The Small Business Hiring Guide

The Small Business Hiring GuideThe Small Business Hiring GuideThe Small Business Hiring GuideIn todays competitive marketplace, your biggest advantage may be the strength of your team and your companys brand. Yet locating and hiring star employees isnt easy for small businesses.It takes patience and persistence to find candidates with the right skills and talents, with qualities that complement your companys culture, and with personalities that will thrive in an entrepreneurial environment. You cant afford to settle for someone whos just sufficient. You need candidates who can make your business boom.Whether youre hiring today or getting ready to hire sometime soon these articles will help sharpen your hiring skills. Youll be ready to land the star talent your company needs and gain a leg up on the competition.Five Essentials for Every Job DescriptionA job description should be clear and simple. behauptung five steps will help your listing attract the right candidates.Interview Str ategies for Successful HiringA well-conducted interview can provide a wealth of information about the job candidate. Use these simple rules as a guide.Closing the Deal Make an Offer They Cant RefuseIn a competitive job market, its crucial to close the deal quickly, particularly for small business. These tips can help.Small Business Hiring ResourcesThese online hiring resources can be useful for the recruitment process, particularly if youre hiring for a small business.Every new hire counts for your small business Download our freeSmallBusinessGuideto Hiringwith 12 pages of insights tohelpyou find the right talent.

How BYOD technology will change the way we meet in 2018

How BYOD technology will change the way we meet in 2018How BYOD technology will change the way we meet in 2018In recent years, the proliferation of BYOD - or bring your own device - has emerged as a major trend in the work landscape. Be it laptops, smartphones, or tablets, many employees are now able to collaborate from the comfort of their own devices.Ive seen this trend make meetings more effective and perhaps even enjoyable. Heres how the BYOD landscape will continue to change the way meetings are viewed and conducted over the next decade, and how it could affect your companys meeting culture.Getting real-time information will eliminate unnecessary meetingsBecause updates and information pertaining to meetings can now be updated in real time, unnecessary meetings will become a thing of the past. If your teams to-do list for the day has already been laid out on a task or project management software like Asana or Trello, you can easily send that information to the rest of your tea m on your mobile device and avoid a meeting altogether.Additionally, BYODs value isnt limited to meeting reduction You can even use your own device to eliminate any information that may no longer be relevant to an upcoming meeting. For example, if there was a meeting to discuss your companys overall absatzwirtschaft spend and the marketing manager sent out a Slack message explaining the budget, youd no longer need to discuss those expenditures in a meeting. The marketing manager can update the meeting agenda on his or her device and send the refined agenda out to the team.Virtual meetings will growIt should come as no surprise that virtual meetings have been on the rise, especially as companies make flexibility a priority and physical locations have become less critical.The sheer number of avenues to conduct a virtual meeting have grown exponentially since 2000, not just via Skype Google Hangouts, GoToMeeting, UberConference, JoinMe, WebEx, FaceTime and, most recently, Slacks call f eature are all viable options. Coupled with the fact that more people will be doing more remote work in upcoming years, you can easily see how virtual meetings will continue to be an important factor in the workforce.We may also need to reconsider how meeting notes are taken and action items are delegated. Even if everyone isnt physically present, the information can live in cloud-based applications and be accessed anywhere,anytime.Meetings will becomeshorterWith this influx of devices and variety of ways to instantly communicate from anywhere, meetings will inherently become shorter. There will be no need for meetings to last hours because most topics will be discussed with a short message in Slack, commented on in Quip or Google Docs, or assigned as a project or task in Asana or Trello - as mentioned above, collaboration and productivity platforms will eliminate unnecessary information.Therefore, meetings should ideally become much more concise (even those covering important info rmation) because only information that is absolutely necessary to discuss will be addressed.Meetings will become more transparentGiven the shift towards teams working on cloud-based, collaborative platforms, meetings will become more open due to BYODs inclusive environment. Think of all of the information currently being collected, shared and documented on all employees own devices over a plethora of software applications. Now, apply all that collected information to todays collaborative workforce, including meetings. For example, meeting notes and information will be shared not only with members who attended a meeting, but also with other relevant team members who are integral to the project.As a result, the ability for any team member to be able to open up their own device and go back and review notes from a past meeting will become much more prevalent, rather than having to use a work computer and/or retrieve the information from, say, upper management. This will enable them to w ork wherever, whenever, at their own convenience, helping them achieve an optimized workflow that is much more transparent and free-flowing.Jason Shah is the founder and CEO ofDo, a collaboration platform that helps you groe nachfrage productive meetings.This article first appeared at Business Collective.

Teasing Out Your 30-Second Elevator Speech

Teasing Out Your 30-Second Elevator SpeechTeasing Out Your 30-Second Elevator SpeechFormulating your personal brand.Refining a 30-second elevator speech - a statement of your professional value you can deliver in the time it takes to complete a hypothetical elevator ride - requires focus. Heres how to make this first impression last.In a 30-second pitch, the biggest mistake I see is that clients try to communicate too many points without driving home memorably a few key attributes.Most listeners will remember no more than three characteristics about a person in a first meeting determine up front the three fruchtwein important traits you want to communicate, then develop statements that effectively illustrate those qualities. For example, lets say you want to communicate that youreA seasoned marketing executiveExperienced in consumer goods A strong leader and team player.You would illustrate these qualities by saying something like, I offer more than 15 years of progressive advancem ent leading marketing teams for highly respected consumer-goods companies.Then you would go on to substantiate this introductory statement with specifics. Ive managed agency teams and internal marketing departments of up to 30 handled budgets ranging between $4 million and $7 million and overseen brand-management, interactive-media and traditional advertising/PR channels.Finally, you provide the listener information that engages him to make a connection with you. My current research has been focused around Fortune 100 companies headquartered in the Northeast that produce premium/luxury products, since thats really my sweet spot. ansicht three statements portray the core of your value to a company, then substantiate the strengths with actual numbers, figures and specifics, closing with your current actions to identify opportunities that meet your qualifications.Play it right by knowing what critical assets you want to communicate about yourself upfront and then develop three concise statements to describe how these traits match the needs of target companies.