Hiring: 5 New Year's resolutions every business should make

As the new year approaches, business leaders everywhere are looking back on 2017 to see what they've learned. If you're not completely satisfied with your current hiring process, consider these five tips:

1. Become a digital thought leader

It's a good exercise to assess how your company is viewed online. Is it easy for job seekers to find information about your business, or would it take Sherlock Holmes a week to find useful data about opportunities at your company?

One way to step up your online presence is to start a business blog to share your company's ideas with the world at large. Think about it: If you were trying to learn about digital marketing, you'd likely turn to Google, a world leader in the field. And if you did, you'd find tons of valuable insights. How can you emulate that kind of robust online presence in regard to your industry?

If you don't want to maintain a blog, there are many other ways to engage online communities, such as posting how-to videos, writing one-off pieces and publishing them on LinkedIn, curating content on your Twitter page and much more.

2. Assess your benefits packages

Open any newspaper and you're bound to see a number of stories about health insurance. Today's job seekers want not only adequate compensation, but also good benefits packages. In fact, many job seekers may be willing to take a job with lower pay in exchange for better health benefits. According to insurance provider Aflac, 63 percent of employees said benefits packages are extremely or very important to their job satisfaction, with 56 percent saying they would accept a position with lower pay but better benefits.

3. Take another look at your job descriptions

Do your job descriptions accurately reflect the responsibilities of the positions they describe? One of the first steps to reducing employee turnover is to ensure new hires are a good fit for the job. And that means your descriptions shouldn't pull any punches. If you try to make a job sound easier than it really is, you increase the chances of employees getting frustrated and overwhelmed. When they quit, you have to start the search all over again, doubling your resource cost.

If you decide to rewrite your job descriptions for the new year, run them by your staff members to ensure they accurately represent the position.

4. Use data to identify useful KPIs

Do you track employment metrics such as cost-per-hire and time-to-turnover? If not, analytic data can help you implement process changes in a more effective manner. With robust analytic reports, you can track where your best hires come from, how long it takes to find them and how much it costs to do so.

As you optimize your hiring process, these key performance indicators will be invaluable. Rather than just guessing at which recruitment tactics work best for your business, you'll have real, actionable data to draw from. Then, every time you make a process change, you'll see how it compares to previous endeavors.

5. Treat job seekers like customers

By resolving to give job seekers the same attention you give to customers, you can use knowledge you've gained in other aspects of the business to inform your hiring process. For example, what if you applied your customer engagement tactics to your talent resource pool? The tasks of engaging customers and attracting new hires aren't that dissimilar. The lessons you learn from one discipline can easily transfer to the other.

"Top candidates typically have multiple companies knocking on their doors (and are receiving offers simultaneously), so initially focus on discovering if s/he is a good fit for the role and company, but then incorporate what the daily to-do's and challenges look like," says Trish Breen, Business Development Manager for Beacon Hill's Technologies Division in Pittsburgh. "As the interview progresses, if you believe you are talking to a top contender, be sure to sell him/her on why they should work for you!"

To learn more about how to optimize your hiring process for the new year, visit BeaconHillStaffing.com today.

This content is brought to you by the Marketing Team at Beacon Hill Staffing Group.