Sabrina

Welcome back to the HR Connection, the podcast built solely for those managing human resources in a 1 to 500 headcount. My name is Sabrina Baker. I am the CEO and founder of Acacia HR Solutions, an embedded fractional HR support firm and one half of the HR Connection hosting team. I will be joined in just a second by Marie, where we are going to talk all things recruiting in a small business. When you are a solo practitioner or part of a small team, recruiting can be such a time suck. And so we want to share some tips and tricks that we have learned over the years to try to streamline that process, things we know we need to have in place, and how to have the conversation you might need to with your leaders about getting some extra support when there are a lot of seats to fill. If you are not already subscribed, now would be a great time to do so before we dive right in.

Marie

Okay, so let's talk about something that happens to basically every HR person working in a small business at some point. So you get hired to be the HR person, right? This also means that you are the compliance person, employee relations person, the policy person, and probably also the payroll person at some point in time. And then one day somebody leaves or the company grows, or maybe it happens both at the same time, and suddenly you are also becoming the recruiting department. You find yourself posting jobs, you're screening resumes, you're scheduling phone screens, coordinating interviews with hiring managers who are just too busy to respond to your emails, and somehow you're doing all of this while the rest of your job hasn't slowed down at all. That is an example of one of the most common things we hear from solo HR practitioners and folks who work in HR in small businesses. And it's also one of the things that gets talked about the least. So this is what we're going to do today. We're going to talk about what to prioritize when you have open recs and no system. We're going to talk about where things go wrong, which is usually in a few very predictable places. And we're going to talk about what repeatable looks like when you have no bandwidth and no infrastructure to build from. We're then going to ground all of that into how we actually approach recruiting at Acacia because, like the rest of our episodes, we're not having a theoretical conversation with all of you. We work with small organizations on this kind of thing every single day. So I'm going to hand it over to Sabrina. She's going to add a CEO lens on all of this because there really is a disconnect between what leaders think recruiting takes and what it actually takes when there's no dedicated function. And that disconnect, it really does matter. But first, I just want to name something really plainly. Now, if you are listening to this and you are currently doing your whole job and recruiting on top of it, you're not behind at all and you're not bad at managing time. You are simply doing two jobs and there really is a difference there.

Sabrina

You know, Marie, this episode is really timely because I just recorded a YouTube episode talking about people who wear many hats inside of a small organization and how when you're super small, like maybe less than 10, that can be smart. It can be really fiscally responsible and it can be smart. But as you scale, it has these invisible costs that no one thinks about. And the invisible costs are that if you are doing three jobs, two jobs, you're not doing half of them well. You're not doing any of them really, really well. And CEOs do not think about that and they certainly don't think about the detail or the information that goes into each job. So when we think about recruiting specifically, we know the amount of work that goes into that. Just playing that calendar Tetris, right? Of just trying to get interviews scheduled when you're trying to navigate six different calendars takes so much time, yet CEOs often have this just fill the role energy, just get it filled. Like, what is the problem? Why does it take so long? They have no idea what goes into doing this well. And for our listeners who are trying to juggle this with something else, juggle this with their other day job, and then have those expectations around just, it's so easy. Like, what are you doing? It can almost feel like we're incapable or like we don't know what we're doing, right? If everybody else thinks it's just so easy, then are we doing something wrong? And the reality is we're not. It's really, really time-consuming and difficult to get this right. 

 

Marie

Yeah. And what Sabrina is describing, that just fill the role energy from leadership, it is real. And I think that it comes from a genuine blind spot. It's not coming from malice by any means. But leaders, they see the output, right? A job gets posted, interviews happen, someone gets hired. But what they don't see is everything that happens behind that, right? They're not seeing the 45 minutes that you're spending rewriting a job description. They're definitely not seeing the screening calls that you had to schedule at 7:00 in the morning because that might have been the only time that worked. And they don't see the follow-up emails, the calendar chaos. They just don't see any of that, right? And so while all of that is happening, your actual HR job is still there waiting for you as well, right? And so that is kind of the reality of wearing both hats here. Recruiting doesn't pause the rest of the job. It just stacks on top of it. So there's also a piece of this that I think is worth naming directly and it doesn't come up enough. So when you are stretched and overwhelmed in recruiting, your stress is about juggling. It's about capacity and bandwidth and a to-do list that's just, it feels too long, right? On the other side, when a candidate is in your process, their stress is personal. Their livelihood is on the line. They might have left another job, right? They might have told their family that they have something promising in the works, but they're in this waiting game that they have no control over and the person with all the information is you. So because of all of that, we want to make sure that we are really driving how we are showing up in the process, even when we're overwhelmed with everything else that's going on on our plate. The candidate experience, it's not a nice-to-have here. It is the thing that protects your organization's reputation and keeps the process from creating problems down the road. But we are going to come back to that. The first thing I want to talk about is triaging because before we can talk about building anything like a recruiting strategy, we need to talk about how you function when you have multiple open recs, no system, and maybe a few hours a week to dedicate to recruiting.

