Helping to tackle the recruitment challenge

Jobtrain is a business that provides recruitment and hiring software for small businesses right up to large enterprise employers, and who have announced a new partnership with the Pizza Pasta & Italian Food Association to provide an all-new job advertising portal and careers site for 2023.

New Membership Benefit

This new solution will enable all members to post their jobs online to reach and attract candidates to apply for their jobs. Jobtrain’s software tools work by helping to reduce time-to-hire and administration, providing access to free job advertising, reducing reliance on expensive recruitment agencies and by providing a full online solution to manage hiring seamlessly.

In addition, for members who might be interested in using Jobtrain’s full online recruitment software platform, they are ordering an exclusive 15% discount on all their annual fees too, and are looking forward to sharing their 20 years of knowledge and insight on all matters relating to recruitment with members.

MANAGING RECRUITMENT - HINTS AND TIPS FOR SMALL AND MEDIUM BUSINESSES

“Running a small business enterprise (SME) can be a challenging experience. You need to be an expert on your product/service, on nance, on management and leadership, on networking etc.,” says Giles Heckstall-Smith, Jobtrain’s director of strategic development (pictured above right).

“Against that backdrop, having to manage recruitment is sometimes seen as a necessary evil - it needs to be done, it provides the lifeblood of your company – but no-one actually likes having to nd candidates and manage the process and in today’s climate this can be a huge challenge too! Here are some of my tips for taking some of the pain out of hiring.”

Define what you’re looking for in your candidates and engage them with your advert

I know it sounds obvious, but it really is important to write down what you see this person doing. What is the problem that you have and why do you need to hire someone?

The temptation is to think “I’ll know it when I see it”, but you won’t attract the right people to sit in front of you if you don’t frame the job correctly in the first instance.

What’s important here is to allow your own passion, your own culture to frame the description of the job you want to ll. You probably noticed there that I deliberately avoided using the term ‘job description’ as that has connotations of boring, dry and overly factual detail. What many job descriptions fail to do is to provide context.

Where do I find candidates

Speaking with many SMEs, I am always surprised at just how much they are prepared to spend on advertising and on agencies.

In the research Jobtrain conducted, amongst a wide range of SMEs we found that a typical spend of £80,000 per annum was the norm (split between agency fees and recruitment advertising).

Now, for some specialist roles that can be hard to fill, there is no doubt a place for agencies. However, they should not be a rst resort for many positions.

Where do I advertise my jobs?

In the UK there are a number of job boards that dominate the marketplace – Indeed, reed.co.uk, Totaljobs, and CV Library are four of the largest job boards.

There are many hundreds (possibly thousands) of others but unless you are looking at niche or very sector specific roles then these three probably serve most purposes.

But what you may not know is that there are a number of sites where you can post your jobs for free, including Google and Indeed, the world’s largest job board! Jobtrain’s recruitment software, for instance, enables you to post all your jobs to these sites with a single click and no adverting fees!

Top tips for interviewing

There is no right or wrong answer to the first bit of interviewing – do you screen people over the phone? Do you interview via Zoom or Teams? Do you conduct face to face interviews? There are benefits in each and you need to decide which is right for you.

Speed is important!

With more vacancies than applicants right now, speed really is of the essence, so engage with candidates quickly!

Phone interviews can save a lot of time if you have a clear requirement and you feel you can assess people in a five to ten minute conversation. This may involve asking them some questions about

their experience, their understanding of your business and the role they have applied for, or what their ambitions are? The important thing is to contact candidates quickly and let them know you are interested in their application! And let anyone that hasn’t been successful know too – recruitment software can automate this for you.

Take control of your own hiring and reduce reliance on agencies

At the start of this article, I shared the costs that SMEs were incurring in their recruitment activity (£80,000 per annum). That excludes the admin costs of managing all the queries, the interview arrangements, the offers and the rejections etc.

For an investment at a fraction of the price you can have your own recruitment solution in place in just a matter of days with solutions such as our JTGO and Jobtrain applications.

Improving productivity is a goal that all sectors are striving to achieve and using systems like Jobtrain and JTGO can help to remove a huge time burden whilst delivering the tools to help you manage recruitment for yourself.

To nd out more, visit jobtrain.co.uk/bsa