Business.com |
- How to Build Links for Your Brand New Business
- 6 Tips for Bootstrapping Your E-Commerce Business to Seven Figures in Sales
- 4 Ways to Leverage Instagram to Promote Your Business Events
- 5 Reasons Why Every Small Business Should Use an Employee App in 2020
- How Direct Sourcing and Pre-Verification Save You Time and Money
| How to Build Links for Your Brand New Business Posted: 21 Jan 2020 12:00 PM PST 
If you're a new business owner, chances are, you've heard other people talking about backlinks. You may even have a good understanding of how backlinks benefit your business by improving your organic SEO ranking, which leads to more sales and conversions. But do you know how to get more backlinks for your website? The truth is, the art of getting backlinks has changed drastically throughout the years. At one point, Google rewarded sites that had the most links; quality didn't play into the equation. Now, the quality of links means more than ever before. Consumers are building bonds with brands due to the technological advancements of the past couple of decades. They expect to shop with companies that are well known and mentioned by other brands that they know. Additionally, Google's web crawlers now rely on links to determine where to rank websites based on specific keywords. This approach works better than paying for your position on Google namely because websites that rank organically get 94% of clicks when compared to paid results. We are going to take a look at several tips you can put into practice today that will help you master the art of building links and help you grow your new business. Maintain your internal link structureYour internal link structure is one of the most critical aspects of your website. Consumers and crawlers depend on the links that you add to each page to navigate to their destination. Additionally, links keep disengaged visitors on your website by giving them access to posts that they might find more relevant than the one they are reading. When adding links to your posts, you have to think about the link you're adding and the anchor text you'll use. Both of these factors help readers (and Google) understand the intent of your piece of content and product if you're operating an e-commerce storefront. Link relevancy helps you build a strong internal network of intertwined pieces of content. For example, if you want to build internal links to your marketing website, you'll want to create separate clusters of links that focus around each subniche of marketing. In other words, if someone is reading your article on email marketing, they should be able to find links to other pieces of content on your website that discuss other areas of email marketing. Additionally, it's vital that you keep track of how deep your links go on your website. As a general rule, the user should only be able to navigate three to four pages deep before they are presented with a lead magnet. Look for guest posting opportunitiesGuest posting is when you post a piece of content, preferably one relevant to your niche, on a website other than your own. There are countless opportunities to write guest posts for other publications and companies, but you should always make sure you're working with a reputable company with high domain authority. You can find both paid and free tools that let you learn about a publication before you craft a pitch. Once you know that the site you want to write for is authoritative, relevant to your niche, and accepting guest posts, it's time to sell your idea. We suggest keeping your pitch short and sweet, but make sure you let editors and business owners know why your piece of content will add value to your website. Create a premise and explain it in your pitch. If your pitch is approved, write a high-quality piece of content and add links to your website (per the guidelines) using the same practices we mentioned above. Specifically, your anchor text should match the keyword you want to rank for on your website. If you want to rank for email marketing, you would link one of your articles about the topic to the anchor text. Another great way to get links is by offering to review products and services. There are plenty of business owners who reach out to other companies and offer to review their products and give them an honest testimonial. If you include a link to your website at the end of the review, for example, "John Doe, writer at Business," you'll land another link to your website from an authoritative source. All of your guest posts will likely get shared on social media. When you consider that the average consumer spends two hours and twenty-two minutes on social media each day and that 80% of internet users have at least one social media account, it's easy to see the benefits of guest posting as it pertains to brand awareness and your link building strategy. Find broken links on other websitesFinally, you can build links on your new website by looking for relevant broken links on other business pages. Let's revisit the example marketing website we mentioned earlier. If you go to a hosting site and notice that one of their links with an email marketing provider is bringing up a 404 error, you can email the webmaster and let them know that the link is broken and that you have a suggestion for a replacement link. The goal is to get the reputable site to remove the broken link, and, instead, insert your healthy link. If a website gets a ton of traffic and shares, there's a good chance that this seemingly small decision can have a massive impact on the state of your link-building strategy. The more high-quality links you have to your website, the better odds you'll have at reaching more consumers. Some marketers and business owners see this strategy as tedious, but, luckily, there's another way to find broken links without manually reviewing every link you come across. Google Chrome offers a free plugin called Check My Links, which allows you to go to any website and see the results of each link in one comprehensive list. Once you find a site that you think might benefit from your link, scan the relevant pages with the plugin and look for 404 errors. If you get a hit on a link that's related to your industry, reach out to the business owner or editor. In many cases, this type of outreach can result in new business opportunities. The business owner you contacted might be looking for a new guest post writer or someone to review their latest product. These are additional opportunities to grow your network and brand reach. ConclusionBuilding links is necessary if you hope to have a successful website that gets a ton of traffic and sales. It's important to note that cultivating excellent links for your website doesn't happen overnight. You might restructure your internal links and submit guest posts and still not see a significant shift. If you're following these practices and consistently building high-quality links, you will see a change in your position on Google and get more organic traffic to your website. |