Sabrina

That's probably the biggest thing that I see with this when we have HR people who also have to wear all of these hats and recruiting is one of them, that the candidate experience really suffers. And no one's trying to make it suffer, but it just does because one person, especially if there's many open roles, if they're filling a couple of positions at one time, doing that and trying to keep everything else afloat, it's just hard to focus on candidate experience. Yet small businesses already are at a disadvantage for recruiting talent. They are already competing with firms that are much bigger and offer better pay and offer better benefits and have bigger names, right? And so when you get people in your pipeline, that candidate experience is what keeps them in your pipeline and not moving on to these bigger places. And so it's such a struggle, and I'm glad that we're going to talk about the triage piece because when you have all of this to do and then you have to focus on making a good experience for the candidate, when you're drowning, that can feel really, really overwhelming.

Marie

Yes, it really can. So, okay. You have open recs. You have no process. You have limited time. Where do you start? So the answer to all of these questions, it's not to start just posting jobs if you have a bunch to get out there. The answer is to figure out which recs actually need your attention first. And that is because not all open roles are the same emergency. And when you treat them like they all are equally urgent, you end up spinning on everything and making real progress on nothing. So the first thing I do when I'm looking at a stack of open recs and there's not a lot of infrastructure in place is I ask myself three questions. So the first one is going to be, what is the revenue or operational impact of this role being open? So with that, it's kind of like, is this a revenue-generating position? Is this a role where someone is currently covering and burning out? Is this something the business genuinely cannot function well without, or is this just a nice-to-have that opened up at a bad time? The second question I like to ask is, how long has it been open? So a role that opened six weeks ago and has been quietly ignored by a hiring manager is a different conversation than one that just opened and has real urgency behind it. So when you think about this, age really does matter. The third question is going to be, is the hiring manager going to be a partner in this or a problem? Now, I know that sounds a little blunt, but it is one of the most practical things you can assess right now because a hiring manager who just won't block time for interviews or won't give you feedback will actually cost you weeks of effort in something that you're not actually prepared for. Whereas if you have a hiring manager who is engaged or responsive and realistic around the role, these things are going to make the whole recruiting process run a whole lot smoother. Now, once you've answered those three questions, when you're looking across all of your open recs, you have the information you need to decide what to push, what to pause, and what to escalate before you spin up a full search. Now, when I say push, I mean this is urgent, right? The hiring manager is ready and this is where your time goes first. Now, when I say pause, I mean that the role is either not urgent or maybe the conditions aren't right to move forward. A search started before the hiring manager is aligned is almost always a wasted search. When we talk about escalate, this means that you have identified a rec where the expectations are just unrealistic, right? The timeline might be impossible or something really just needs to be reset at the leadership level before anyone should be sourcing candidates. Now, all of that brings me to the intake conversation. And this is the thing that most HR folks skip when they're super busy and also the thing that would actually save them the most time. Now, before a search starts, you need to make sure you have alignment with the hiring manager on four things. What are the actual non-negotiables for this role? What does the timeline realistically look like? What does the interview process look like and who is doing what? What does the feedback loop look like when I send you candidates? Now, that conversation, it really should take 30 minutes, maybe 45, but it will save you three weeks of going back and forth or starting over and losing candidates in a process that was never actually designed to move in the first place. I cannot stress it enough that the intake conversation, this is not overhead for you. This is the actual work you need to be doing. 

