Creating Jobs During Tough Times
As an entrepreneur or small business owner you probably already know, the more successful you are, the more jobs you are able to create. It might even be on your vision board … HIRE MORE PEOPLE.
But what happens when there’s an economic downturn? Your business may struggle and your employees might become concerned.
The hardest part about downturns is knowing it isn’t ONLY poorly-run businesses that go under. They’re simply more likely to fail during hard times vs. a well-run operation.
And it’s not just businesses that suffer; it’s regular people. You know the ones. the hard worker who shows up early every day and just wants to provide for their family. If you’re lucky they care as much about your business as they do their own welfare.
As unfortunate as economic downturns are, it’s important to keep in mind that they also create opportunities on both sides of the table.
Businesses with a strong foundation will survive or even thrive while their competitors get stress-tested, creating an opportunity for them to hire new talent, many of whom will be displaced as poorly-run businesses go under.
This is good for the working class too.
Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying that losing your job is a good thing. In fact, it REALLY sucks. However these things do happen all the time, and none of us can really stop it.
What we can do is see it for the opportunity it creates to seek out better places of employment.
As business owners, and employers, it’s our duty to create opportunities for other people.
The Problems With Hiring People
Hiring people sounds great. If only we could all afford to hire millions of people, right?
No matter how good of an idea hiring people is, or how much it helps the economy in a downturn, there are some pain points you’ll have to work through.
Some of these are pretty obvious…
- freeing up capital to pay salaries
- talent acquisition costs
- training costs
- finding the right talent, to begin with (aka endless hours of screening resumes)
Not to mention checking social media activity for potential hires, because that’s a thing now. it’s overwhelming right!
But let’s talk about an often overlooked option; Automating your hiring workflow.
Automating Your Hiring Workflow
What does that mean?
Realistically, it means that you can pretty much automate all of your hiring processes.
Before you get excited, automation doesn’t magically solve all of the pain points that hiring can cause, but it’s a good way to free up your time so you can focus on the parts of the process that are most important.
For example, let’s say you invite prospects to send in their resume and cover letter like most companies do when seeking to hire people.
Does it make sense to pay an assistant to take all of those job applications, enter all of the applicant’s details into a database, and then send you the ones that meet your requirements?
It kind of does… at first.
Wait, what? No, it doesn’t.
Better use of your assistant’s time, not to mention your budget, would be to have the applicants upload their documents, and have a system in place to pre-qualify them. Then your assistant could have a quick 15-minute call to further vet the candidates and ONLY send you the best of the bunch.
In this example, automation didn’t even steal the assistant’s job (trust me all assistants worry about this). In fact, it created an opportunity for your assistant to advance from a simple data entry clerk into an HR rep. and made the process easier for you both to find the right talent.
So how do you make that happen?
You need a Customer Relationship Management tool, or a CRM for short.
We recommend Keap, and we’ve used it for over a decade. Keap is an exceptional tool, but just signing up for Keap isn’t going to get you where you need to be. Like any new tool you’re going to have a learning curve and you’ll need time to implement all the bells and whistles.
Some other agencies might try to sell you the “simply sign up and automate your problems away” type of story, but we don’t do that. The reality is; it takes a little more effort than that.
What You Can Expect After Signing Up For A CRM
Selling Keap subscriptions, Setting up CRMs, and teaching people how to use them is what we do. And we have a pretty solid understanding of what you’re going to experience.
So let’s with being honest … at first, you’re not going to know what you’re doing. And that’s ok. You wouldn’t walk into an auto plant and expect to know how to build a car, would you? (ok truth I totally would … but I suffer from over achiever-itis)
Everything is a learning process, but once you get going it’s all fairly straightforward. Plus, the Keap team did an excellent job of creating support resources so you will have an easier time learning.
If you get stuck, there ARE people to help you through it, whether it’s the Keap support team or Keap Certified Ignition Partners, like me.
Why did I become a Certified Partner? Because Keap puts a LOT of effort and resources into their Partners, they encourage and enable us to be better at helping YOU automate your workflow and bring your products to market.
Just get in touch with us if you need help, we got you covered!
Automating your hiring, and your other business systems can free up capital, and make you more efficient, both of which can enable you to hire more people and help support economic stability, especially during tough times and economic downturns.
If you feel like you need the power of Keap to automate your hiring but feel a bit overwhelmed by it, feel free to schedule a Creative Solutions call with me, and we can come up with a plan to get you up and running quickly so you can do what you do best.
About the Author,
Michelle Bell
Michelle Bell is a Marketing and Workflow Automation Expert and Keap Certified Ignition Partner with a passion for creative solutions. She excels at identifying needs and resolving them, creative and genuine communication, understanding business process efficiency, simplifying the complicated, facilitating relationships, and being herself in all things. She began her career in finance, later moving into regulatory affairs for the local public utilities, before finding her passion for working with small businesses and coaches. Michelle is all about family and believes you build work around your life, not vice versa!