Streamline Spring Hiring & Onboarding for Small Businesses

Spring is a time to freshen up your hiring and onboarding processes so you can uplevel your future team!

Many small business owners wait to grow their teams because the thought of hiring and training new people is overwhelming. Honestly, I understand that fear. Writing a winning job ad, weeding through dozens (or hundreds) applicants, and hoping that you pick the right candidate is not something that most business owners want to spend hours doing. And once you find your new hire, how do you go about onboarding them successfully?

With the right systems, you can make the process much easier and more successful.

While this time of year is often an afterthought between busy seasons, spring is a great time to start planning intentionally and building a better tomorrow.  Here are my tips on hiring and onboarding systems.

Building Out Your Hiring Systems

I’m a big fan of having solid hiring systems to simplify the process. For any business owner that plans to grow (especially if they’re planning to hire three to six people per year), it is imperative that you get these systems in place early on. This will ensure that you reduce the wasted energy spent doing the same tasks from scratch every time.

What are these systems, though?

A system is a culmination of the policies (why we do it) and the procedures (how to do it), with the templates, examples, diagrams, scripts, checklists, and other supporting documents. These are then compiled to make sure it all can be utilized quickly and easily by anyone who touches the process.

It’s essential to build out your hiring system, especially since there are so many repeatable processes involved. This will save you a ton of time! Whether you utilize an ATS (Applicant Tracking System) or you do the process manually, having your 10 vital documents in place and ready to go for each position is a huge game changer for when you need to hire. You can enter the conversation prepared, already having drafts of the job description, job ad, interview questions, and reference check questions ready to go.

Putting a hiring system together is not that difficult when you have the base elements, but it can be very time-consuming if you start from scratch. This is a technique successful business owners use to leapfrog ahead when it comes to building their systems! Don’t start from scratch – search out experienced business owners who have done what you want to do. Make use of templates and other ready-made processes that can reduce your time and energy and put you on the path to success. This makes execution of breeze whether by you or by someone you delegate to.

The systems don’t stop there, though. You also have the opportunity to create an onboarding checklist and onboarding agenda that shorten the amount of time for bringing that person up to speed. Finally, you need the core documents to ensure that the person continues to thrive in their role with quarterly reviews KPIs scorecards and opportunities for ongoing training. These can be formatted so that the onboarding process is systematized.

The Second Half Of The Equation Is The Onboarding University

The second half of the equation is the Onboarding University.

Many business owners dread the onboarding process because of the sheer time that it takes. They want to teach and train their new hire effectively, but there are only so many hours in the day. That’s where the Onboarding University comes in: it’s an opportunity to orchestrate how you will quickly get this person trained up and productive without having to spend hours and hours each day by their side.

Your Onboarding University is just what it sounds like – a central location for all of your training materials that your new hires can access, learn from, review, and use to get up to speed.

Is important to recognize that your team will have different learning styles; you’ll want to create trainings that are tailored to different needs. For instance, you may have diagrams for your visual learners, written procedures for your readers, short videos for your auditory learners, and checklists and tests for your kinesthetic learners.

While you may not have all of this done all at once, this is a great opportunity to create a map of what you want to build. Then, over a few weeks, you and your team can build out the different elements. One of the things we often help clients with is giving them the scripts and the examples for videos, diagrams, and other training materials so they can quickly adapt and create something that’s on point to their business and how they operate.

While you can systematize a lot of the hiring and onboarding processes, you also need to remember that your new hires do need some in person connection time. They need some context as to your brand, your mission, your core values, and your culture. This is what helps your team understand how to work when you’re not there, keeping them engaged and on point.

Spring is a great time to take inventory of what you have. It’s a good opportunity to get with a coach or a trusted professional who can do an audit with you to review what you have, what you may need, and help you triage a plan of what needs to be built now versus next quarter or later in the year.

This spring, commit to freshen up your hiring and onboarding systems and find new spring solutions for a better tomorrow!