 

Sabrina

So I have a couple of thoughts that I want to jump in. So first of all, as we think through your triage, kind of your questions here around the roles that you have open and how you prioritize them, I think it's something that is worth having a really tough conversation with leadership over. And we've certainly had to do that with clients because if there are five open roles, they want you to try to fill them all right now. They want to post all of them. Let's get going on five interview processes. And not only is that draining on the HR person trying to navigate that, but it definitely means that some of those roles are not going to be handled well. If you haven't really looked at an intake process, if you don't have a manager who's aligned on what they're looking for, if you haven't benchmarked salaries and we're just being reactive in, oh, we need to fill this role and here's what we think, then you're going to waste so much time in a recruiting process that's not fruitful. And I know that there are a lot of HR people who don't want to push back or they don't think they can push back. And I would tell you that if you're ever going to push back, recruiting is a place where I think you have to. You can do that in a way of like, I want to work with you and I want to get this done, but you got to help me with figuring out these things, navigating these things. It's why we, so we work on a fractional basis, a set amount of hours per week, and we literally have limits for how many open roles we will recruit for at one time because we know that if they give us five open roles and they're a 15-hour-a-week client, that's all we're doing. That's it. We're only recruiting, and yet they want us to do all of their other HR stuff. So we have put limits around how many open roles we'll take on at a given time for our retained clients specifically for that reason. And so I think that that triage process that you detailed can be really helpful if you have multiple open roles to figure out which ones really do I start with and then which ones am I still working on and getting to and what's the order of that.

Marie

Now, if you do find yourself having to recruit for three, four roles at the same time, one of the most practical things you can do when you're solo and overwhelmed in a search is get very clear on one distinction. The difference between an applicant and a candidate. Now, I remember when we rolled out our recruiting process and Sabrina, you really broke down the definitions between these two. It felt so obvious, but also it's not something that I had ever really thought about before. So I want to share that with our listeners. Now, an applicant is someone who submitted, right? They clicked apply, attached a resume, and hit send. That is all you know about them, and they exist in a pile of other resumes. A candidate is someone you are actively vetting. You have looked at their background. You have decided they're worth more of your time, and you are moving them forward in the process. Now, these two groups, they have different communication obligations. And more importantly, they require very different amounts of your time. Now, a lot of folks working in HR alone, especially in the small business space, they treat people or every applicant like a candidate, right? And they want to do that because they care. But they write individual emails to everyone who applied. They spend time on every resume, and then they might feel guilty about every person who doesn't hear back from them. And again, I understand that impulse. It comes from a place of caring about the candidate experience, which is a very good thing, and it is important. But what happens in practice is that you burn your time on the volume and the actual candidates, right? The people who you should be focused on, they get a slower and less attentive process because you have nothing left to give. So here's how we think about it. Now, applicants get a timely acknowledgment and a closing communication when the role is filled or paused. That is your sole obligation. You do not owe every applicant a personal note. You don't owe them detailed feedback, but you do owe them a response and a closure. When we think about candidates, these are the folks that are going to get a real process. Candidates get communication at every stage. They get actual feedback when it doesn't work out versus a generic rejection that just doesn't tell them anything. And here is how you keep the volume manageable on the applicant side. So you need to make sure that you're implementing knockout questions in the application. Non-negotiables are called out clearly in the job posting itself. And then use filters and search when you're doing your initial screen. And if you find that the pile is genuinely unmanageable, go ahead and just pause the post. These aren't shortcuts that we're talking about, but they are how you stay within the actual time you have and still give your candidates a good experience. I think about a role that we posted a couple of years ago, and within 24 hours, we had over hundreds of applications, right? And there were maybe two of us trying to go through that effort. We had to triage in that moment immediately.

Sabrina

Yeah. And one of the interesting things that we didn't mention here is AI, right? We're not talking AI. And the reason we are deliberate about that, AI has its place. We use AI a ton, but we also know that our listeners may not even have an applicant tracking system. They literally might be getting all of the resumes to their email. They may have no system. I hope you do. I hope you have a system, but I also know that you may not. And so we certainly don't want to share anything that is unreasonable for anyone to be able to do. The HR person using those knockout questions, using your filters, using things you can do to help people deselect. I talk about non-negotiables all the time because if I want somebody on-site five days a week, I want that clear and loud and proud in the job posting and the job description and everything that they see because I want them to deselect themselves if they don't want to be on-site five days a week.

