According to an article in People Management, SMEs are facing many recruitment challenges with more than 25% unable to fill workforce gaps left vacant by lost staff.  Of the 500 companies surveyed, more than half reported running costs above the rate of inflation and almost all have suffered from an increase in costs as a direct result of the cost of living crisis. Small businesses are particularly hard hit and are facing several recruitment difficulties:

  • Competing with larger companies with deeper pockets
  • The cost of meeting higher employee expectations
  • Challenges of flexible working hours/WFH opportunities
  • Healthcare/wellness in the workplace costs
  • Impact of inflation on wage rates
  • High staff attrition rates leave unfilled vacancies
  • Interview no-shows 
  • Employee retention problems

In the face of these challenges, many small businesses are casting their recruitment net nearer to home, applying strategies for local recruitment as a sustainable solution for attracting and retaining candidates, while enhancing their role within the local community.

Small businesses can’t compete with larger companies with big recruitment budgets, so are losing out when it comes to recruiting the best candidates from the talent pool. The longer the recruitment process takes, the more it costs, and small businesses are losing out.

If your company normally handles the recruitment process itself, these factors can seem especially challenging. At Oliver King Consulting, we work with you to remove barriers from the process, so if you feel you are not attracting the right calibre of candidates and would like to implement a local campaign, book an appointment to talk about your options. 

The benefits of hiring locally

During the last few years, we have all noticed the focus of businesses changing from a global to a local approach, as consumers have become more invested in their local communities. The following phrases have become buzzwords, yet they were not part of our psyche 20 years ago:

  • Buy local campaigns 
  • Farm-to-table 
  • Locally sourced produce
  • Farmers/Artisan markets
  • Family run business
  • Support your local business community
  • Homemade

Consumers are actively supporting local businesses, and in turn, local businesses are discovering the benefits of hiring local talent. 

Brand reputation

Taking an active part in the local community can enhance a company’s brand reputation. Businesses working together to improve the local economy reap the rewards of reduced, from supplies to sustainable recruitment, while winning customer loyalty from residents. The economy grows stronger as workers spend their wages in other local businesses, fuelling prosperity within the locale. 

Word-of-mouth recommendations from employees enhance the company’s reputation, increasing the odds of finding good staff locally. 

The Environment

Hiring locally brings environmental benefits too, most notably through reduced commuting. If the office is nearby, many employees will choose to walk or cycle to work. If a car journey is necessary, because staff come from the local community, short bus routes or car shares become more viable. 

Reduce turnover

Local employees benefit from a better work-life balance because they spend less time commuting. A short walk or cycle ride enhances a feeling of well-being and gives workers time to separate their working life from their home life. An extra benefit of a short commute is that staff may prefer to work in the office, building a work community.

In addition, staff who anxiously spend time sitting in traffic jams, have time to reflect on their situation and may associate the anxiety of the commute with the job itself. The commute can therefore influence overall job dissatisfaction, leading to an increase in staff turnover. 

Productive staff

Employees who are not stressed out by the commute, benefit from walking to work with colleagues, and feel like they belong to a work community, will be happier and more productive. Dissatisfied workers may come to resent their employer and won’t have the same attention to detail or the focus, energy or conscientiousness as happy workers, and be less productive as a result. 

Local economy

We have already touched on the benefits to the local economy, but local workers are more invested. They benefit from local shops and services and are less inclined to travel for leisure purposes if everything they need is within the local area. This results in a growing local economy and a higher rate of employee retention.

Hiring costs

Advertising nationally/internationally makes the recruitment process longer and of course, more expensive. Hiring local talent offers a sustainable, cost-effective and time-efficient solution.

Employee loyalty

Employees who feel part of a brand’s culture and valued in the workplace tend to stay longer and may seek career progression within the company, rather than looking elsewhere. You can read more on this subject in our article about the benefits of building a strong employer brand. Hiring local workers results in better connections through attending meetings in person and socialising with colleagues outside work.

