Small Business Hiring Guide: Fixing New Problems with Proven Solutions

If you’re reading this, you might be:

A frustrated small business owner with open job positions.

A busy recruiter or talent specialist at a small business working on multiple open requisitions.

A worried founder of a new startup looking for committed new talent.

None of these things, but you clicked into this page in hopes of answering a question you have in mind.

Regardless of who you are, what problems you aim to solve and what you’re curious to know more about, this guide has one simple goal.

To show small and growing businesses how AI recruitment technology is accessible, budget-friendly and effective to find and hire talent during post-pandemic hiring surges.

If you’re waiting to scroll through the entirety of this guide, we’ll stop you right here and say that it covers a lot of things. Tips, examples, images, videos — everything you need to understand how to apply hireEZ to recruitment bottlenecks you’re currently facing.

Don’t worry, we’re not trying to be pushy. This is a guide about solving problems (it just so happens that hireEZ solves them.)

Even if you don’t plan on using hireEZ, we think you’ll enjoy reading about how small business talent teams and individual recruiters are utilizing technology like ours today.

You’ve probably heard this before, but it’s even more necessary now: Posting and praying isn’t going to work. A perfect applicant who stays committed to your recruitment process won’t just fall in your lap from an isolated job posting. Talent today has way more options for job opportunities and are looking for more than just financial stability.

To meet these elevated expectations, small businesses and independent firms invest in hireEZ to capitalize on what we do best: to connect qualified and engaged talent with a role that they see themselves succeeding in.

To find high quality talent, small businesses are proactively searching for it.

In fact, small businesses are searching for talent on hireEZ 6X more in 2021 than they were at the start of 2020.

hireEZ’s AI-powered search pulls candidate profiles from open web sources for a comprehensive talent data set. These include:

Recruiters also have the ability to focus on details by starting a talent search with a Boolean string or uploading a resume file or job description. From there, AI Sourcing filters can be added to complete the task.

hireEZ Enterprise isn’t just for enterprises. If your team is looking to invest in a robust talent data platform, hireEZ Enterprise provides access to ATS integrations and advanced AI Sourcing filters for diversity hiring, technical candidates, healthcare roles and more.

hireEZ’s talent platform provides stronger results for those hiring for the professional workforce. If you’re one of the 40% of small businesses with unfilled openings for white-collar jobs, you can use hireEZ’s AI Sourcing search filters to target talent who are already employed or who have the potential to upskill and transfer skills to a different industry.

There are three ways hireEZ can help small businesses compete in a tight labor market.

In 2021, small businesses on hireEZ commonly searched for job titles related to management, engineering, business development and business operations. The job market across these roles are already starting to tighten despite an increase in demand this year.

Build a talent search with hireEZ’s Company filters to target candidates who work at competitor companies or companies with a track record for acquiring successful skilled workers.

Recruiters can choose to include or exclude a list of similar companies to build strategic recruitment campaigns. Our customers use these campaigns to convert already employed talent with better growth and skills than what they currently have.

“[AI recruitment tools] allow for immediate direct engagement with that talent and deliver a unique and compelling message specifically targeting ideal candidates. We are a small business ourselves and have used hireEZ to identify, evaluate and secure talent not only before the largest competitors but also from them” - Jeff Kaye, Co-CEO at Kaye/Bassman - Sanford Rose Associates

To expand talent pools, recruiters use hireEZ to target candidates beyond a job title to instead focus on adaptable and transferable skills acquired from different industries.

Amy Agneta, Director of Talent Acquisition at a health and wellness center turned an unfruitful 8-week sourcing project around by using hireEZ to search for a candidate that could no longer be defined by a job title for their revenue cycle team.

“Instead of looking at revenue cycle experience, we looked at those with business consulting experience. We had to find someone who could leave the consulting world and turn a position that would max out in a couple years into an opportunity for that person to utilize the consulting mindset in other areas of the company.”

Amy expected to find results with hireEZ in the first few months of implementation; however, she found the right candidate in a matter of weeks.

hireEZ’s advanced diversity hiring capabilities are only available in our hireEZ Enterprise plan. However, small and growing businesses are allocating bigger budgets this year for new tools and equipment to increase diversity hiring and worker productivity.

When it comes to competing with large enterprises for talent, small businesses have the opportunity to stand out by providing underrepresented talent with more flexibility and personalized value. As job seekers look to align themselves with inclusive companies, a diverse workforce is a strong factor for attracting those candidates

hireEZ’s Diversity Sourcing helps employers build a more efficient and holistic search for underrepresented talent across the open web.

hireEZ has identified a talent pool of 115M+ underrepresented candidates. Our Natural Language Processing model reviews candidate profiles and highlights areas such as membership with professional organization, self-identification and universities.

At the end of the day, successful hires will come from quality candidates that you successfully engage and convert.

Similar to advancements within candidate searches, engagement has been elevated by features, like tracking, delegation, sequence-building, scheduling, and more.

Still, small business recruiters are often relying on commonly used talent platforms, like LinkedIn, to engage with talent despite new engagement limitations. It’s time to adopt candidate communication channels that can be scaled and personalized in a recruiter-friendly way.

Recruiters can do two things to combat low response rates:

• Find high-quality contact information such as phone numbers and personal emails
• Drop candidates into a multi-touch email campaign

Instead of waiting for a candidate to respond to a single outreach message in an inbox they may not even check frequently, hireEZ gives recruiters more options. Our contact-finder pulls public information for personal emails, work emails, social profiles, and phone numbers. This means more avenues for reaching candidates that competing businesses don’t have access to.

Access to those points of contact will also help small businesses with recruitment marketing, which was listed as a top priority in 2021. From branding to job opportunities, hireEZ has built-in email functionalities, like sequence and scheduling, to strengthen outreach campaigns.

How can sequences help?

According to email engagement on hireEZ, 3X more candidates convert in an email sequence instead of a single email.

Recruiters from small businesses were sending out 8X more email sequences on hireEZ this year compared to single emails.

Getting started with email engagement on hireEZ is simple. Here are 4 things to remember for better outreach on hireEZ.

What does integration do for your current engagement workflow? At worst, everything will remain the same as you continue using the functionalities of your original email providers. At best, you’ll elevate your outreach results by adding capabilities for tracking, sequence building, and more.

The goal for any recruiter conducting email outreach is standing out in a candidate’s busy inbox. Uncover how templates make that a possibility (with examples!).

As hiring picks up and your inbox becomes flooded, don’t forget to communicate with candidates in a timely manner. The last thing you need is a poor candidate experience deterring quality talent. Use reminders to keep your outreach organized.

Find out what’s working. Find out what isn’t. And use tracking as a way to refine your outreach for improved candidate responses.

We know that was a lot of information to take in. Hopefully, your fingers don’t hurt too much from scrolling.

If there’s one thing we can’t emphasize enough, it’s our excitement.

With affordable access to strategies and technology used by larger companies, we believe that small businesses are ready to exceed their hiring goals faster than ever before.