| 6 Tips for Bootstrapping Your E-Commerce Business to Seven Figures in Sales Posted: 21 Jan 2020 10:00 AM PST  Many young companies in their early stages find themselves shorter on resources than they would like to be. This is a natural place to be in, but this doesn't mean you have to lower your expectations for growth. There are countless success stories of smart, innovative people starting with nothing and creating massively profitable companies. It's unwise to think that just because your resources are limited, you can't increase sales. E-commerce companies are in an especially advantageous position to increase sales without increasing costs because of the efficiencies of an online business model. Unlike a brick-and-mortar businesses, the advantage of working in e-commerce is that increased sales often do not lead to significant increases in costs from wages and store maintenance, though this isn't always necessarily the case. It takes creativity and patience, but anyone can increase revenue without a massive budget. Here are six tips that will help you bootstrap your e-commerce business to seven figures in sales. Build your email subscribers list.Findings from a recent Adobe report state that around 98% of millennials check their personal email at least every few hours. Email marketing is a highly effective channel for re-engaging with customers who have already demonstrated an interest in your value proposition. If a well-thought-out email marketing campaign is managed and executed properly, e-commerce stores have shown the ability to confidently attribute over 50% of sales to the campaign. The first step in email marketing is to set up drip campaigns, abandoned-cart emails, and other sequences to re-engage customers. Producing quality content — and the email copy and templates that come along with it, of course — to consistently send out can't be understated. The good news is that if you're already creating content for your website, you can often repurpose said content into new emails. All it takes is a slight change of format, and you have a ready-to-go message for your customers. The next step is to build a strong list of email subscribers. This can be a slow, tedious process, but the better the content you create and send out and the more creative you get with email-capture campaigns, the quicker this process should be. Once you have a strong, sizable list of subscribers, you have access to people who have already declared themselves fans of your content by signing up for the emails you regularly send out. Needless to say, these people should be treated as top-quality leads for your company. After creating the necessary content and building a subscriber list of your own, you'll want to make sure people are actually reading the emails you're sending out by tracking open rates – from there, optimize things on your end, accordingly. Pay attention to what the data is telling you and refine your content to meet your subscribers' interests. Editor's note: Looking for the right email marketing service for your business? Fill out the below questionnaire to have our vendor partners contact you about your needs.
Target the right audience.Some young companies think they will achieve major profits by selling their products to everyone. Unfortunately, the larger your desired audience is, the more costly it will be to reach them. At least initially, it's important to choose a finite, well-defined audience and specifically target the people found therein. You will spend far less money on customer acquisition if you target a specific group of people and cater your products and marketing efforts to their unique needs. As you get more specific in your targeting, your ability to refine and optimize will increase. When choosing an audience to target, think about how you can meet the unmet needs of one specific group. Then, run a series of A/B tests on Facebook and Instagram to validate these assumptions. Use social media to build community.As of 2020, it's widely accepted that social media is one of the best tools for businesses trying to grow without spending millions of dollars in the process. Social media can help you build brand loyalty by interacting with customers on a more personal level. It's also great for building a sense of community with them. Brand loyalty is important for a company trying to increase sales, as a reported 43% of customers spend more money at stores (or with brands, really) with which they feel an emotional connection. Keep this in mind as your brand seeks to interact with customers and prospective customers on social media. Engagement is great, but merely existing on social media does little to help improve a brand's bottom line. In order to build a sense of community and brand loyalty among your brand's social media followers, it's important to frequently engage with customers. In turn, this encourages them to engage with you, as well. Responding quickly to interactions and getting to know your customers on a more personal, yet appropriate level helps with this. Social media contests and giveaways can also encourage engagement, too. It's important to be consistent in posting on social media, so your customers look forward to the content you share. As you increase your consistency, followers will start to expect your content, which saves you the effort of trying to reach them. Lastly, avoid the knee-jerk desire to simply establish Instagram as your e-commerce brand's channel of choice. Instead, diversify, finding the right mix of social networks that will make the most sense for your brand. Make