DIY hiring vs recruitment support: How to hire at every stage of small business without breaking the bank

I have a lot of love to give to small business owners right now. I want to see everyone succeed, find happiness, and be equipped with the tools and support they need to grow and thrive!

Full disclaimer: I just came off an offer call with a beautiful lady who CRIED with happiness that she got the job. I’m feeling the feels, and loving seeing the incredible impact that successful hiring can have on people.

In the spirit of sharing the love and support, I’m going to straight-up outline how to successfully hire your next employee, whichever way you go about it. Yep, I’m just going to give it to you.

There are three ways you can choose to hire an employee: 

1. Completely DIY
2. DIY, but with some coaching and guidance
3. Outsource it to a recruitment professional.

What works for you at this point in your life and business will be entirely unique to YOU. So let’s take a sneak peek at what each option looks like. 

Option 1: DIY recruitment

You can absolutely hire someone yourself. But you need to know that it’s time consuming… and it’s a LOT. 

DIY recruitment will take over your life for a few weeks. But it might truly be what’s best for where you’re at right now. Sometimes DIY recruitment does serve you better than outsourced recruitment.

Here are the steps you need to take to recruit someone on your own:

• First, make a big, fat checklist of all the steps you need to take, break them down and diarise them. My FREE Pre-Hiring Checklist can help with this. 
• Speak to your accountant, review your costs and make sure you’re actually financially ready to take on a new staff member and pay their wages.
• Get your new employee management systems in place. Consider accounting software like Xero, and bookkeeping support to help you manage payroll.
• Get onto Fair Work and understand different types of employment, and what your rights and obligations are. There’s information on there about calculating wages and how to hire an employee. 
• Research market rates so you know what to offer your candidate. 
• Design the role. Consider what skills you need in the business and what the person you’re hiring will do. It might be the same skills as you, or entirely different ones. (Chat to me about role design and strategy!)
• Write the job description BEFORE you write the job advert. (Learn how to write an epic job advert.)
• Decide where you’ll advertise the role – which job boards you’ll use, how much you’ll spend, and whether you’ll support your advert with social media promotion. 
• Review your applicants. Immediately call the people who aren’t the right fit to let them know, and shortlist your best applicants (usually this will be around 3-4 people if you’re recruiting one person). 
• Screen your shortlisted candidates via phone and book in interviews with the ones that seem great. Prepare by creating an interview agenda and writing up a great list of interview questions. (Here are 10 interview questions to knock your applicants’ socks off.)
• Choose your favourite person, write up the offer and make the call. (Note: don’t let down other people until you have at least a verbal agreement of offer.)
• Organise any necessary background checks (for example Working With Children Checks or police checks). And of course, do your reference checks.
• Set up your employee management systems, including payroll processes to account for paying super and tax.
• Onboard your new employee! This is actually a huge job in itself and it’s very important to get right. You’ll need to flesh out a development plan, train them up, check in regularly, and ensure they’re well supported. 

Option 2: Supported DIY recruitment

This is where you do most of the hiring work yourself, but you get help from an expert to get it right. Queen, that’s where someone like myself comes in.

I’ve got two key ways you can DIY your hiring, with expert support.

1. Invest in a resource like The Hiring Playbook

This is a completely done-for-you hiring process with templates, learning modules and over 80 pages of tried and tested strategies and tips. 

It’s an extremely cost-effective way to get equipped with all the tools and resources you need to hire someone on your own – and it’s PROVEN to work. With the Playbook, you’ll learn a simple, repeatable recruitment process that’ll save you time and money as you level-up your business.

You can make your way through the learning modules at your own pace, and pick and choose the parts you need, whenever you need them.

2. Check out my hiring consultation services

I can also provide tailored coaching and consultation if the in-person thing is more your style. We can look specifically at auditing your hiring process, designing the role you need in your business, or we can simply discuss your challenges and brainstorm solutions.

Supported DIY hiring can work really well if you’ve got the drive to move the needle in your recruitment by yourself, but you need proven tactics and techniques to steer you in the right direction. For many people, DIY is much more successful with the right support.

Option 3: Outsourced recruitment

You can also choose to have someone else manage the entire recruitment process for you. Again, this will look different depending on how you go about it.

Engage a recruitment agency 

• You’ll brief them on the job.
• They’ll work hard to fill the job.
• They’ll charge a percentage fee for the placement – typically 15-25%.

