SusanRanford

4 Ways Small Businesses Can Entice Entry-Level Employees

April 12, 2019 by SusanRanford

Recruiting is a challenge for small businesses, particularly those that compete with enterprise for talent.

According to Inc., competing with bigger companies is one of the top four recruiting challenges a small business faces.

That challenge becomes even more daunting when seeking candidates for entry-level positions.

Due to the nature of these lower-level positions, plus the stigma of working for a small company, it can be difficult to attract the top candidates.

There are three main strategies your small business can use to attract entry-level talent:

Build your brand online
Tout the benefits of working for a smaller company
Align your company’s strengths with the candidates’ interests
Seek outside resources

Using these strategies to earn an advantage against larger competition and increase interest for your company’s entry-level positions.

1. Polish Your Digital Reputation

Job seekers mainly turn to online sources to learn about a company and its culture. To adapt to this behavior, you small business’s digital presence needs to be both updated and appealing.

The first place to start is your website. Your website is your calling card – candidates will associate their impressions of your website with the overall impression of your brand.

A website that is outdated, aesthetically flat, or nonresponsive produces a negative impression of your company and turns off job seekers.

Invest in professional assistance, such as a web design firm, if you don’t have the in-house resources to build your website.

You also need to ensure that your company maintains a strong social media presence. While LinkedIn is typically the main business social recruitment platform, candidates will also review Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube profiles to learn more about your company’s culture.

Post regularly about daily life company. Short, succinct videos are effective and provide insight about how a job seeker fits in with your team.

Finally, set up a company profile on job search sites such as Indeed and Glassdoor and encourage current and former employees to rate your company and share information about the employment experience.

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The more content you have on these platforms, the more clarity you provide candidates about the employment experience at your company. Be sure to monitor the reviews to perform any reputation management if someone shares a negative experience.

2. Promote the Benefits of Working at a Small Business

There are a lot of misconceptions about working for a small business.

The comparison they face against large businesses and enterprises are tough to compete with. For example, large businesses simply have more resources for salary, mobility, and benefits.

Small businesses, though, generally measure higher for employee happiness.

Your small business should actively promote the benefits of working for a small company. While every workplace is different, some of the common small company benefits are:

Collegial atmosphere: A tighter-knit team works in close proximity, which can foster a closer bond between employees.
Collaboration: Smaller companies provide the ability to call a huddle with the entire team at any given time, making brainstorming and feedback easier.
Diverse experience: Employees may have multiple different responsibilities in a small company, as opposed to being siloed into one role.

3. Play to Candidates’ Interests

Every generation has different preferences and expectations for their ideal workplaces. Millennials, for example, value freedom and relationships with colleagues. These preferences don’t directly translate to their immediate successors may not resonate with their immediate successors, Gen Y, who value opportunity for advancement.

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There is, though, areas of common preference between the age groups that can help you mold your company culture to attract and retain new talent for entry-level positions.

A few areas of appeal in today’s workplace include:

Flexibility/work-life balance
Opportunity for advancement or recognition
Mentoring/coaching (professional and personal)

Try to identify small perks and advantages of your company that make it unique for the particular group you are targeting for your entry-level roles. These can be small perks, but may make your company more attractive over larger firms.

4. Don’t Be Afraid to Consult an Expert

Small businesses may also struggle to hire entry-level employees simply because they don’t have as many HR or recruiting resources as larger firms.

Larger companies often have presences on college campuses, which helps them attract young candidates before they even hit the market. They also often have software and other resources at their disposal that help them streamline their hiring processes.

If your small business is struggling to keep up with hiring in general, it may benefit from an outside expert. Recruiting agencies are helpful resources that have expertise targeting your ideal candidates.

Staffing firms, on the other hand, can help provide you with short-term or contractual employees for product pushes or to fill resources gaps.

Small Steps Pay Big Dividends

Competing with large companies for entry-level employees can seem daunting, but many large companies are rigid when it comes to attracting talent.

Your small business can take advantage of this by positioning yourself as an appealing alternative to enterprise culture.