data-driven decisions.Running a business has often been treated as a trial-and-error process. Business owners follow their intuition and wait to see what the results will be. Unfortunately, it can be expensive to test new strategies on your company with no guarantee of success. A business with limited resources has little room for error and must test early, often and resourcefully. Luckily, making decisions doesn't have to be a guessing game. In fact, if you want to increase your sales by a large percentage, your decisions must be informed by data, especially if you are trying to avoid wasteful spending. With today's technology, there are numerous low-cost ways to use data for decision-making. Most website platforms will help you track consumer behavior. For example, Google Analytics is an excellent resource for understanding your customers. Spend some time with the tool to better understand it. From there, deploy it to understand the onsite behavior of those to whom you're selling. Using the resources available to you to make decisions will lead to a much higher chance of success than simply relying on your gut instinct. The truth of the matter? Even with a microscopic budget, you can still achieve tremendous profits. Prioritize excellent customer service.Implementing customer service of the highest quality is another low-cost way to increase revenue and stand out against the competition. According to a 2019 Gladly Survey, 84% of customers will switch to a different company after three negative experiences with customer service. Furthermore, 17% of customers leave after just one bad experience. The best way to ensure that customers feel properly taken care of is to respond to questions, comments and concerns as quickly and effectively as possible. According to Gladly's findings, consumers expect a response to email inquiries in three to four hours. Live chat is also gaining traction as an efficient way to communicate with customers. Consumers expect a response to a live chat inquiry in under a minute. After all, there's a reason it's called "live chat." The expectation is that it is constantly being monitored. Unfortunately, failure to meet these kinds of quick response rate expectations can make a bad impression on customers. Avoid this issue by making customer care a top priority for your e-commerce brand. Although expectations for customer service are high, these expectations are frequently not met. Consumers are always looking for a new brand that will take care of them better than the rest. Though difficult, this gives you an excellent opportunity to acquire new buyers by simply showing them that you have the highest customer service in your industry. Free shipping and quick returns are simple offerings that users expect in 2020 – start thinking beyond these offers for continued success in 2020 and beyond. Implement cost-effective marketing strategies.The implementation of certain growth-marketing strategies can produce tremendous ROI. For example, if you're looking for a good place to start, content marketing – think of creating and managing a blog, for example – is a great way to engage in some new-age marketing without ruining a budget. This kind of organic approach, however, won't yield much in the way of revenue-generating results all that quickly. Creating and implementing a comprehensive paid-ad campaign with more tried-and-true growth hacks can generate the explosive growth you might be looking for. Much of this starts with strategy, experimentation and engaging content. For the purpose of brevity, however, let's focus solely on the final point. In terms of visual content, video can reliably perform if executed well. In fact, a recent survey held by Renderforest found that 78% of businesses increased their site traffic after creating and housing video content on their websites. Video content is sometimes seen as too expensive to pursue, but it doesn't have to be. Anyone with a smartphone, an editing app, and a bit of artistic ingenuity can quickly upload videos and increase web traffic. Whatever form of content you end up going with, the following can't be understated: It must be of the highest quality. It may seem difficult to consistently create high-quality content, but keep in mind that you can repurpose existing content to remove some of that pressure. Finally, another cost-effective marketing strategy is retargeting. Retargeting campaigns are a highly efficient way to convert piping-hot leads into new customers while keeping costs down. In a retargeting campaign, ads are directed toward people who have already shown some kind of initial interest in your brand by visiting your page. Retargeting uses cookie-based technology to track when people view your website or product page but have not yet finalized a purchase. It's an extremely popular strategy among entrepreneurs and marketers as it produces reliable ROI that's easy to measure and learn from. And it makes sense – it takes much less effort and money to acquire a new user who has already shown an interest in your e-commerce offering. Feeling overwhelmed by all of this? If so, you're not alone. Though it might sound corny, it's true: The journey to seven-figure e-commerce sales is a marathon, not a sprint. Take your time, allow yourself to make mistakes, and your e-commerce store will see real growth before you know it. |
| 4 Ways to Leverage Instagram to Promote Your Business Events Posted: 21 Jan 2020 08:00 AM PST  While members of the media consistently prophesy its demise, social media hasn't jumped the shark. In truth, there's never been a better time to be on social media. While Facebook and Twitter have been social media's standard-bearers for much of the past decade, they've lost some ground to the likes of TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram. In particular, Instagram has experienced meteoric growth. Millions of new users join the platform every month, and it soared past 1 billion monthly users back in 2018. According to information from Apple, Instagram was the second-most downloaded app on the Apple app store in 2019 — it held the same spot in 2018. Instagram continues to attract hordes of new audience members every single day, and the business world needs to take notice. Facebook was once the go-to platform for companies that wanted