Marie

Yes, exactly. On top of that, let's talk about what repeatable actually looks like. So repeatable, it doesn't have to mean fancy here. But instead, repeatable means that you're not reinventing the wheel every single time a rec opens up. Now, this looks like having a job rec intake process, even if that process is just a one-page document with a few questions on it. It also means that you have something like a basic interview guide with a structure that your hiring managers can actually use. That way, interviews are evaluating the same things across all the candidates. It also means that you have templated email responses for every stage in your recruiting process and then templates that you can customize as needed rather than just writing from scratch every single time. Now, those three things alone will change how recruiting feels. On the tactical side, I have examples of a small or I have examples of some small infrastructure pieces that compound over time. Now, it's so important to set things up like a calendar link for scheduling versus having emails going back and forth trying to coordinate a call. So instead, you can just send out one link. Candidates are able to self-schedule, and then your inbox doesn't become a coordination nightmare. Sabrina, you mentioned AI earlier. Now, we really like to use an AI note-taker, and we encourage folks to use it if they have access to it. This is especially helpful in the recruiting process because while you're on an interview, you can be very present instead of trying to sit there and listen and write notes at the same time. Another non-negotiable, in my opinion, is going to be having a 15-minute weekly standup with each hiring manager who's working on an active search. So this is 15 minutes or less. You give them a status update. You give them some feedback. You talk to them about some blockers that you might be experiencing, and then you definitely want to go over next steps. What's nice about this is that you don't have to chase anyone down if there's already a standing touchpoint where you're going to meet with people weekly just to talk about what's going on. Now, what I just described, these aren't big systems at all, but they are consistent habits. And honestly, consistency is what's going to hold when you're stretched across a full HR function and also trying to fill three jobs. 

 

Sabrina

Yeah, I'm sure that to some, that might sound a little overwhelming, everything that we just said, but every piece of that absolutely saves you time. Yes, it might feel overwhelming to set it up. It might feel overwhelming to think about having email templates to tell people that the job is closed. Any of this could feel like it's overwhelming. And maybe to set it all up, to sit down and think about getting a calendar link and potentially looking at an AI note-taker, although if you have Zoom or I think Microsoft does this too, a lot of those are becoming just part of it now. And so you may have something already available to you. It's going to just save you so much time after you get it set up. And so it's just sitting down and really coming up with what does your recruiting process look like, and what are those components that you can do to really save yourself throughout this process and help, again, with that candidate experience. Also, it's another reason I'm just going to push again why you cannot be expected to hire five, six roles at the same time. You have to figure out what your capacity is. And that can change based on what else is going on. But you really have to, as the HR person, figure out what your capacity is to take this on and really push back when there's more open roles than you know you can handle well.

Marie

Yes. Exactly. And so let's keep going on that because I want to talk about where the recruiting process starts to break down because there are a few places it almost always breaks down, and they are definitely predictable enough that it's worth naming all of them. So the most common breakdown points I see are these. The first is going to be no intake conversation, right? So I talked about this a little bit earlier. But your search, it starts because a rec got approved, right? A posting goes up, resumes start coming in, and then nobody has had a 20-minute conversation with the hiring manager about what they actually need. So you find yourself a few weeks later just having to start over because the feedback is something like, "Oh, that candidate isn't quite right." And maybe you're hearing that on every candidate. And at the end of the day, you still have no idea what right actually looks like. Next is going to be interview panels that don't have any alignment on what is actually being evaluated. And so this looks like having multiple people in a room or on a call, each doing their own version of the interview with no shared rubric and no debrief structure, right? So the feedback, it ends up being contradictory. The next one is going to be offers that surprise people. So either the candidate or the hiring manager, sometimes both. But the candidate might get a number that's not close to what they were expecting, right? Or maybe the hiring manager is surprised by what it's going to cost to close the candidate they're actually excited about. Now, both of these are conversations that should have just happened before anyone got to the offer stage in the beginning, but they often don't happen because there wasn't a good process built for it. But the one that really hurts the most is this one. So you spend a few weeks or maybe a month on a search, right? You do it right. You do the intake. You screen as carefully as possible, and you run the best process that you can. You end up with a finalist candidate who's very excited, and then the offer takes 10 days to actually get written. And then that candidate takes another offer and goes to another job. Now, those are examples of something that always is a solvable problem, but it doesn't get solved because nobody is building the backend, right? Nobody is designing the offer stage with the same intention they designed the screening stage. In this instance, it's an example of where the front of the process gets all the attention, and really the backend is where you're going to lose people every single time.