The bottom line: You’ll probably get an amazing experience, but it's a huge monetary hit for a small business. Also, recruiters can be a bit pushy because they only get paid if they fill the job. They want their commission! 

Have an internal person recruit for you

• Someone in the business, such as an operations person, manages the process.
• You’ll continue paying them their normal wage.
• When you need to hire, they’ll be pulled away from their normal duties to get it done – usually lumping the business owner (AKA you) with extra work.

The bottom line: This can work really well and be cost-effective, but it will seriously suck up this person’s time. It often works best if you hire one or two people a year, and it’s well planned for in advance. You still need a robust recruitment process in place. That’s time consuming to build and manage – and keep in mind that people in operations typically don’t LOVE recruitment.

Use a business like Hiring Advantage  

• Pay a flat fee for us to recruit one-off roles. 
• Give us a role and we’ll fit it for you – fast.

OR

• Pay a retainer fee for an ongoing relationship.
• We become an extension of your business and fill roles whenever they come up.

The bottom line: This is a really cost-effective option that saves you time and money. You still need to understand your business' finances, be involved in the hiring strategy, conduct interviews and onboard new staff – but outsourcing the recruitment gruntwork to an expert significantly cuts down on your time spent recruiting. 

Ready to do this thing?!

Choose the right hiring method for you

Start by working out which option will suit you best right now. This will depend on the stage of business you’re at, your personal preferences, and how much money you have to spend on recruitment.

Let me give you a personal example of when DIY worked out better for me than outsourcing:

I needed to get moving on social media content in my business, so I hired a social media manager. But I did it too early on. They were great at their job, but I wasn’t ready for it and kept changing my mind. I found that doing social media training suited me better. In this scenario, it was more beneficial for me to get support in developing these skills for myself.

Look at your growth goals

Some small business owners look at how much recruitment will COST them, and forget to consider how much hiring can MAKE them money. Setting clear business goals can help set you on the right track with hiring.

Here’s an awesome example of how I worked with a client to figure out how she could make $500K in a year.

• The goal was to make $500K.
• She charges an hourly rate of $50 (and pays her staff $30/hr).
• We worked out it’d take 10,000 hours to make $500K.
• Over a year (48 weeks to allow for leave etc.) she’d need to charge out 10,000 hours to reach the goal. Spread across 48 weeks, that 10,000 hours looks like 208 hours of work per week.
• Her team members work 20 hours per week. So it would take 10 people working 20 hrs per week over 48 weeks at $50/hr to reach $500K.
• Staff costs would be $300K so the client would be left over with $200K!

A recruiter can help you hire the right people to achieve goals like this. Volume Hiring Services are a great option for business owners that want to grow the team and keep business momentum going. For example, we could hire two people per month to help you reach the amount of staff you need to reach your financial goals.

Back yourself with tried and tested recruitment techniques!

If DIY recruitment is the way to go for you, The Hiring Playbook can help you get it right. It’s a solid resource you can have by your side from the very first employee you hire, and well into the future. This will be your go-to resource throughout the evolution of your business.

So what is it?

• It’s an 80+ page guide that covers the hiring process from start to finish, packed with valuable insights and tips taken from my 12+ years of recruitment experience.
• 25 bite-sized video modules to teach you the ins and outs of recruitment strategy.
• Plug and play templates you can use to make the process easier
• Priority access to discounted 1:1 coaching with ME!

I’ll say it: Every business needs something like this.

Take it from Sammy, who used The Hiring Playbook to scale up her business, and gained life-long skills along the way. She said in our interview, “You’ve got to do things before you’re ready.” While she didn’t think she was ready to think about recruiting in her business, she found herself growing much faster than anticipated and ready to take on more staff much earlier!

Listen to Sammy’s Hiring Playbook success story

Some kind words about The Hiring Playbook:

I will use this playbook when I am hiring my first employee. I have learned so much I should have considered when I hired my first VA on Upwork and I will definitely have much clearer processes and procedures in place from now on.

 Naomi Ivala

Whether you plan on hiring yourself or outsourcing hiring, I believe that the Hiring Playbook is something you should invest in before growing your team because it allows you to really understand the systems and processes in your businesses' hiring strategy. 

 Sammy Kennedy

Queen, what are you waiting for? Get access to The Hiring Playbook now.