As a small business grows, many owners are figuring out how to grow a team. They want to scale up their operations while also staying lean. Keeping up with mounting demand and avoiding ramping up hiring efforts too quickly, small business owners must be diligent and strategic about the additions they make to their teams.
With your business on an upward trajectory, what are the core hires that you should be prioritizing and looking for that will add value to your team? What are the key factors to managing a growing team? And why are hiring decisions so important for small businesses in the first place?
How hiring decisions can impact your business
The truth is, finding the right people to join your small business can be a very costly decision. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, employers spend about $4,129 and 42 days to hire a new employee.
Thus, hiring decisions are not something that should be taken lightly–and the last thing business owners want to do is end up in the costly cycle of endless recruiting, hiring, and training.
Therefore, small businesses need to make clear expectations about the positions they need filled, what skills and roles they’re prioritizing, and what their ideal candidates look like. With these elements in mind, they can be better equipped to build a team that will prove beneficial to operations.
4 types of hires you need to scale your business
Knowing what roles to prioritize and what gaps exist in the current team are important elements that small businesses must consider as they look to ramp up hiring efforts.
One way to make sure your hiring plan is effective is to focus on “buckets,” or categories, of people that would benefit your team. Even the most skilled talent may not be able to add value once they’re on the job if they were hired without a clear need or plan for their new role.
So, the following four buckets are some of the main types of hires that small business owners should be looking to fill as they scale up their business.
1. People with subject matter expertise
An important area of hiring for small businesses is to seek out talent that have subject matter expertise in an area that is lacking from the current team. These are roles you couldn’t do yourself even if you had the time, but are still necessary in helping your business continue to grow.
Roles in this bucket include SEO strategists, supply chain managers, and accountants, among others.
2. People who free up your time
There comes a time for many small business owners when they’re not able to wear all the hats anymore. Hires like administrative assistants or community managers can execute on the things that maybe you used to do when you had the time, but you no longer can do effectively given all the other things on your plate.
Their role will likely be fairly clear and easy for you to delegate, because you understand the skills they need for the job having done the duties on your own for some time.
3. People who take on tasks you dislike
Many small business owners recognize tasks that should be done or maybe have even been neglected, but are still absolutely necessary for the ongoing success of the business. So, they should make a clear list of the tasks they don’t like doing, and come up with a role that would be appealing to someone else with different interests and skill sets. It’s likely you’ll be able to find someone who is passionate about the areas that you are not.
4. People with specific technical or creative skills
Lastly, small businesses should seek out talent who have specialized technical or creative skills that could add value to the company. People like engineers, designers, and videographers can all be great additions, and possess skills that can’t easily be replicated or learned by the existing team.
New hires can fit into more than one bucket
An important thing for business owners to keep in mind is that many new hires they make will fit into one or more of these buckets–and that’s a good thing! For example, an accountant may be a hire that has subject matter expertise, and does a task that you don’t like to do–bookkeeping.
These four groups should serve as guideposts, helping businesses to ensure that each new hire fits into at least one or more of these categories. As we mentioned above, hiring can be costly, so you want to make sure you’re making the right additions that will help drive value and bring something new to the team.
Hiring for your growing small business
For any small business that’s building momentum in their industry, there will come a time when the team needs to expand to keep operations running smoothly. While this is evidently a good problem, it becomes increasingly clear that you can’t hire just anyone.
Finding the right people for the right positions that will actually drive value for the business is a key element to this process, and shouldn’t be taken lightly. Therefore, small business owners should do an assessment of their current team, recognize where there are any skill gaps, and prioritize which roles they should hire for.
