As a business owner, you’re probably aware that delegation is crucial for leaders. But what if you’re struggling to find the right person to delegate tasks to?

Eighty-two percent of small businesses have no employees. They’re operated by solo entrepreneurs. So, when the time comes to scale the business, those founders have no experience in making hires. 

And small businesses that do have employees make hires very rarely. “Among the roughly 6 million small businesses with employees, 49% have just one to four workers,” reports the Pew Research Center. Yet over 40% of small businesses are looking to hire new employees — and they have very little experience in doing this. The average small business might hire someone every five years, making them unpracticed in this skill.

For these reasons, over 84% of small businesses say they struggle to hire new employees. More than 60% rank it as one of their top barriers to success. Often their recruitment process drags on for months, and they struggle to target and identify the right talent.

Let’s dive into why hiring can be so tough for small businesses in more detail. Then, I’ll share a client story that shows how we helped them resolve this challenge, along with strategies for finding the right talent.

The Main Hiring Challenges for Small Businesses

Small businesses (and medium-size ones, for that matter) face several key issues when it’s time to hire. Most struggle with these fears and hiring hurdles:

• Losing a talented recruit to a competitor, due to hiring delays.
• Determining which skills gaps are most crucial to address.
• Finding people with the right abilities and experience.
• Determining which qualifications are crucial and which can be built on the job.
• Figuring out which recruits best fit their culture and values.

Small businesses usually don’t have a talent strategy in place. They’re new to the game, after all. But when you have a small team, it’s even more crucial to think strategically about hiring. You might be doubling your workforce or expanding it by a quarter, so you really need to get it right. This can mean redesigning roles and creating a new position focused on skills your team currently lacks, before you start recruiting.

If you have less than 10 people, you’re probably not practiced in hiring. Even if you have a natural ability to read people, you’re more likely to make mistakes if you don’t hire very often. At ia Blueprint, since we’re hiring people all the time, we have a steady and reliable process. Let’s look at how this benefited one client that had been struggling with retention and recruitment.

Case Study: How One Client Fixed Their Turnover Problem

Our client, an insurance firm based in Colorado, was losing employees due to the massive volume of work it was asking them to handle. Over time, the problem was compounding. The remaining team members were growing even more stressed and frazzled, since they had to carry the workload of their departing coworkers.

When the client reached out, we talked with them in depth to understand the situation and their needs. They sought to create a personalized client renewal team that could manage this function with more dedicated focus. Due to their heavy workload, their customer service team was struggling to spend enough time with clients to maintain a personal touch. By enlisting the support of virtual assistants for renewals, they sought to free front-line staff to give clients the attention they deserved, while building their business’s capacity. 

Ultimately, we placed an entire team of virtual assistants with them, selecting folks who had expertise in this function. We hired a team leader to spearhead their newly created client renewal department, along with two other staff. Hiring these talented people took only two weeks, cutting down their time to hire by 75%. 

This strategic move lifted a massive burden from their existing staff’s shoulders. In turn, it dramatically ramped up productivity, streamlined client communications, and supported ongoing customer retention. Just as importantly, the firm hasn’t lost any employees since then, because their staff are no longer overworked. Instead, their employees have a high level of job satisfaction and their culture is stronger than ever.

So, how did we help them accomplish all of this? We’ll dive into that next.

5 Recruitment Strategies for Effective Hiring

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In the 2024 Monster Work Watch Report, candidates cited poor communication, recruiters’ unfriendly attitudes, and having to jump through too many hoops as the most common reasons why they bowed out of the recruitment process. A lengthy, cumbersome process gives them the impression that a company will be hard to work with — and a talented candidate will find other options. But for overtaxed small business leaders, it’s hard to speed up that process.

How to decrease time to hire, while making sure you choose the right candidate? Leveraging the expertise of a recruiter can dramatically improve the success of your hiring process. This can mean the difference between taking months to hire a suboptimal candidate and finding the perfect one in just a few weeks. And it will keep you from losing talented recruits due to an unwieldy process. 

At IA Blueprint, we have a well-oiled process for targeting — then hiring — the right talent for each client. Read on to learn about crucial strategies that guide our success.

1. Let Your Business Strategy Guide Your Hiring Strategy

Consider both current and anticipated talent gaps. Look at your future direction, so you can hire with long-term needs in mind. Think about what skills and expertise you’ll need as you scale. Then, create or fine-tune your role descriptions based on these needs.

For instance, maybe you need an executive assistant to free up your own time for strategic leadership priorities. Or, maybe you need customer service support for personal or commercial insurance lines, so your existing staff can focus on sales and marketing. Either way, identifying your needs will help you bring in the perfect addition to your team.

1. Ask the Right Questions

When talking with virtual assistant recruits, we know how to watch for whether they’re overselling themselves. We ask the right questions to assess whether they genuinely know what they’re talking about. Great questions focus on specific behaviors and actions they’ve engaged in on the job, asking for examples.

At the same time, we don’t make it an interrogation. Instead, we create a conversational experience that draws out insights about candidates naturally. We also look at whether they have a proven track record in the core areas that clients need help with, based on past employment history.

1. Speed Up the Process

Hiring often takes months. And if your process drags on indefinitely, qualified candidates are going to move on. 

Reducing time to fill a position will help you avoid losing talent to competitors. By partnering with IAB, clients can speed up the process to 3 weeks. If we already know the client and their needs, it can take even less time. Since we always have a strong pipeline of talented recruits, it’s often mainly a matter of matching the right person and company. By reducing the time to hire a candidate, we help you secure your top choice.

1. Create a Smooth and Supportive Candidate Experience

A recruiter acts as the face of the company for prospective employees, so make sure they’re making the right impression. You want your interviewers to be friendly and personable, not standoffish. Tell recruits what to expect from the process every step of the way, too. Good communication will provide stronger insights and keep them invested in the process.

1. Look Outside of the Box

When hiring virtually, you open the door to a vast pool of qualified talent. Skilled applicants around the world can compete for the role, letting you find an ideal match. By hiring a VA from across the world, our clients can tap into an incredible array of skills along with personal qualities like integrity and commitment. Satisfaction is extremely high on both ends, with employees staying with clients for an average of five years.

Hiring the right people will help you build a culture that scales. As you think strategically about hiring, you’ll also grow a team with complementary skill sets who can rely on one another’s abilities to accomplish bigger goals.

Wondering how to partner with a recruiter to optimize your recruitment process? Or, do you want more insight on how a virtual assistant could benefit your operations? Let’s set up a conversation to discuss how to hire a virtual assistant who fits your needs exactly. While small businesses face common challenges, every case is different, and we’ll help you identify the hiring strategy that best fits your stage of growth.