Recruitment Strategies: Making Your Small Business Stand Out

For many small businesses, developing dedicated recruitment strategies is crucial for building an effective team, but it can also easily be neglected. After all, every dollar and minute counts towards keeping your doors open, so it’s only natural that some lower-priority processes fall by the wayside. 

However, whether you’re setting expansion goals for your small business before a new year starts or simply need fresh perspectives, recruitment might already be on your mind—and it should be if you want to compete with larger businesses in your niche. 

In this guide, let’s explore three recruitment tactics that can supercharge your outreach to candidates and empower your small business to flourish like never before. 

1. Strengthen Your Employer Brand

Much like your marketing brand, your reputation as an employer significantly impacts the volume and quality of applicants you receive. In fact, 88% of job seekers consider a company's employer brand when applying for a job.

 As Lever’s guide to recruitment marketing suggests, fine-tuning your employer brand—the backbone of your recruitment success—should be a top priority. Set yourself up for success with these easy steps:

1. Gauge your current employer brand by surveying employees, applicants, and other community members close to your business. 

2. Record and analyze these insights, looking for trends pointing to potential improvements or strengths.

3. Create an employer brand guide featuring value propositions, benefits, and messaging guidelines that reflect your company culture and values. 

4. Optimize recruitment materials on key channels, such as local job boards and LinkedIn, to align with your new employer branding.

5. Embody your employer brand throughout the recruitment process, from the first touchpoint to onboarding. 

As you roll out your revamped employer brand, monitor how potential applicants and other important stakeholders perceive it. You might get direct feedback about it or discern insights from other essential recruitment metrics (JazzHR’s guide to recruitment metrics recommends tracking data such as employee retention and offer acceptance rates). Regardless of the metrics you track, you need the right tech stack to get a full picture of your progress.

2. Use the Right Tools

Small businesses must make smart decisions and manage resources efficiently to compete with larger companies. That’s why adding the best solutions to your toolkit is key to reaching more applicants and establishing your employer brand. 

Small businesses all have different capacities, skill levels, and resources that can shape software buying decisions. Start your research with these general tiers of hiring platforms:

Type of tool	Best for	Price range (depending on the solution)
Spreadsheet	Small businesses with tight budgets, entry-level tech experience, or low-maintenance hiring needs	Free-$
Basic standalone hiring tool	Small businesses that want to streamline a specific aspect of the hiring process, such as interview management or social media marketing automation	Free-$
Small business hiring platforms	Small businesses that want to supercharge all aspects of their hiring process and have room to invest in holistic software	$-$$

Once you understand where you fall on this spectrum, you can experiment with solutions to see which works best for you. Prioritize solutions with transparent pricing structures, great third-party reviews, and comprehensive support resources on their website.

3. Promote Your Unique Benefits

Now that you’ve shaped the initial versions of your employer brand and understand the tech solutions out there, you should develop your employer value proposition. We aren’t just talking about money, either. In fact, many employees increasingly prioritize benefits over salary when entering the job market.

Here are some unique aspects of your small business that can generate buzz via recruitment marketing efforts:

• Paid time off (PTO). Allowing employees to recharge outside of work prevents turnover and motivates them to bring their A-game to work. Provide a PTO policy that aligns with your business’ capacity while competing with other businesses in your industry.

• Employee giving programs. Perhaps you could match employee contributions to charity or organize business-wide volunteer days. Whatever giving programs you offer, applicants want to know you support their philanthropic pursuits. 

• Wellness initiatives. Burnout constantly threatens small businesses’ success, but you can prevent it with emotional and physical employee wellness initiatives. Help your employees handle stress by providing mental health days separate from PTO or offering a membership discount to a local gym.

Naturally promote these benefits by tying them back to your business’ values. For instance, if a key part of your company culture is mutual respect, you might highlight that you have a total “unplug” expectation when employees are out of the office, showing that you respect work-life balance.

While investing in a recruitment strategy might not seem like a top priority now, it’ll benefit your business in the long run by attracting the best hires to join your team. Furthermore, the most effective recruitment strategies evolve with the business, so consistently evaluate and adjust your tactics to complement your business’ current state.