Recruitment barriers small businesses face

One of the biggest challenges for small and medium-sized companies is competing with the big organizations when it comes to the recruitment of employees. Big companies find it much easier to recruit capable employees as they are much more recognizable than their smaller counterparts.

Just imagine, you are a well qualified Data Analyst and are looking for a change of scenery. Would you be more likely to go to a small and unknown company or would you go with an established industry leader?

It’s like giving casino enthusiasts the chance to play at a brand new online casino versus the opportunity to play at the worn down slots and pokies in the pub down the street. Of course they would choose the shiny and glamorous new casino establishment. 

Not Visible to Job Seekers

A significant obstacle that small companies face is the fact that they are barely visible for potential employees. They are a completely unknown entity to the job seeker because they don’t put a lot of funds into recruitment marketing and are almost never part of the daily lives of job seekers.

Even if you have never set foot in one of those huge Amazon warehouses, you know what to expect if you start working there. Amazon pays a lot of money in educating potential job seekers as to the benefits of working with them and you have probably seen a lot of news reels and even documentaries about how it feels to work for Amazon.

Lack of Word of Mouth Recommendation

A lot of the research which has been done on this topic points to the direction that neither brochures nor professional recruiters help a lot in raising the visibility of the small company. This is because there are just so many brochures out there that job seekers pay little attention to them.

In fact, researchers have come to the conclusion that oftentimes what people say to each other is actually much more beneficial for the company looking to recruit new employees.

This means that people feel it is much more reliable to go to have an interview with a company recommended by someone else than to go to a company they came across in the newspaper ads. Word of mouth is actually one of the chief methods of recruitment that many medium-sized companies utilize and small businesses would do well to copy that strategy if possible.

No Investment in Recruitment Capacities

However, as important as word of mouth can be, companies still have to invest in their recruitment capacities. This is where small companies trail the big industry leaders the most as big multinational companies have whole separate departments of Human Resources, something which budding enterprises can only dream of.

Small businesses find it very hard to create their own identity when compared to large companies and investing in recruitment is one of the key reasons for this. In a survey of 26 small and medium-sized enterprises carried out by recruitment professionals only 7% of the total number of enterprises invested in any type of recruitment policies.