Episode 3: 10 Tips to Hiring Employees Right Now

One of the most common struggles Franchisees and small business owners are facing right now is finding employees. Many believe the increase in unemployment benefits is the cause – but what if they’re wrong? Candidates are learning to value themselves in a different way, so employers may need to attract them in a different way. Of course, in any environment, we don’t just want to find an employee, we want to find the right employee, which requires an employment search based on strategy. Here are 10 tips to set you apart from the competition and connect with employment candidates that want to work for someone just like you. Use these tactics to enhance your employment search process so that you can fill your roster with the rock stars that are ready, willing and able to take your company to the next level.

• Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts
• Listen to this episode on Spotify

Resources mentioned during the show:

• Upwork: www.upwork.com
• Fiverr: www.fiverr.com
• Indeed Job Postings: www.indeed.com
• Handshake (college career centers): www.joinhandshake.com
• Local Facebook Community Groups
• Local Chambers of Commerce

Welcome to the Infinite Franchisee show where every franchisee meets infinite possibilities. Here, you will discover the executive level strategies needed to overcome the overwhelm concentrate on explosive growth activities and capture the life of your dreams with me, April Porter, I am an attorney, a former award winning multi unit franchisee, and a number one international best selling author on a mission to help franchisees achieve infinite success.

Welcome, everyone! Thank you so much for choosing to spend your time with me here at the Infinite Franchisee show. I'm very excited to be spending my time with you and talking about the 10 tips to hire employees right now, and we're gonna dive right in with number one. If you have current team members, then ask them if they would like more hours from you, you never know a person's situation, they might be looking for a little extra cash. Or if they're part time with you, they may actually be looking to leave their full time position and go full time somewhere else. In which case, if you need another part time employee, maybe you could take this person on full time. Also, just because they're working with you in one capacity doesn't mean they don't have skills in another capacity. So if you're looking for a new position, you may ask your current team members, if anyone has interest in that position, if anybody has interest in learning those skills, or possibly can already bring those skills to the table. And because they're working in another capacity in your business, you may not know about that. So always going to your team first is a great place to start because you have people who already know you who may already be invested in your company and wanting an opportunity for advancement or to take another step with you in your company. 

Number two is to ask your team for referrals. If you have really great team members that you would like to duplicate, guess what, they likely have friends and family that have similar values as them and similar work ethic. Usually we surround ourselves with people who are positive influences in our lives. And so they may have friends and family that they could refer to for an employment position. You could even offer a bonus for anyone who gives you an employment referral. So you could tell your team, if you refer someone to interview with us, and we ended up hiring them and they stay on for at least 60, 90 days, you will get a referral bonus of 200 bucks, something that is very incentivizing so that they're out there really racking their brains and thinking about who could be a great employee for you. You could even offer this referral bonus to the public or to your client list as well. 

Number three, consider using a freelancer. So with the pandemic, there were a lot of positive changes that came out in the workforce. And one of those is that many people realize their talents could be put to great use by helping the world instead of just helping a single company. So there's many freelancers out there right now specializing in different areas that could be of interest to you. The nice thing about freelancers is you can get somebody who's very, very skilled in a very specific area. And you may only need them for a single project, or for just a couple hours a week. And instead of hiring an entire employee for either a part time or full time position where their job description includes that specific skill, you could hire someone highly skilled in that area for just a couple of hours, and get a great work product out of it. And probably spend less. So right now, freelancers are an awesome option, not just to fill a potential need in your business long term, but also to bridge the gap while you're searching for that perfect employee. You could be using the freelancer to get you over the hump. So a great place to find some freelancers is on Upwork and Fiverr. Those are two sites and there's a few more out there but I think those are the top two, where freelancers are advertising their services. 

