Three ways to recruit good employees for your small business

If you’re like most small-business owners, finding and retaining great workers can be tough. The labor market remains tight. Unemployment is still at historically low levels and immigration enforcement is restricting the pool of available workers.

This week, human resources firm (and my client) Paychex released its monthly Small Business Employment Watch, which found that even as the supply of workers contracts, small-business hiring remained steady.

“Our latest employment data once again underscore the stability and resilience of the small-business labor market,” said John Gibson, Paychex president and CEO. “Although job growth has remained flat over the last year, the continued decline in wage inflation should create a more favorable environment for small-business owners seeking to hire and compete for talent.”

So where’s the best place to find new employees? Here are the three most popular among my clients.

Sites like Indeed, Monster, and Career Builder continue to be popular. But a growing number of social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and even X (formerly Twitter) are becoming go-to places to find talent as well, thanks to their reach, better branding tools, and overall lower costs.

More employers are migrating to these resources, with 98% using social media for hiring and employer branding, and another 65% having dedicated social channels for recruitment, according to one recent study.

“LinkedIn has become an essential tool for our company when sourcing and researching candidates throughout the hiring process,” said Kristen Wik, chief people officer at Centri business consulting, a finance and accounting consulting firm based in Philadelphia. “We see social media as a powerful platform to showcase our unique workplace culture, which helps make our company stand out to prospective team members.”

Anthony J. Biondo Jr., the founder and CEO of Biondo Creative, a marketing agency in Yardley, said social platforms like LinkedIn deliver “higher-quality candidates than Indeed and other recruitment sites.” He has shifted most of his search toward LinkedIn and other social sites, concluding that social media in general is a lower-cost, higher-return hiring tool for his business.

“Facebook works particularly well for shares and engagement, and experimenting with other platforms like X/Twitter Jobs is also part of my strategy,” he said. “I push jobs out on social media across all of our platforms because there is little cost to do it.”

Online job sites and social platforms are good for finding candidates, but these are generally “cold” leads. Getting a referral from an existing employee can provide a much better candidate who may be a better long-term fit for your company.

According to one recent study, over 45% of employees referred by colleagues stay for more than four years at a company, while only 25% of employees sourced through job boards stay longer than two years. The same study found that referrals were favored by 82% of employers for yielding the best return on investment.

“One of the most effective tools we’ve discovered is leveraging the networks of our current team members,” Wik said. “Their connections often include highly talented individuals.”

Biondo agrees. “Employee referrals provide the strongest candidates,” he said.

Tricia Wyatt, an associate partner at Bridgeforce LLC, a financial services provider based in Chadds Ford, shares her applicant tracking system with employees to help drive referrals.

“It’s important to find candidates whose values align with our company culture, and our existing employees best understand what that is,” she said.

For businesses looking for skilled hourly workers, technical, vocational, and many high schools have become a popular resource.

According to a recent Wall Street Journal report, schools like Father Judge High School offer welding classes that prepare their graduates to do work in industries ranging from local transit to building submarines.

“I’m not looking to hire the guy I used to have 20 years ago,” Bob Walker, founder of Global Affinity in Bristol, told the Journal. Walker’s equipment is “highly advanced” and “needs tech-savvy workers to operate it.”

Biondo’s firm says that partnerships with technical schools can provide a regular source of interns who can then turn into potential employees.

“Though we’re generally not yet using these schools for full-time hires, they’re becoming a more legitimate path for future talent,” he said.

There’s no one place where employers find employees. Generally diversity in where you search will yield the best results.

Wyatt admits that being a small company, she doesn’t have a dedicated recruiter or talent acquisition team, so she has to look in as many places as possible herself.

“When we have an opening, we need to find talent quickly in a cost-efficient manner,” she said. “We go between LinkedIn, Indeed, and our referral network as all three have provided good candidates cost effectively.”

Wik agrees.

“Use a multichannel approach,” Wik said. “Talent is diverse, so relying on multiple sources is crucial.”