Sole Trader Challenges: Recruitment

Recruiting staff when you are a sole trader can be a real challenge. I have written this article to give some back ground and some practical help for sole traders (small business). It may also help people looking for work in small companies.
Before I get into the central theme of this article, recruitment, I feel that it worth briefly looking at the sole trader as a concept.
As a sole trader you are the owner of your business, you may have employees but usually you have very few. It's the most common form of business ownership in the United Kingdom.
Some of the principle advantages of being a sole trade:
• you keep all the profits
• you have complete control
• your set up costs are usually relatively low
• your business matters are private
• your decision making is quick and responsive
• you can focus on customers that are local to you
As a sole trader you simply have to keep proper business accounts/ records and comply with health and safety legislation, sale of goods act etc.
It's all looking great but there are some down sides. Unlimited liability, raising finance, access to economies of scale and, apart from your principle trading skill, you are a jack of all trades master of non-e.g. Accountant, Human resources manager, administrator, marketing manager etc.
One of the areas where, by definition of being a sole trader, you are likely to be very inexperienced is recruitment. However in a small business each employee represents a very large percentage of your resource which means getting recruitment wrong can be disastrous.
Firstly are there options other than recruitment that you can consider. You could take on a partner. This has some advantages over recruitment of an employee. It brings the extra resource you are looking for, both financial, manpower and, potentially, expertise. But finding the right partner can be more difficult than finding the right employee. Not to mention that you have given up the control of your business. On the other hand as they say a problem shared is a problem halved.
You could outsource work that you can't cope with. No recruitment headaches but at what cost? Will your sub-contractor deliver the service, quality and commitment that your reputation is based on? Oh and the margin is likely to be considerably smaller than that which you have been accustomed too. Does it have merit? Yes very much so and it can and does work very well. For many businessess it allows head count flexibility and that has huge appeal.
So I have considered my opinion as a sole trader running a business, offering carpet cleaning South Yorkshire and decided to recruit an apprentice. Now I haven't recruited anyone ever so I ask my father for his advice. I did this with real confidence as he has recruited hundreds of people over the years; predominantly sales people. The sales people aspect seemed highly relevant as I wanted a self-starter who isn't going to let me down.
This is what he told me.
I have dealt with several human resource managers, and many of their juniors, and the collective conclusion seems to be that effective recruitment of staff is their most taxing responsibility. Even though they rarely made the final decision on recruitment, they just facilitate the decision making.
In your case son you will be relying on guess work. (He meant it, he said it wasn't an insult and it was just true of any one in my position)
The three things that you should have at the fore front of your mind is:
1. Attitude
2. Attitude
3. Attitude
All the HR staff over the years have told me, interview performance is a poor predictor of job performance. This applies even when the interviews are part of a full assessment centre. This is backed up by very considerable amounts of data. Reilly and Chao (1982), Weisner and Cronshaw (1988), and others all show a low correlation between, interview performance andjJob performance. Let's not forget it is job performance you care about at the end of the day.
He went on to say that he found that the conclusion of one of the largest Meta analyses by McDaniel, Whetzel, Schmidt, and Maurer, (1994). He summarised it in a very short sentence "focus on the job"
He also told me that some of his best recruitment decisions occurred when he saw the person do the job. It just so happened that he had a number of staff on short term contracts. The way they performed in role was an excellent predictor of future job performance. No surprise really.
With all this information in mind my father and I came up with a very short 4 point plan that relates to carpet cleaning Rotherham.
1. Talk to all candidates on the phone and along with their application, decide who you want to interview. "listen to their attitude and their communication skills"
2. At interview ask all the candidates the same, job focused, questions plus any additional or clarification questions. Focus on the job and their attitude to it.
3. Invite at least 5 candidates to a job shadow day (notify your liability insurer). Let the candidate take a lead as much as you can. Get the candidate to talk to the customer as much as possible. Watch and listen to what they do very closely and ask? Do you think they can perform the technical aspects of the Job and do they relate well to the customers and you.
4. Make your decision
Summary
Recruiting for the sole trader can be very challenging with, little experience or resources, it's far from an exact science and it is usually a huge gamble. I hope my or, should I say our, plan helps you. To date it's worked very well for me and it's doable. These two things make it great for a sole trader, which is what I am after all.