Other benefits

The wider you cast your recruitment net the more there is to consider:

  • Accessibility to your base specifically the commute time and transportation
  • The organisation’s carbon footprint concerning your team’s travel
  • Your offering compared to other local and national businesses
  • The potential relationship built with the current team
  • Candidate knowledge of your organisation

However, recruiting locally avoids these costly issues. If you want to know more, this LinkedIn article outlines the advantages and disadvantages of hiring locally.

Tips for successful local recruitment: What you can do online

There are lots of positive steps you can take to build an effective online local recruitment strategy. The aim is to make people excited at the prospect of working for your company.

Website

Give your brand more personality, especially on the careers page. Actively promote why working for your company is great by optimising career prospects, employee benefits, social clubs, sporting activities etc. Think about an FAQ page for careers, where you can address questions and concerns, or better still, your existing employees can! Post vacancies on your homepage with a link to the careers section, or utilise a ‘now hiring’ banner, so candidates don’t have to search for the careers section. Invite visitors to subscribe to your newsletter, advertising the latest vacancies.

Have you thought about using AI chatbots on your careers page to answer questions from prospective employees? You can programme these resources to pop up and ask whether the candidate has questions about your company as an employer.

Invite department heads to write blogs about their department, their teams and interesting projects they are working on. 

Social media

Sharing the news via many different media on social media platforms gives people a window into your company culture. Posting the latest vacancies on your social media platforms encourages two-way communication with possible candidates. Encourage existing employees to post the vacancies on their profiles too. If you have strong links to your customer base and have already built a following for your brand via social media, your customers will publicise job vacancies for you by sharing them on their profiles. 

Add employee profiles to your social media posts, with videos about what they do, employee interviews/testimonials etc. Create or use existing hashtags, so your key phrase becomes related to other posts, boosting its circulation.

YouTube

Do you have a company YouTube Channel? As well as posting videos showing what you do, you could repurpose recruitment videos and others, for example, internal awards ceremonies and charity events to highlight your employer brand.

Job boards

There are lots of job boards out there where you can post vacancies for a fraction of the cost of more traditional advertising. Candidates can search and filter through the listings to find positions that fit their salary expectations and other requirements, including geographical areas. There may be job boards for a specific locality, such as local online newspapers or community magazines for example.

Online Communities

Online forums or professional communities can be used to identify professionals for specific company roles especially if you already have employees subscribed or registered with professional groups.

Be active in Facebook communities, taking an interest in what is happening in the local area and posting job vacancies among other interesting content.

Paid online advertising

Paid online advertising gives you the option to use job titles as keywords, so they come up in Google searches. 

Tips for successful local recruitment: What you can do in person

Alongside online activities, there are actions you can take face-to-face when building a sustainable local recruitment process.

Recruitment events

Whether local job fairs with other companies or your corporate event, this is an effective way of attracting local workers at a low cost. Another way of meeting prospective candidates is to hold open days for local schools and colleges, so students can be informed about the jobs on offer and their career prospects with your company.

School/college talks

Talk to local schools and colleges, sending a department head or someone from HR to give a talk about your company and the jobs available.

Both recruitment events and school talks offer interactive communication and are a good way to get to know about rising stars and the potential of the local talent pool.

Company network

Take advantage of your established business network by asking employees to share job vacancies with their social groups. Contact past candidates who may have been unsuccessful in their application for one role but may be suitable for the latest vacancy. Some candidates could have taken your advice about extra training or e-learning and may now be more suitable.

Business networking

If you regularly attend networking groups, you may have the opportunity to speak to other local businesses about vacancies and obtain recommendations. In addition, there could be online job boards that you could utilise.

Local businesses

Get other local businesses to help you by putting posters in the windows of newsagents, cafés or other retail outlets, or leaving newsletters on the counter. It costs nothing to ask, and if you are all members of a local business group, they may well say yes!

Employee referrals

Offer incentives to employees for candidate referrals. Referral programmes can motivate existing employees to become more active in your recruitment process via rewards or bonuses. If all of this looks a bit daunting, why not talk to the experts at Oliver King Consulting to find out how we can help you put together the right local recruitment strategy as a sustainable solution for your business?