Take risks and be creative building your digital brand, tout the benefits of a smaller workplace, research and play to candidate preferences, and review expert resources if needed.

Your efforts don’t have to be elaborate or expensive, but they can still have exemplary return on investment when it comes to recruiting and keeping entry-level talent.

Riley Panko is a Senior Content Writer at Clutch, a B2B research and reviews platform in Washington, D.C. She leads the team’s HR services research.

Grow Your Business with Banner Designing Software

April 12, 2019 by SusanRanford

It takes something to get a business going. You just can’t open a business and hope it does well. The heart and sweat must be poured into it to make it a success. Above all, you must advertise the business and its aspects to the world and look for ways to increase the visibility of the business. If budget is a concern, you can always take help of banner advertising and realizing the true potential of the business. You can design attractive banner ads and post them into different channels, and this will help the business grow its base.

Here are ways in which to grow the business with software for banner designing –

Create banners of your choice

Businesses must feel lucky to have the support of a feature-rich tool or software for designing banner of choices. They can create banner ads as attractive as needed to get an edge in the market. The tool is very easy to operate, and it does not even require much of technical knowledge. The software comes with visual signs and features to guide users through designing processes. It won’t take much of effort in creating the type of banner ads required to support the advertising of the business. This will help realize the true potential of the business easily.

Create multiple designs and choose the best one

The software we are discussing is rich in features and businesses can leverage it to create multiple designs in an effortless way. Any design is a reality with the choice of colours, shapes, texture, art, etc. being added easily. With multiple designs at hand, it becomes easy to choose the best one and ditch the rest one. For doing all this, there won’t be the need to hire a team and spend needlessly. When a tool can do all this, why should a company be bothered to invest in the manpower.

Save time and money with banner ads

The concept of banner designing is just amazing for small businesses with low advertising budget. They needn’t put up a team of graphic designers and artists for creating many mock-ups of the design for their banner. There is the software which makes it extremely easy to create lovely banner ads with a few clicks only. The tool is responsive and fast, can be accessed from any device and provides ease of banner ad designing. Any business can benefit from its features and realize its advertising potential even without having to spend a lot of money.

Add effects and visuals of choice

The best thing about banner designing software is that it lets anyone add text and arches effect to beautify the banner ads easily. It’s simple to upload images, add shapes, insert clip arts, rotate text, change background and save design. With a huge library of themes and templates, getting ideas and inspirations for design won’t be an issue for sure. For that reason, businesses can trust this software and achieve their advertising goals in a cost-effective and smooth banner possible.

Author Bio

Nitesh Ranjan is a keen tech blogger with interest in diverse technologies that impact human lives. He currently works with a company that develops product designing tools. You can benefit from these tools for designing any product of choice.

5 Landing Page Mistakes That Affect Your Conversion Rate

February 28, 2019 by SusanRanford

High-converting landing pages are essential to fuel your inbound marketing strategy. They are not only a significant lead generation tool, but also help in strengthening your brand image. Designing captivating landing pages is also vital to beat the cut-throat competition that your business faces today.

You can’t afford to ignore the challenges of the continually growing digital landscape as doing that will kill your conversions. You have to go an extra mile to stand out from the crowd. In other words, when every firm is accessible to customers online, you have to put additional efforts to convert your organic traffic into leads. You have to design incredibly attractive landing pages to grab the attention of the visitors.

You get only a couple of seconds to persuade a visitor to take action or to convert them when they enter your landing page. And if you fail to make the best use of those few seconds, you will lose a lead.

An inbound marketer does a lot of hard work to divert traffic to their website, but they don’t always succeed in generating enough leads from that traffic. One of the most important reasons behind that is poor landing pages.

If you are also unable to generate leads due to awful landing pages, you must work towards improving them.

Here are some common landing page mistakes that you must avoid to increase the conversion rate.

