cut that process down to make it more time-effective and less stressful for everyone involved. Consider just having group interviews if that would be sufficient for you as this gives you the option to meet lots of potential candidates in one go rather than needing to block out a few days in your calendar for 1:1 interviews.
6. SOCIAL MEDIA! This is probably the most obvious on the list but we had to include it because social media really is one of the most powerful and free marketing tools that your business can get access to. The way you use social media is important but if you are already up and running on several accounts creating a job availability post that is public for people to share and tag their friends in could be a very successful way of finding new employees that are capable of doing the role with minimal overhead cost.
Hopefully, these tips have given you some inspiration in order to make your seasonal hire period much less stressful than initially anticipated. As a bonus tip, we would like to remind you to get going as soon as possible. The sooner you start advertising the job role, looking over applications and meeting with potential candidates the more time you will actually have to spend on this process and therefore the less stressful it will be.
