Don't be an "Enron" Owner

I was doing a project for a small business once and the owner said, It's nice just to have someone to bounce ideas off of. Folks who have a steady job or work for large organizations surrounded by lots of smart colleagues may not understand how lonely it can be running a small business. You have these 10 or 20 or 50 employees who are counting on you to keep the momentum going and you have to be the expert in everything from finding the customers, to servicing them, to all the back of the house functions like finance, HR, safety and marketing. 

Success for these small business owners so often is expanded by or limited by whom they choose to surround themselves. I once called on a prospect who told me in no uncertain terms that he was not going to have any outsiders looking at or involved with his business. I understand he was protecting his cash by shunning consultants and people who sell business services. There are lots of us out there and you can't engage everyone. The problem was, he wasn't large enough to have the internal expertise he needed to be successful and was simultaneously averse to engaging anyone who could help him. Not surprisingly, I was unable to find that business two years later.

While all business owners feel pressure to become knowledgable in several functional areas, some of these owners, like the owner above, actually convince themselves that they are experts in everything. Every consultant or B2B sales rep has run across that owner that knows more about taxes than their CPA, knows more about the law than their attorney, and they are smarter than every consultant, coach or rep in every specialty field out there. I call these Enron Owners, a reference to the documentary film about the fall of Enron which was titled, The Smartest Guys in the Room. 

Thankfully, Enron Owners are in the minority. Most small business owners are simply trying to find those 2-4 key advisors from whom they can get wise counsel. They're looking for people who have experienced what they are going through or about to go through and can help them navigate the rapids along the river that leads them from where they are to where they want to be. They're not looking for people to tell them what to do. They're looking for people to appropriately affirm what they're doing when it's right or challenge their thinking when there may be better alternatives.

The partners of The Davidson Group fill this role for many of our clients. Yes, some just hire us to write an employee handbook or teach a training class, but many of our clients are happy to have someone to bounce ideas off of relative to their workforce strategies. We've been there and done that and can generally help them avoid hitting rocks such as a significant compliance risk or making a management move that may cripple their employee engagement levels.

The important thing for small business owners is to avoid isolating themselves and becoming overly dependent on their own skill and knowledge set. They should find a few key partners they can trust and be willing to listen. 

Recruiting Tips for 2016

Let's face it, recruiting is inefficient. Especially for the small to mid-sized company that still states at the bottom of its ads, send resume and cover letter to hr@xyzcompany.com. This means that someone at XYZ Company has to open every email, open two separate attachments in every email, and decide what to do with them. Ugh!

Recruiting is part of a two-step process. Recruiting is how you go about stocking the pond with viable candidates. Selection is how you go about choosing which candidates to invite to join the team and which ones you toss back into the pond. 

While I am much better equipped to help clients with selection, I am frequently asked to participate in the recruiting phase simply because of this inefficiency. No one at XYZ has time to open all those emails! 

Since I am an HR consultant and not a full-time recruiter, I often recommend alternative solutions to my clients:

1. I know many industry-specific recruiters who maintain deep databases of technically competent candidates who might be passively looking, but may not reply to one of my ads. These recruiters can be ideal for construction, engineering, finance, IT and healthcare roles, just to name a few.
2. I know several staffing agencies that do a wonderful job helping stock the pond for general administrative, office, warehouse and general labor roles on a direct hire or temp-to-perm basis. They have a steady stream of applicants coming through their doors that may also not answer one of my ads on a job board.

For a variety of reasons, some folks are reluctant to partner with an industry recruiter or a staffing agency, or see this an expense of last resort. So I set about trying to find a solution that would meet the needs of this population. 

It was clear that the core tool that would immediately improve the efficiency of the recruiting process for these clients is an applicant tracking system (ATS). So, I investigated several and found that many miss the plot when it comes to smaller organizations with relatively low turnover. They insist on a per-employee-per-month subscription. This is not an attractive solution to a firm that hopes it won't need to hire again anytime soon.

I eventually partnered with a company that has an excellent, easy-to-use tool that allows its clients to pay for ads on an a la carte basis. We can set up a branded portal so that candidates who see your ad on Indeed or one of the dozen other sites it goes to click to a page that is branded for your company (not mine). Candidates complete the application, answer screening questions that I help you create, and the only emails that end up in the hiring manager's in-box are from candidates who have been pre-qualified by the ATS. The hiring manager can always scroll through the rejected list, if they choose, but even this is much more efficient than looking through emails in a rejected folder as they are displayed in a manner that makes it easy to take a quick peek and label applicants as rejected, a maybe or someone to pursue.

This ATS is a very economical solution for companies that are confident that they can find their star from active job seekers and want internal control over most of the process. It may not be as effective as utilizing industry recruiters or staffing agencies, who often have access to passive job seekers as well, but it may make a reasonable first step for some organizations. Contact me for more information.