Why Hiring the Right Staff is Vital for SMEs in 2016

When it comes to success in the business world, hiring the right staff is crucial.

It’s no coincidence that an ever-increasing number of SMEs are working on their employer brand to help attract the best people to their business. As important as hiring the right staff is, there are many businesses that are suffering due to a lack of skilled staff.

Here’s some of the biggest problems that SMEs face due to hiring under skilled staff:

• Lack of time – When your staff are under skilled, they’re much more likely to require help doing their job. This puts strain on your business and will almost certainly cause productivity to suffer as a result. It also means you’ll have less time to implement strategies to improve your business overall.

• Security weaknesses – Another big problem of having staff that are not up to scratch is that it can easily lead to security weaknesses in your businesses. Scams such as CEO fraud rely on their being a weak link in a business for them to be successful. If your staff is not properly trained, then it can easily lead to security issues that could cost you a lot of money.

• Lack of innovation – In order for businesses to fulfil their potential, it’s necessary to innovate and find new ways to reach customers, build brand loyalty and increase profits. Having the right talent on board is vital to achieving this. If your staff are only just qualified to carry out the day-to-day tasks required of them then this is far from ideal and won’t enable you to innovate and move your business forward in the way you’d like.

• Poor IT support – If the staff in your IT department are not adequately skilled then this is a big problem and means your IT support is going to be lacking and you’ll likely need to rely on outside help.

How to make sure you attract the right staff

Below are some of the best ways to make sure you attract the best talent to your business:

• Improve your employer brand – Improving your employer brand is one of the best ways to attract the right people to your business. Your employer brand is essentially the impression that your business gives to others but most importantly in this case – potential employees.

There are many ways you can improve your employer brand to attract the best talent to your business. Think about the appearance of your website, your social media presence and your offices and what they say about your business and what it would be like to work at.

• Be clear on what you’re looking for – It might seem obvious but in order to hire the people, you need to be very clear on what it is you’re looking for. This means knowing the exact skills that are required for the role you’re hiring for as well as the right personality traits. For example – when hiring IT staff, you want to be sure that anyone you hire is skilled and experienced enough to be able to tackle any issue that might arise as well as having a calm and patient temperament.

• Use your current staff to help with recruitment – An excellent and often underused way to recruit talented people to your business is by using your current staff. For example, if you need to add to your IT department then there’s a very good chance that those currently working in the department will be able to recommend somebody suited to the job.

How Grant McGregor can help

Grant McGregor offer a range of IT support services to help all types of businesses across the UK and Ireland. Our IT support services are suitable for businesses and non-profit organisations that need a flexible and affordable solution. We also offer cloud and managed IT services.

If you have – or are part of – a small, in-house IT department then you might also want to read more about how we successfully work in harmony with IT Managers to provide         Co-Sourcing. That means you keep IT as an in-house function but you can boost your resources when you need to, get help with specific project or technologies or can outsource certain services (such as patch management or back-up) to an IT Services company to do.

If you’d like more information on how our complete range of IT support services can benefit your business then don’t hesitate to get in touch and we can provide you with more detail.