to be active on social media. As consumers turn their attention to alternatives like Instagram, they expect their favorite brands to do the same. More than 200 million users visit at least one business profile every day on Instagram, which means business leaders would be wise to adjust their social strategies accordingly. How exactly? By using Instagram to provide a more personal touch and behind-the-scenes glimpses to consumers. This is useful in all facets of business, but Instagram is particularly powerful when it comes to promoting events. Generating buzz with the 'GramInstagram provides a more direct connection to potential attendees. The app's updated algorithm favors high-quality business content when it pulls in new images for users. A business account on the social network is free and easy to open, which means you can begin using Instagram to promote your events in a matter of minutes. By strategically using influencers, advertisements and Instagram stories, your brand can build buzz for upcoming events. For starters, Instagram stories let you cobble together several videos and images into a narrative that disappears 24 hours later — a lot like Snapchat stories. Few small and midsize businesses have integrated the stories feature into their event promotions, but it can be incredibly useful. These stories can weave an ongoing tale for your event, building momentum with each installment. In addition to creating your own content, Instagram influencers can boost your event via paid campaigns. While influencer marketing once required a massive budget – Nike shelled out millions in the '80s to partner with Michael Jordan – social media enables businesses to reach millions of passionate followers without much star power. This change has made it cheaper and easier for brands to work with influencers to promote their events. Beyond influencers, you can also sink some budget into advertising your event on Instagram. Instagram ads are still relatively affordable, and they operate on the same platform as Facebook advertisements – so there's a small barrier to entry. As you post about your event and gain exposure, followers are more likely to attend your event; when those same people post about attending your event, you should gain more exposure on social media and more followers. Lather, rinse, repeat. How to effectively promote an event on InstagramInstagram can be an incredibly useful tool for small and midsize businesses that operate in niches, as the power of Facebook's targeting algorithms is the backbone of Instagram ads – Facebook owns Instagram, after all. This means your team can home in on your specific target audiences and find users who have taken certain actions, such as following other industry events. StartUp FASHION, an online community of independent fashion designers and brands, uses Instagram to promote its brand and events. Instead of spreading itself too thin by being a jack-of-all-trades, StartUp FASHION focuses on Instagram by posting images, videos and stories for its more than 15,000 followers. Here are four ways to promote your events on Instagram in a way that publicizes your brand while providing a tangible return via ticket sales. 1. Offer a compelling narrativeWhile it's wonderful to have a profile flush with gorgeous images of your event, you want a strategy to guide your Instagram posts. Consistent publishing is important, but this particular social network is more about telling your followers a story. For starters, switch how you view your posts. While they're a great way to show off your event and encourage followers to purchase tickets, they're equally effective at driving ongoing engagement, which eventually leads to ticket sales. Add a little life to your posts by including geolocation tags and hashtags, which have driven 79% more engagement. You can also share videos of your event – or hyping your event – or post photo albums on various themes to tell visual stories. To get a little bit more juice from your event posts, tag related influencers such as vendors and sponsors. 2. Collaborate with influencersWhile you want to create compelling posts, Instagram can be even more effective when influencers begin to talk about your event. These influencers can range from paid brand ambassadors who have a massive following to microinfluencers who cultivate small yet loyal fanbases. Whether they've reached Kardashian status or are just getting started, influencers can give your event a jump-start with their dedicated followers. You'll want to work with any influencer whose followers match your target audience in terms of geographic locations, demographics or interests. A great example is Wanderlust, which started as a small, yoga-focused festival. Now, it encompasses global wellness events, a streaming video service, and physical yoga centers in places like Montreal and Hollywood. Festival organizers use Instagram as a critical marketing tool, telling stories year-round that showcase it as a unified brand. 3. Use stories to their full potentialWhile traditional in-feed posts might focus more on event highlights, you can use stories to record events in real time. Piece together short – less than 10 seconds – videos and a collection of snapshots, and you'll create the sort of content that your followers crave. As mentioned earlier, Instagram stories disappear 24 hours after posting. These temporary postings are the future of the platform, and they have strategic applications. For one, they can compel your followers to regularly check in to avoid missing out on behind-the-scenes content or insider information. They also give you a great avenue to test new types of content or strategies in a temporary environment or to tease announcements while keeping users hungry for more details. And once you have at least 10,000 followers, you can add clickable links to your stories — something not possible with traditional Instagram posts. Use this opportunity to link followers to your ticketing page at least once a week, which should help you convert viewers into attendees. 4. Make the most of your bio.While Instagram fame is terrific, you'll want to turn that buzz into event registrations. Save followers the hassle of combing your website for your ticketing or registration page by making it the URL of your Instagram profile. This profile link is your best chance to drive sales through Instagram. If you're promoting multiple events at once, you might consider creating a landing page specifically for Instagram traffic to direct users to several offerings. In addition to a helpful URL, you can use your profile to offer users a custom hashtag to share event-related posts. Get creative with your bio and make the most of your limited space. Instagram has never been more popular, and it shows no signs of slowing. With more than a billion monthly users scrolling through Instagram feeds, it makes a lot of business sense to use the social network to promote your event — and hopefully sell a few tickets. By being strategic about what you post, how you post, and who posts about you, you can help your event generate the kind of grassroots support any brand would love to have. |