Sabrina

And it does unbelievably sting, doesn't it? When you spend weeks or months on a process, you have them. You've got the perfect person finally. And then for whatever reason, it falls through. They take another offer because it was taking too long. And when that's your fault, and I don't mean yours by the HR persons, I mean the organizations, whatever happened inside the org's fault, it hurts so bad because there are very good chances you've let every other candidate go, right? That you've probably had a gap in time of conversation with them as well. So they've assumed the job is no longer open, or you've already told them it's not because you thought this was happening. And now you are starting over from day one again. It's such a time waster. That last one hurts all of them. I think panels, I go back and forth on panels and whether I love them or hate them, and it really just depends on the day. But definitely, you and I did a we did an episode last year around recruiting, and I think we'll have to link that in the show notes because I think it's another good one for them to work through. And it kind of goes through our skills framework, which is a really important document. But we talk about the fact that so many interviews are just repeats of the previous one. So you have the HR interview, and then you have a hiring manager interview, and then if you have a panel, and then maybe one more interview, they all ask the same questions. And there's no decision on what are we really looking for. There's no conversation. And so all of that just becomes such a waste. And not only such a waste, but then it also results in not great hires.

Marie

Say you implement all of these lovely things that we have shared, I want to go back to something that Sabrina talked about. So now we trust and believe in this process, and we encourage you to try it because we know it can be effective. At some point, especially if you are managing HR by yourself and you're trying to do all the things and carry recruiting along, you're going to need to have a conversation with your leadership about the load because at some point, it may become too much to manage alone. So I do want to talk about how to have that conversation, go into it a little bit deeper because there is a version of it that lands, and there's a version of it that gets dismissed, and the difference is almost entirely about framing. Now, the version that gets dismissed sounds like, "Hey, I have too much on my plate, and I need help." While that is true, it reads like a workload complaint, and leaders who are not in the day-to-day of what you carry often hear that as a time management conversation. The version that actually lands is going to sound like, "Hey, here's what it costs to have this role open for 60 days. Here's what slipped in HR while I was heads down on recruiting, and here is what it looks like to get some support." So with that, you're not coming into the conversation with a complaint. You're coming into the conversation with a business impact. You really need data. Now, you don't need a lot of data, but you just need enough of it to make a business conversation, right? So you can focus on things like time spent on recruiting over the last quarter, even if it's just an estimate. You can go in and you can say something like, "I've spent roughly 30% of my time on recruiting over the last couple of months." Now, that is an example of something concrete, right? You can go into that conversation, and you can focus on what slipped. You're not talking about these things as a complaint, but as a business impact, right? So when you go in, you can say something like, "The onboarding process was lighter than it should have been," or "The employee handbook review got pushed because of this." Another thing you can go into this conversation with is the cost of an open role. And you can easily find a calculator online for this, but the general rule of thumb is that an open role costs somewhere between half and two times the annual salary when you factor in lost productivity, coverage costs, and the recruiting time itself. Now, you don't have to have a perfect answer, but you do need to have the data ready to go and the ask you want to give to your leadership team. Now, the ask, it doesn't have to be a full-time recruiter. It could be a contract recruiter for one specific search. It could be an RPO for a specific role type. Or maybe it's just getting an ATS, so you're not running everything out of spreadsheets and email all the time. At the end of the day, you do deserve to be heard in this conversation, and the best way to make sure you are is to walk in with numbers and not frustration.

Sabrina

Yeah, we've talked plenty of times on this podcast about how CEOs love data. If you bring me numbers and you tell me what it's costing this business, then my ears are going to perk up, and I'm going to listen. If you just come in and say, "I'm busy, and I'm overwhelmed," I'm just going to be honest that as a CEO, the minute somebody says that to me, I'm like, "Why? Why are you busy, and why are you overwhelmed?" If I don't immediately understand, if there is not a viable reason, like we're onboarding new clients this week or we've started a new project, if I don't see a viable reason for it, then I'm going to dismiss that. 

 

Marie

Okay, folks, if today's episode gave you something you can actually use this week, we'd love for you to take that next step. Go ahead, head over to akashiahrsolutions.com. We have some resources tied directly to what we talked about today. We have an intake form template, screener question guides, and a communication template for every single stage of the process. These are the things we referenced. We use them, and they're there for you to use as well. Also, if you are a solo HR practitioner who's figuring out how to build out the HR function in a small organization, we would love to hear from you. Really, we've built so much of what we have exactly for that person.

Sabrina

All right. And should you find yourself in need of recruiting support and you're able to get outside help, you're able to have that conversation and get some outside support, we do recruiting as a project. So it's very different than an agency recruiter. We do embedded recruiting as a project at an hourly rate. You can cap those hours. You can decide how many hours. And then it's something that you can ramp up and ramp down. It is a little bit of a unique model and something that can be really beneficial for short-term help.

Marie

Thanks, Sabrina. And thanks for everyone for being here today. We'll see you next time.

Sabrina

We'll see you next time.