by Mary G. White, M.A., SPHR (MTI Business Solutions)

As a small business owner with a growing company, it’s likely that you will need to continue to add employees to your staff over time, to keep up with growth. The best time to start making sure that you have solid hiring practices in place is while you are still very small. It may take a little time to set up solid procedures for hiring before you even start adding staff members, but in the long run, you’ll be very glad that you took care of establishing a sound system early on. If not, once your company starts to grow, you’ll find yourself backtracking to try to keep up with the practical, operational, and legal obligations associated with staffing a growing business.

Some of the important decisions you need to make before you start recruiting employees include:

Application Procedures:
One of the first decisions you need to make is to define your company’s application procedures. You need to define when, where, and how you are going to accept applications, as well as decide exactly what constitutes a completed application. You’ll need to come up with a uniform job application form that meets your needs in terms of gathering necessary information, permissions, and signatures that is also compliant with all applicable human resources legislation. Further, you need to decide how long you will keep applications on file.

Screening Practices:
Once you know how you are going to collect and keep employee applications, the next thing you’ll have to do is come up with a policy and procedure for how you are going to screen candidates. Will you do an initial telephone interview, followed by an in-person conversation? Will you require pre-employment aptitude testing. If so, can you demonstrate that the assessment instruments you use are tied to bona fide occupational qualifications? Is passing a pre-employment drug test and background screen going to be a mandatory component of your hiring practices policy?

Interviewer Skills
Before you start interviewing people, it’s important that you learn the proper way to interview. As a small business owner, it’s important that you develop a solid understanding about what is and is not legal to ask applicants. You also need to learn how to use proper interviewing techniques to get the information that you want out of candidates. If you aren’t familiar with behavior based interviewing techniques, it’s a good idea to get familiar with them before you start asking questions.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, of course. Once you know how you are going to screen applicants, you’ll need to make other important decisions, such as your procedure for setting salaries, conveying offers, establishing an employee handbook, and more. By making sure you have the proper procedures in place early in your company’s existence, you’ll save yourself a lot of trouble as your company expands.