| 5 Reasons Why Every Small Business Should Use an Employee App in 2020 Posted: 21 Jan 2020 07:00 AM PST  If there's one thing a small business owner knows, it's that they're expected to be on top of everything, all the time. Everything. All. The. Time. From solving problems to effective internal communication and boosting engagement, to offering a positive customer experience, creating work schedules and more. I mean, the list never stops! However, when it comes to employee management, there is a solution that can help you streamline each process so you can focus on what matters to you: achieving the goals of your company. Employee behavior is evolving, and it's starting to follow the path we've seen with consumer behavior. Consumers have become so dependent on mobile devices. They are the dashboard to everything in our daily lives. And that's now transferring over to the employee experience. Employee management software apps help keep everyone on the same page, and all processes perfectly streamlined so you can run your business and manage your team efficiently and seamlessly. Thanks to the latest advances in management software, there are plenty of online tools that allow small businesses to easily create their employee app. Exactly. An employee app that is customized for your own business. The benefits of an employee app stretch across the organization. An app
Let's cover more of these benefits in depth. Streamlined communicationHere's what we know about communication at the workplace:
Employee apps are specifically built to enable seamless communication between staff, whether they're behind a desk or on the go. Managers can't always be in 50 places at once. That's why employee management apps allow you to hold conversations and share ideas messages, videos, and documents all in one place without skipping a beat. Employees are also busy. They have jobs to get done and they're sometimes inundated with work messages that often prove distracting from actually doing their jobs. Research is beginning to show to collaborative tools such as Slack, can be antiproductivity tools because of the constant interruptions and the way need-to-know information gets completely lost in the shuffle of minutia. For example, "What's for lunch today?" "How was your weekend?" An employee app enables companies to have conversations with each individual where it's personalized. It's like you're having a one-on-one conversation and the employee can provide instant feedback. It can be by liking a post, making a comment, or offering his or her opinion in a real-time pulse survey. It builds a closer, more vibrant, deeper connection. Increased employee engagementWhen you have staff that is committed to the company and to the work they do, you have engaged employees. Employees who don't just show up to earn a salary but genuinely care and are invested in what they do and how the company does. With good employee engagement, you have increased employee productivity, higher customer satisfaction, low turnover and enhanced company culture. From the first day, you should aim to establish employee engagement, and with an employee management app, that's attainable and not a faraway dream. Regularly, you can send surveys to gain feedback to better understand the concerns and satisfaction of your employees, offer a suggestion box so your team can dish out their thoughts and ideas, send instant company updates like a new product launch or welcoming a new employee, allow for social alerts to recognize the employee of the month or other achievements, and so much more. An improved onboarding processFrom the second a new hire sets foot in the office, you must establish a smooth and efficient onboarding process. Instead of them sifting through endless binders of training material and filling out piles of paperwork, shift everything to the employee app to streamline the entire process. With an employee app, each new hire has their process on the app with easy access to relevant documents. Most employee management apps allow you to create quizzes to gauge if all content was understood. All of the above will help streamline the onboarding process as they become a part of your company. Truth be told, training for new employees can be overwhelming at times. This is just another reason to make it fun and engaging. You'll notice in no time that your new employees will be taking on the position they were hired for with extra confidence and fluency. Streamlined workflows that ensure employee safetyEnsure employee safety with daily checklists and workflows via your employee app. Now your team can work more efficiently as the workflow of your company is streamlined. Via the app, you can hold virtual meetings, share tasks, send reports and forms while on the go, ask for feedback, send safety updates or hazard reports, and so much more. In fact, an employee app is a practical method of supporting safety-related activities and can help boost your company's safety culture. With your employee app, you can do the following:
An employee app makes it that much easier to encourage and maintain employee safety and ensures a safety culture that works across the board. Decreased employee turnoverEmployee turnover can seriously cost your company as much as twice the employee's salary in your efforts to find and hire a replacement. That's money and time you just can't afford to lose. So how can you decrease employee turnover with an employee management app?