Poor Headlines

When a visitor arrives on your landing page, you have only 4-to-5 seconds to convince them to take action. Poor headlines can reduce that time further by failing to capture the attention of the visitors. The first thing that a visitor observes in your landing page is the headline, and if it doesn’t impress them, you most probably end up losing a lead.

So it’s essential to spend sufficient time in creating meaningful yet captivating headlines that can encourage visitors to go through the rest of the information on the landing page and then take the required action.

Your headline should give the most valuable information to visitors in a clear and concise manner.

Poor Design And Visual Clutter

The design and visual appeal of your landing page are highly crucial to draw the attention of the visitors. Awful design and unattractive visuals can irritate the users, thereby encouraging them to leave your landing page.

Create a design that talks volumes about your brand and reflects its personality. You should also avoid visual clutter because it distracts the visitors from focusing on the main point. So choose the right colours, fonts, and graphics while designing landing pages.

Unattractive Images & Videos

Images and videos play a crucial role in encouraging your visitors to stay on your landing page. But if they are unattractive and fail to convey the information to visitors, they will lose their relevance. So, pick attention drawing images and videos for your landing pages to make them more functional.

Complicated Forms

Whether you are looking forward to gathering readers for your eBook or you want to increase subscribers to your blog, you should always try to simplify the process of accessing your product for the users. If you ask them to fill an extremely complicated form, not everyone will indulge in that process, which will affect your conversion rate.

In short, if you want your landing page visitors to fill a form to access your product, make sure you keep it simple.

Bad Call-to-Action

A good call-to-action helps in generating great expectations in visitors. The kind of words you use can raise their interest in your products, so pick your call-to-action phrases carefully.

For example, if you are offering an eBook, using a CTA like “grab your eBook” or “read your eBook,” can increase your conversion rate multiple times when compared to a generic CTA like “download the eBook.” In this particular example, you are trying to connect your visitors with your product by using the word “your.” It makes them feel that it’s a product meant for them.

So, if you want to experience increased conversion, improve credibility, enhance brand awareness, and generate information from your landing pages, make sure that you avoid above mistakes.

Defining & Presenting the Right KPIs

February 28, 2019 by SusanRanford

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are metrics that measure how successful your company is at accomplishing a goal or objective. They are the strongest indicator of whether or not your business is successful. The challenge is knowing which metrics are the most effective for achieving your goals, as well as how to present those metrics to the key stakeholders in your organization.

Defining the Right KPIs

There is no “one-KPI-fits-all” solution when it comes to defining your company’s key performance indicators. KPIs should be tailored specifically to your business model and objectives, so you can get a solid understanding of the health of your company by simply looking at the status of your KPIs. If your KPIs are on track, your business is as well.

Steps to Building Custom KPIs For Your Business

Evaluate your goals and objectives: What is the purpose of your company? What determines whether or not you are successful? The answer to these questions can help you better understand what metrics will help you reach your goals.
Focus on between 4 and 10 KPIs: There are so nearly infinite things in your business that can be measured, but less is more when it comes to monitoring KPIs. These should be the metrics that are the most critical towards your success. If you track too many, it can become overwhelming and pointless.
Reassess and review: Be critical of your KPIs and check to make sure that monitoring them is a good use of your time. They should be moving the needle and improving your company’s performance. If they aren’t, it may be time to think of some better KPIs.

Presenting Your KPIs

Data presentation matters. In order for a data analyst’s recommendations or analysis to generate real action, they need to be heard (and understood) by stakeholders. When information is not presented clearly and effectively, it may be hard for business-minded people to understand the importance and value of the data in front of them. The goal of KPI presentation, then, should be to make data understandable and easily comprehensible.

The Psychology of Data Visualization

Data visualization allows you to maximize pre-attentive processing and quickly absorb complex information. When you are looking at a chart or graph, your brain will automatically identify unique elements and patterns. On the other hand, numbers on a spreadsheet require the viewer to actively analyze and examine to find key insights, which can be mentally exhausting.

Data visualization takes those seemingly random numbers and turns them into aesthetically pleasing visuals. You can tell a narrative with your data and integrate already learned information for quicker and more established connections. This connects your short and long-term memory, which helps you more permanently remember the information.

