Does Size Matter When It Comes To Recruiting and Hiring Talent?

A recent LinkedIn analysis of organizational recruitment and candidate preferences indicated that small organizations recruit differently and face more challenges in recruiting the best talent compared to larger organizations (LinkedIn defined small as under and large as over 500 employees). While this has been the case for sometime, an examination of the data does give insights into what small organizations can do to reduce or even remove the disadvantaged.

Priorities Small V Large Organizations

When LinkedIn asked them about their priorities for hiring there were marginal but interesting differences between the responses of large and small organizations:

• Recruiting highly skilled talent – both prioritized this as one of their top priorities, but 49% small organizations valued this the most compared to 43% of larger organizations
• Improving the quality of hiring – 37% or small organizations indicated this as a top priority vs. only 31% or larger organizations
• Diversity recruitment – this was only a priority of 9% of small business vs. 15% of larger ones.

Smaller organizations valued the ‘quality of a hire’ over the ‘time to hire’ or ‘hiring managers satisfaction’; 51% of small organizations indicated quality of hire was the most important metric compared to only 38% of larger organizations; larger organizations valued speed to hire at 31% vs. only 18% of smaller organizations.

It is also interesting to understand how ‘quality of hire’ was assessed. Smaller organizations put more weight on ‘new hire performance evaluations’ (55%) vs. larger organizations (49%), ‘Cultural Fit’ (37%) vs. larger (24%) and ‘Time to productivity’ (31%) over larger organizations (21%).  In a nutshell, those first few weeks of performance had a higher impact on how a smaller organization measured the quality of their new hires.

Looking for Talent  – Using your Brand and Getting it Out There

When asked about their best sources for quality talent smaller organizations tended to rely more on Internet job boards 47% vs. for larger organizations at only 39%. Where as, as one would expect, 34% of larger organizations sourced internally compared to only 23% of smaller organizations.

According to research from LinkedIn, social networking has demonstrated the most increase in helping attract quality hires and is becoming one of the primary ways larger organizations seek talent. While job boards are still useful smaller organizations may find they do not always attract the highest quality hires.  What can smaller organizations do to compete?

• Brand Clarity and Dissemination: An advantage larger organizations often have is the time and effort put into clarifying and marketing their brands. Smaller organizations often need to do a better job of clarifying their brand to their own employees and in their materials and communications externally.According to LinkedIn’s 2015 Global Talent Trends report the top items on the shopping list of global talent are 1) better compensation packages (49%), 2) better professional development opportunity (33%) and 3) better work-life balance (29%). For smaller organizations to compete they have to find a way to get out in front of talent and promote their potential advantages for professional development and better work-life balance as they often struggle to compete on compensation.
• Strategic Visibility: Smaller organizations can seek to leverage an integration of social networks, their job postings and their company webpages by regularly pushing their activities out in front of potential candidates, including and especially local candidates and college/university students and graduates. Smaller organizations need to engage their own employees to attract and build talent pools by more actively engaging where the talent pools are hanging out. LinkedIn is one source but there are many more.Creating messages, news, stories and other content to be shared and so that employees can share, comment on, like is a way to help them help the organization. Different social networks have different rhythms, for example sharing 1 company update a day 3-4 times in a week is usually sufficient on LinkedIn whereas sharing multiple updates a day on Twitter or Facebook would be appropriate. Provide employees with training on how to represent the organization well and appropriately.

Small business is becoming more attractive to candidates for a variety of reasons. However, if potential candidates cannot find your organization easily or if you do not build up your credibility over time you may be looked over by the top candidates during their search. Determine your brand and help your employees help you market it beyond your business.