According to a study around employee communication and engagement, the stats reflect the disturbing disconnect between how companies believe they're connecting with workers and what is happening. Among the findings:
There are many more reasons why an employee management app for small businesses is a must for 2020, but the list could run on for pages. The takeaways are all the positive benefits this addition will bring for your company and your employees. Remember, not long ago, employee management work was recorded on paper for the most part. Nowadays, you can get any employee app, customize it to your needs and bring that workload down for good. Advances in mobile technology will continue to make this tool more and more customized for each business and I'm pretty confident that soon enough every business will be using employee management apps. With today's accessibility to smartphones, there is no telling how far we can go. One thing is for sure, it will be really easy to find the employee app that works best for you and your employees. |
| How Direct Sourcing and Pre-Verification Save You Time and Money Posted: 21 Jan 2020 06:00 AM PST  Show me a company that isn't focused on saving time and money, and I'll show you a company that's doomed to fail. We operate in a world where we expect near-immediate gratification: we stream movies, pay yearly premiums for fast shipping, communicate via text message, and search the internet for answers for which we used to visit the library. With the current consumer demand for getting things fast, a company that doesn't find ways to save time will certainly lose money. Consequently, when it comes to sourcing and hiring talent (often an expensive and time-consuming process), the company that uses direct sourcing and streamlined candidate verification processes will find itself ahead of the game. Direct sourcingDirect sourcing is a talent management process in which a company develops its own talent pool and pulls from it directly to fill vacant positions rather than using a recruiting agency. Often, managers build relationships with independent professionals and repeatedly turn to them for long- or short-term project work, rather than onboarding permanent staff. By cutting out the middleman (outside recruitment agencies) and dealing directly with prospective talent, direct sourcing can be the means of saving organizations significant time and money, thereby increasing their return on their hiring investments and boosting a company's bottom line. How direct sourcing saves timeNo waitingThe paradigm for finding work candidates has shifted markedly and is unlikely to shift back. According to Travis O'Rourke, Vice President of Head of Hays Talent Solutions, "Recruitment is already a far distance from the post-and-apply model of decades past, and in [a] world of skills scarcity you must find and engage with candidates to get the talent you need." This shift is a positive change in many ways, but perhaps particularly as it relates to saving time. Now, rather than waiting for candidates to come to you, you go to them. Platforms and apps where qualified candidates await discovery are in abundant supply. Your work is half-finishedSpeaking of apps and platforms, you'll find that if you use them, they'll have done a large part of the work for you by the time you get there. Sifting through resumes? Check. Employee verification? Check. Unqualified candidates weeded out? Check. Your talent management team will be able to focus on onboarding rather than frontloading, which will get people to work faster, resulting in a better experience on both sides of the equation. Full pipelinesDirect sourcing, especially in terms of bringing on freelancers or consultants, results in a talent pool that feeds itself. When you source and hire qualified people for contingent work, the relationship doesn't need to end just because the project has.