Number four, you want to revamp your job descriptions. All too often companies out there are using a boilerplate standard job description where it just lists out the features of the job like:  “in this job you will need to make sales”, “you will need to clean the store”, “you will need to you know do have proficiency with Microsoft Word”, - Whatever those bullet pointed job description pieces are, and then usually it goes to the bullet points of the candidate you're looking for. The candidate will be highly organized, self motivated. It's a very boring job description - but more importantly, it looks like every other job description out there. And it's all about the company, it's all about the needs of the company, this is what WE need - we, we ,we. You want to flip that job description on its head. And instead of focusing on the features of the company, you want to focus on the benefits to the future employee. And by benefit, I don't mean, human resources benefits. I don't mean vacation time, insurance, those types of benefits. I mean, quality of life benefits. Why? Why does someone want to work for your company? What will they be able to achieve in their lives? By working for your company? Are you offering training that they could use to enhance their careers long term? Are you offering a great work schedule that lets them pick their kids up from school? Are you offering room for advancement so that they can grow with your company? Are you offering a job after graduation, if you are trying to attract college students, these are things that set you apart from your competition, because they're showing how someone coming to work for you what their future looks like, instead of just what their job standing or sitting in your office looks like. 

Number five, when you title your job description, title it based upon the way that people will be searching for a job. So if you have a job that includes some administrative tasks, some sales tasks, and maybe some product execution tasks, like showing a customer how to use your product or service, then you might use the same job description, but post it multiple times using different headers, different titles. So instead of just saying, you know, “customer service support” for that position, in one job description, you might call it a “sales job”. And another job description, you might call it “customer support”. And another job description, you may call it “trainer”. This way, if someone is searching for a training position, they see that job, whereas if it's customer service support, they may never have seen that job, so you want to be titling it in a way where people are actually going to find the people that you want, you want the people with the sales skills to find that job, not just people with customer support skills. 

Number six, you're going to post this job description everywhere. And often. When I say everywhere, yes, you're going to post it on Indeed, and the social media sites, but keep in mind that people are so inundated with information from social media sites, their attention span is like three seconds. So you can't just post it once and think that you're going to get your perfect employee out of it, you have to post it often on both your personal and business pages. But take it one step further. Join community groups in your area, and post in those community groups. Even if you're an online business, who serves the entire country, still post in your local community groups, because those are very easy for people to tag other people that they know who would be a good fit for that job. It's also very easy for people to know your reputation within those groups. And so you may have people who can say, “Oh, this is a great company”, or “I know so and so personally, I know the business owner personally and they're awesome, they will be great to work for”. You could use your network, such as Chamber of Commerce, and your networking groups to even comment. Ask your friends in your networking to comment on those posts and say things like that. And don't leave out those Chamber of Commerce Facebook groups post on those as well. 

Number seven, you want to create a handshake account and you want to post your jobs there. Handshake is the platform that colleges are now using to advertise job openings to their students to college students. This is where college students will find internships and also jobs. Now there are some tricks to getting you an approved account on a Handshake and getting your job descriptions seem you want to be extraordinarily descriptive when you're writing up your account. And when you're writing up your job descriptions. They actually review your company and have to approve you to get placed on handshake. And what they're looking for are jobs that are not trying to take advantage of just the labor of college students but jobs that are going to give college students experiences that are going to enhance their careers long term. So you want to add in your job descriptions how this will benefit the college student post graduation, whether there's a post graduation, full time employment opportunity that could come from this work. In addition, a great tip is to call the Career Services offices in advance of making an application to join Handshake. And talking to someone in career services about your company and about how you want to develop your employees. Then what they can do is look for your application as it comes through and get you approved more quickly. 

