Small-business Advice: Tackling Tricky Hiring Issues

One of the best parts of building a company is hiring great people so that your business can benefit from their skills, their ideas and their enthusiasm.

But as Merrin Muxlow has pointed out over at the Resource Nation blog, recruiting new employees involves a host of tricky legal and ethical issues, including background checks and employment law compliance.

Maxlow makes useful recommendations about getting an applicant’s consent before running a background check, being careful about accessing an applicant’s social media profiles, knowing all the applicable anti-discrimination laws (federal, state and local) that apply to hiring procedures, and taking the time to verify necessary licenses, credentials and employment eligibility. Maxlow suggests that E-Verify can prove useful for this last task.

Need more advice before bringing a new hire on board? Guidestar published an article earlier this year that contains lots of good advice on avoiding common hiring pitfalls. For instance, Guidestar notes that it’s vital to properly define the position you’re trying to fill before seeking candidates. If you’re too ambitious in defining the scope of the position, you may have trouble finding applicants who contain all the skills and competencies you’re requiring. Guidestar advises being realistic in defining the position and making sure that you budget a salary sufficient to attract the caliber of employee you’re seeking.

Like the article in Resource Nation, Guidestar emphasizes the importance of checking references and not rushing the hiring decision. That doesn’t mean that you should dawdle either. Instead, create a timetable and then stick to it. Proceed at a deliberate pace while acting with consideration toward the candidates and trying to envision the process from their perspective.

If all these seems awfully challenging, you might enjoy Will Helmlinger’s look at hiring “Pitfalls and Pratfalls” on Inc.com’s website. Helmlinger has some great advice in this story, including a suggestion that the hiring manager should let candidates do most of the talking during the interview process and to avoid misinterpreting what candidates say.

For instance, Helmlinger offers the hypothetical scenario in which a hiring manager asks if an applicant is willing to work overtime. If the applicant says “Yes,” the hiring manager may assume the applicant is willing to regularly burn the midnight oil. But Helmlinger notes that the hiring manager has no grounds to jump to that conclusion without first asking how often and how long the applicant might expect or be available to work beyond regular hours.

Phew! That’s a lot for an employer to remember. But investing some time and effort upfront in finding and vetting the right person for the job will prove invaluable to building a stable, loyal and enthusiastic team of employees all pulling together to help build your business.

How do you handle tricky hiring tasks? Do you perform background checks yourself or outsource the procedures? How do you ensure your company doesn’t run afoul of anti-discrimination hiring rules?

Unless you have some sort of exclusive patent, chances are that your business competes on quality. This means that whether you run a dry-cleaning company, a restaurant, an office supply [store] or a gardening business, your customer has a number of choices [for] where to […] buy essentially the same product or service.

So how can you stand out from the pack? Obviously, you should stake your reputation on quality, friendly customer service, professionalism, good prices and so forth.

But in addition to all that, John Jantsch, author of the Duct Tape Marketing blog, believes you also need a “free soup strategy.”

For Jantsch, “free soup” is shorthand for an unexpected bonus that exceeds your customer’s expectations and leaves [him or] her not only satisfied, but so impressed that [he or] she raves about your business both online (email mes[s]ages, social [media] marketing sites, review forums) and offline (conversations with […] friends and family, casual recommendations to people who need a similar service).

In some cases, this unexpected bonus could literally be “free soup.” That’s what happened with Jantsch and his wife when they ate at a local restaurant and received a complimentary unexpected pint of soup to go along with their bill.

In the comments section of his post, some of Jantsch’s readers chimed in with examples of “free soup” strategies they use themselves or have experienced as customers—a house inspector who gives his customers a free re-inspection, a web design company that provides its customers with a bonus favicon as a surprise at the end of the project, a home décor company that gives soaps and candles to its clients.

Your “free soup” doesn’t need to be expensive or elaborate, but it should relate in some way to the products or service you provide. If you sell bicycles, maybe you could provide a free six-month maintenance offer that would have the added benefit of bringing your customers back to your store. If you do outdoor landscaping, you could give your clients a bonus potted plant for indoor use.

It’s also important to know the surprise factor in the “free soup” strategy. If you sell bicycles with a six-month maintenance offer bundled in, that might be an attractive offer, but it’s not exactly “free soup.” “Free soup” is giving the customer something unexpected after the purchase so that he or she feels a sense of satisfaction at getting what he or she has paid for and more.

What are some of the ways you go above and beyond expectations for your clients? Do “free soup” strategies impress you as a customer?

Drew Carey tells a joke about work that goes, “You hate your job? Why didn’t you say so? There’s a support group for that. It’s called ‘Everybody,’ and they meet at the bar.”

Of course, not everybody really hates their job. In fact, if you’re an entrepreneur or business owner, you might bound out of bed on a Monday morning, thrilled to start another exciting work week.

But Clint Greenleaf, author of the “By the Book” blog at Inc.com, [reminds] entrepreneurs […] their coworkers or employees may not share quite the same level of excitement and anticipation when the weekend comes to an end.

Greenleaf recommends Roxanne Emerich’s book, “Thank God It’s Monday!”, which he says makes the argument that creating a fun workplace is closely linked with having a successful business.

In essence, Greenleaf and Emerich suggest that if you and your coworkers [and/or] employees enjoy being at work, you’ll do a better job and therefore make your customers more satisfied.

Intuitively, this makes a lot of sense—and remember that keeping your employees and coworkers satisfied and engaged will probably have the added benefit of increasing their loyalty to the company, reducing turnover and making it easier to retain your most valuable team members.

Do you think creating a happy, fun workplace is important for business success? What are some strategies you’ve used to get people excited and energized about coming to work on Mondays?

Ken Burgin and Elizabeth Walker have an interesting article on the Business in General blog in which they argue that too many businesses make the mistake of focusing on what they would like to offer rather than what customers would like to buy.

So how do you figure out what customers want?

Ask them!

Burgin and Walker have some specific suggestions for matching your sales and marketing efforts to customer needs. For instance, they suggest writing down the questions your customers ask so that you can be sure to answer those questions in your marketing materials.

Another good suggestion is to probe beyond a customer’s questions to find the motivation behind the questions. The authors suggest you […] find out what your customer thinks constitutes good customer service before you start talking about how great your customer service is.

Successful businesses excel at identifying and meeting customers’ needs and wants. If you can take some of the guesswork out of the equation and determine exactly what your customers are seeking, you could be light years ahead of the competition.

How do you find out what your customers want? Do you have an inspiring (or cautionary) story about meeting (or misreading) market demand?