As you hire these professionals for specific projects, your in-house talent database expands, leaving you with a pipeline of vetted, tried-and-true candidates to choose from for future assignments. The larger this pipeline grows, the more your company will have already absorbed the work of onboarding, and the quicker you can fill vacancies with full confidence. How direct sourcing saves moneyReduced recruiting costsThird-party staffing companies, like everybody else, are in the business of making money. As such, they may mark up their services anywhere from 20% to 40%, which accounts for a good portion of what organizations spend on their hiring processes. If you can cut that out by sourcing your own talent, you'll see significant savings that will continue to grow with every independent professional you bring on – and especially for those you bring back. By establishing an in-house recruiting system, you can focus specifically on finding and attracting independent talent, which is something that most recruiting companies don't do. You can also work on deepening the pool from which you draw on a regular basis. Reduced payroll costsAdditionally, independent talent acquired through direct sourcing is often less costly to a company in terms of benefits packages and permanent paychecks. The flexibility of hiring independent contractors for projects allows you to bypass the costs of recruiting, hiring, training, and retaining (with perks, insurance, and other benefits) permanent employees. Pre-screeningOne of the benefits of using an existing direct sourcing application or platform is that they take care of a large part of the candidate verification process for you, which removes a significant helping from your talent management team's plate of responsibilities. This service is advantageous in terms of both time and money. Pre-verificationJob verification, also known as candidate verification or employee screening, is a process by which organizations determine whether a candidate is a good fit for a company. To determine whether a prospective employee is trustworthy with the right personality and credentials for the job, talent management officials may consider factors such as:
The process may include drug screenings, background checks, personality tests, or other procedures that hiring officials deem relevant. Pre-verification, then, is when much or the entirety of the candidate verification process is complete before the applicant even gets in front of an organization's hiring administrators. Reputable direct sourcing platforms will conduct pre-screening as a routine part of their process. How pre-verification saves timeReduced resume-siftingOne of the most dreaded and time-consuming facets of the entire recruiting process is sifting through countless resumes to determine which candidates are worth approaching. As every recruiter knows, sometimes even the most promising resumes don't yield equally promising candidates as some people unfortunately fabricate their work history. Imagine the time you can save by combing a beach for candidates where the sand has already been sifted and the less desirable clumps have been removed, leaving the most qualified candidates ready to connect with. To make it even easier, some direct sourcing platforms specialize in specific industries, saving you that much more time by further reducing the number of prospects you need to scan. Reduced screening timeThere is no way around it – employee verification is a time-consuming process. Phone screens, preliminary interviews, and reference checks don't conduct themselves. Even filling out the paperwork, electronic or otherwise, can eat up precious hours. Pre-verification can give you those hours back. How pre-verification saves moneyReduced processing costsEmployee screening can include such items as:
In terms of time and/or money, none of these tests are completely free, and some are remarkably expensive. Quality criminal background checks, drug screens, and personality tests, for instance, are all quite costly. UCSDHC Jobs states, "According to a recent report in HR Magazine, over 76 percent of companies use some form of employee screening when recruiting candidates. Most organizations have a third-party vendor conduct the employee screening." As we have established, third-party vendors don't come cheap. But with identity theft, misappropriation of funds, investment fraud, violence, and sexual misconduct in the workplace, companies can't afford not to safeguard their bottom line by implementing employee screenings as part of their recruitment practice. Direct sourcing prospective hires who have already been vetted in such areas can significantly improve peace of mind, as well as save you a hefty amount in processing fees. Better retentionSmart talent management teams understand they need to weed out prospective candidates who could be problematic to avoid problems such as weak performance, attendance issues, and workplace drama. Should troublesome prospects not be properly vetted, they end up as problem employees rather than problem candidates. The unavoidable consequence of making poor hiring decisions due to incomplete or subpar screening is that those hires don't last, and the company finds itself back at the drawing board, spending more time and money on trying to find new talent. Pre-verification lowers that risk. Pre-verification technology is waiting for youPerhaps most importantly, know that you don't have to reinvent the wheel. Excellent talent management programs geared specifically toward direct sourcing are available that can help you with everything from onboarding and payment processes to documentation, vetting, and compliance solutions. Candidate verification technology exists to make our lives easier. By using talent management software like that of VeriKlick, you can set certain hiring and recruiting tasks to perform automatically, verify credentials, and more. Give people on your team more time to focus on other responsibilities while simplifying the hiring and recruiting processes. Make hiring easyThe task of sourcing your own prospects and properly vetting them might sound overwhelming, but the good news is that when properly managed, it's much easier than it used to be. Excellent direct sourcing platforms and applications are available that help you every step of the way. The technology is readily available, and it isn't hard to find. If you take the time to research the right solution for your organization, you'll find that this investment pays rich dividends by saving you ample time and money as you move forward. It will also empower you to make your hiring decisions with more ease and higher confidence. |
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