Number eight, you want to pay attention to your experience as a customer, and recruit from there. What I mean is when you walk in for your morning coffee, if you are greeted by a sunshiny attitude, and an efficient work ethic, then you want to know what the person's goals are. “Who is the barista?” You want to ask that person - “Are you in school?”, “What are you studying?”, “Is this your full time job?”. Start to build a rapport with that person. You could even decide to go in for coffee multiple days in a row when you wouldn't actually do it. Maybe you're I get a specialty coffee one day a week person. But you might ask this person “Oh, what are you working next?” Okay, well, I'll be in tomorrow, I'll see you then.”. Maybe if you didn't intend to go in tomorrow, well, now you are because you want to start building rapport to that person so that you can recruit them to your company. That doesn't mean they have to quit this barista job, or whatever job they have, they could just come and work for both of you. Or maybe you're offering a better opportunity. And people are looking for better opportunities. So don't be shy in asking if that person is looking for a better opportunity.

Number nine, make a list of your current contacts that you would love to have as an employee. This includes clients, and anyone in your networking sphere. Don't just assume because someone's a business owner that they are happy being a business owner, they may be ready to move on back into an employee position, or they could be secretly selling their business. And you may not know about it, they may be wanting to retire, but not give up working completely and they're ready to take on a few hours with you. So make a list of those current contacts that if you could have them as an employee, you absolutely would, and then have some conversations with them about if they would ever consider working for you. If the answer's no, you lose nothing. And they receive a huge compliment. It is very flattering for someone to approach you and say, Hey, based on our experiences together, I appreciate you. And I acknowledge and respect how talented you are. And because of that, I would love to have you on my team. Doesn't that feel good? Would that feel good if somebody came and said it to you, even if you didn't have any intention of abandoning your business, so there is no harm in asking. 

And number ten, consider job sharing. This can be a really effective way, particularly for franchisees to get employees. A lot of franchises use entry level part time positions. And sometimes that can be a barrier to hiring a really awesome employee who is looking for full time hours, what you can do is partner up with another local franchisee in your brand, and hire that person, each location part time giving them full time hours, they get to do the same job at both locations, receive full time hours and learn the business and then as a full time position opens up, they might be able to slide into that at one or the other location. Now when you're doing this, you do need to work it out in detail with the other business owner just so everything seems on the up and up and no one has any bad experiences. But all you have to do is work it out as to schedule and make sure that the pay is consistent across both locations. And then you have a perfect situation for job sharing. 

I'm going to give you a bonus one too - this is something you can do to make yourself stand out from the competition -  which is to get a little creative with your job benefits. So not every franchise is able to offer health insurance, vacation time, 401 K's, things of that nature. And a lot of times people looking for entry level jobs, they aren't expecting that. But they will be looking for a company that's offering some kind of benefits particularly when comparing working for you with your competition or with others in the entry level fields. So a great way to do this is to partner up with other small business owners, and provide free benefits for their employees so that they can provide free benefits for yours. Let me give you a couple of examples. You could partner up, If you're a gym, you could partner up with a chiropractor or a massage therapist, you could provide free gym memberships for the chiropractor, or massage therapist, and they can provide free massages for your employees. Now they get to advertise the benefit of free membership with employment free gym membership with employment, you get to advertise free full body massages with employment. So you can do this across all the boards. You could partner up with someone - If you're a gym, you could partner up with a business that has with a food business and you could offer one free lunch a month, and they could get three free workouts a month, you can get really, really creative so that you have a list of unique benefits that your competition doesn't have. 

Those are the 10 tips to hiring employees right now plus your bonus. I hope that this helps you go out and find the stellar employees immediately. Let us know how this list has impacted the way you think about finding employees. And definitely let us know when you find that amazing employee based on some of the tips we gave you. And you can connect with us here or on Facebook, Instagram, tik, Tok, Twitter, LinkedIn, and clubhouse. So until next time, I hope you have an infinitely fantastic day. Do you love the infinite franchisee show? I'd love to hear from you. Take 60 seconds and leave a review of the podcast on iTunes or wherever you listen. It is such a small thing that can help so many other franchisees and entrepreneurs find us and then they can discover infinite possibilities too. Thanks for tuning in today. Until next time, remember, there are infinite opportunities to grow your business and reach the sanity, wealth and gratitude you deserve. So don't ever settle for anything less than infinite success.