Small business recruiting can often be more challenging than running an HR department in a big corporation. This is mainly due to the fact that a small business owner in the UK has to handle all aspects of HR and recruiting personally. Technology and recruitment software for small business can alleviate the drain on your time and even save you money in your recruitment efforts.

Learning how to recruit effectively means that you need to be able to screen potential candidates before they even get to the interview process. Just learning how to read a CV quickly and being able to extrapolate information from it can be a difficult process.

3 Top Screening Techniques to help your Small Business Recruitment

1. Check references. This is an important part of screening candidates before they are interviewed. It is vital that you check references provided by the candidate on their CV. Making a reference check early on in the hiring process is a sure fire way of saving time and effort later on. You don’t want to spend time interviewing and then only check references. As a potential employer you have the right to ask candidates for extra references. A good mix is to request references from a supervisor, a co-worker and from someone who has worked under the candidate. It provides an excellent all round picture of the person you are considering recruiting.
2. Check the CV carefully for examples of job-hopping.
   While it is not completely indicative of bad performance, it will give you an overall picture of the stability of a candidate. This is a red flag that should occur at the very beginning of the recruitment process, when you are just starting to screen candidates. Be aware that you are not excluding a candidate based on a small period of job changes. The economy at present has meant that many more people are changing jobs than before.
3. Evaluate the Social Ability of Candidates.
   This is where it becomes so important to have a pre-screening questionnaire that potential candidates can complete online. It can be used to evaluate the integration potential of a candidate, which is very important if you run a small business with a close knit team. You can also screen candidates using social media and business networks.

The biggest aspect of screening candidates is that you are checking that what they say on paper IS in fact who they are and gives a good indication of what they can offer your business.

TalentPack provides small business recruitment software with in-built screening options and intuitive software that you can use to find the best new recruits for your growing business.