If you’ve had trouble finding and hiring the right people to grow your remodeling business, you’re not alone. In fact, a recent study showed that nearly half of small business owners are finding it difficult to find qualified employees.
With advancements in technology impacting so much of how we do business, the question is, is it helping or hurting your chances of making that hiring process, and the result, better?
Let’s take a look.
Finding the Time to Find Applicants
One of the biggest barriers to filling an open role is simply the legwork and investment to get the word out. From taking the time to write a proper and accurate job description to creating accounts and posting your job on all the right job boards, the hours add up.
Fortunately, this is one area where technology can make a big difference. There are many services that allow you to send your job description out to multiple job boards with one account and one click. This can literally save you hours, plus it gets your job out that much faster.
So, let’s chalk that up as a win for technology!
The Pile of Resumes
So you’ve used technology to get your job out there, but are you prepared for what’s next?
The influx of resumes.
Thanks to technology, you’ve been able to reach that many more applicants that much faster—but that also means a pile of applications to sort through.
And, because it’s so much easier for candidates to apply for roles (thanks to technology again!) you could end up with a ton of applicants that aren’t even remotely qualified.
No wonder hiring is tough!
With the stack of resumes on your desk or in your inbox, how can you possibly know which applicants to interview and which to reject?
Let’s give technology one check in the “helping” column because it’s made it easier to find applicants. But it gets one check in the “hurting” column because it’s made hiring harder by giving you so many applicants to plow through.
Decision Making—Who to Hire?
The good news is that while technology has created some extra pain around that pile of applicants, it’s also provided some relief.
For decades many large enterprises have been asking their applicants to complete something called a personality job fit survey, which scores them against the key traits of the role. It’s a proven formula for matching the type of work people like to do to the work required by the job.
Simply stated, people who are doing work that they naturally enjoy are happier and more productive. The job fit survey matches applicants to job roles and then instantly identifies which candidates are most likely to succeed on the job. This allows the hiring manager to avoid the huge stack and focus only on resumes from strong applicants.
And while, historically, surveys like this have been too expensive for the small business owner, technology has now made it accessible—and affordable—to everyone.
For about the cost of posting to a job board, small businesses can use the job-fit survey technology to identify instantly which applicants are a good fit for the job. In fact, it’s proven to be five times more effective at predicting job success than traditional hiring.
Conclusion
Hiring is difficult and painful. However, technology has made great strides to increase the speed of finding applicants and to enable us to make faster and better hiring decisions.
And for the more than half of you who are experiencing the difficulty of finding and hiring the right people for your business, this is indeed good news.
 Join us in October for the 2015 Annual Remodelers Summit! This year’s theme: Technology — Click here for details!