3-Step Process for Processing Information

Visual Sensory Register: Information first processes through here, which is part of pre-attentive processing. Before you are even aware you are processing information, certain things will stand out and objects may be unconsciously grouped together.
Short-Term Memory: Your short-term memory has a limited capacity. Anything that is not considered useful is discarded, so you can only retain about 3-9 “chunks” of visual information.
Long-Term Memory: Your long-term memory retains meaningful information, not the precise details.

Tips for Communicating KPIs

Keep it simple: Don’t overwhelm your audience with data. A clear and concise message is easier to comprehend and remember.
Choose the appropriate chart: Not all chart types will accomplish the same goal or tell the same story. That’s why it’s important to take some time to understand the different chart types so you can select the best option for your visualization. This infographic can help you choose the right chart for your KPIs:

Use color with intention: Color is a crucial element of data visualization design. It can simplify complex graphs, influence the feel of the data, or add contextual depth to data. It’s important to be consistent with your color choices and use plenty of contrast to make your visualizations easy to read and understand.
Tell a story: It’s easier for stakeholders to understand the data if you accompany it with a narrative and helpful context. They should be able to quickly sum up what action needs to be taken based on what they learned from the information you presented.

Author Bio: Samantha Marsh is the Marketing Content Coordinator for iDashboards, a data visualization software company on a mission to transform reporting into meaningful dashboards.

Benefits of Automating Expense Management With an HRMS

February 28, 2019 by SusanRanford

BAn untold truth about HRs is that all efforts put in from finding the right candidate, interviewing them, selecting, onboarding and finally handling their separation costs money. Hence, it becomes an additional responsibility of the HR to always go the extra mile to find the right candidate for the company who will be a part of the company for a long run and help the company grow.

Usually these expenses are centrally handles by the finance department but, with Pocket HRMS, your HR can not only automate the expense management, but also monitor the ROI behind every spending and aim to be more efficient in the spending. A smart HRMS solution like Pocket HRMS gives you the freedom to choose from varied modules to suit your business needs.

How does an HR software help you automate your expense management?

Taxation and Standard Deductions

With Pocket HRMS, the employees can file their declaration for the year and the algorithm in the system will help the HR calculate the Income Tax and other deductions for the individual. Seeing everything clearly, helps the employee plan his/her taxes in advance and file for returns without any hiccups eliminating any type any human error.

Claims Reporting

Either travel expenses or taking the client out for dinner/lunch is an expense that the sales person has to borne to make a potential sales. With the help of a smart HRMS software, you can manage all your claims in one place along with the proper approval system and add that up when the payout is to be made.

Transparency in approvals:

With integrated HRMS software comes a business card for all types of transactions with automated and streamlined transparent expense management system. Now employees can track all their reimbursements processes with ease along with their approvals avoiding any chances of fraud cases between claimers and approvers.

Quick operations:

Processing for medical claims is another huge task for the HR wherein they not only have to deal with the employee, but also the TPA of the insurance company. Having one streamlined software makes it easier for all the communication to be logged along with providing transparency to all the parties. Lodging all your claims are now just one click away.

Easy ROI reporting:

Many businesses, during their procurement period, find reporting on their Return on Investment (ROI) the most tedious and tough task to perform. Doing it manually, does not only arises errors but also consumes tons of minutes which could rather be focused on other productive activities. Switching your accounts’ department to automated expense management gives you an easier way of reporting within no time. Automating expense management and budgeting with a system can eliminate all errors and increase efficiency.

Epilogue:

Including an HRMS system into your expense management department can be a beneficial act. It is intelligent enough to manage compliances, deductions, taxations and all other expenses automatically without any error.

Ritik Singh writes about HR (Human Resource) software, cloud and enterprise technology. A dynamic content writer who writes for PocketHRMS, a leading provider of cloud based HR software with inbuilt AI-powered HR chatbot (smHRty) to small and mid-sized businesses across India.