In today’s job market, the candidate is king. With top talent calling the shots, organizations have to be particularly responsive to the needs of qualified candidates in order to make hires.

Combine this smaller talent pool with skills shortages in many industries, and today’s employers find themselves hunting for currently employed talent in order to fill their open roles.

Sourcing candidates is hard enough; convincing passive candidates to jump ship for your organization is even more difficult. This is especially true for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). While larger corporations have a little more leeway when it comes to salaries and benefits packages, SMBs are working with smaller budgets. They can’t rely on remuneration to lure people away from their current roles.

But all hope is not lost for SMBs. If they adopt the right tactics, they’ll have just as good a shot at passive talent as their larger competitors do. Here are three techniques all SMBs should adopt:

1. Frame Your Recruiting Efforts in Terms of an ‘Opportunity Gap’

According to a 2015 study from Workfront, 74 percent of employees work because they want to pay the bills. When you’re hiring for an SMB, you likely won’t be able to offer the most lavish of salaries.

Luckily, however, paychecks aren’t the only thing workers want from their jobs. Many people are looking for jobs with a purpose. In one survey, 48 percent of baby boomers, 38 percent of gen. X-ers, and 30 percent of millennials said they prioritize purpose over pay. These employees are ripe for the picking, so long as you frame your open role as a chance for them to close an “opportunity gap” in their career.

According to recruiting expert Lou Adler, opportunity gaps are critical components of any strategy for recruiting passive candidates. The phrase refers to a gap between the opportunity offered to a worker by their current job and the opportunity offered by your job. For example, maybe you can offer an employee a faster track to an upper management role, the chance to manage a larger team, or a range of responsibilities the employee doesn’t currently own. Whatever opportunity it is, your job is to sell that opportunity to the candidate.

You need to be careful here. Do your research. Talk to the candidate first: Find out exactly what kinds of opportunities they’re looking for. The opportunity gap angle only works if you’re offering the candidate some kind of meaningful work they genuinely want but can’t have at their current job.

2. Offer More Flexibility

Better work/life balance ranks among the top five reasons why passive candidates will consider ditching their current role for a new one. Luckily, this is fairly easy to give to candidates, especially in our hyper-connected, tech-driven age.

Offer candidates better work/life balance by giving them more flexibility and autonomy. Let them decide their daily hours and work from home when they’d like to. These are simple enough steps, but they can have a profound impact on how open candidates are to moving to your company.

Even if your organization requires employees to be on site together, you can still offer some flexibility by instituting “core work hours.” These are hours during each day when everyone must be in the office. Once you’ve set these core hours, you can give employees autonomy over the rest of their schedules. So, if core work hours are 12 – 2 pm on weekdays, employees can decide whether they’d like to work 7 am – 3 pm, 12 – 8 pm or whatever might work best within the parameters.

You can also give employees more flexibility by offering unlimited PTO time. Don’t worry: Doing so won’t turn your office into a ghost town. If anything, it might make employees even more productive.

3. Turn Your Company Into a Destination Workplace

A destination workplace is a company that has a widespread reputation as a great place to work. Whereas the aforementioned techniques were all about going to top candidates with great offers, this technique centers on getting candidates to flock to you. As such, it takes a little more time and planning, but it’s well worth it.

To become a destination workplace, you have to establish your organization as a leader in its industry. If you don’t have a blog set up yet, do that now. Starting publishing thoughtful, illuminating, and industry-relevant articles on your blog. Share them via social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and the more niche options your prime candidates might be using.

Speaking of social media: Get involved in industry conversations. Position your organization and its employees as thought leaders in your space. Steadily, over time, you’ll build up a reputation as a smart, thriving company in the industry, and curious candidates will start looking your way.

You also want to use your company blog and social media platform to showcase the culture of your company. Through videos, photos, and other media-rich publications, show candidates how exciting and engaging it is to be a part of your team. Once you’ve sufficiently established your organization as a leader in terms of both the employee experience and the industry itself, it’s only a matter of time before formerly passive candidates start chasing you.

SMBs definitely have the leg up here, believe it or not. While large companies may have bigger marketing budgets, they also have more red tape. As an SMB, your company can move more quickly and engage with industry communities on a more personal level. While big companies blast shiny ad campaigns, you can build trust and goodwill directly with candidates.

If you’re not already recruiting passive candidates, there’s a good chance you will have to in the future. The pool of active and unemployed candidates is shrinking, and it’s likely that the candidate who has the skills you need is already gainfully employed. While it takes a little more work to source and hire passive candidates, it can be done. All you need are some smart strategies.

Matthew Kosinski is managing editor of Recruiter.com.

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With the proliferation of social media and the rise of messaging apps, companies must adjust to the ways their employees communicate outside of work.

This pull from outside forces is a good thing because it makes implicit issues and gaps in communication explicit. HR managers can quickly inventory the tools their employees use to communicate and pinpoint where internal communication channels fall short.

However, not all communications problems can be solved by throwing technology at them. Many are difficult to identity in the first place because employees tend to disengage when there are persistent issues. Below are some common internal communication problems and a great mix of solutions you can institute to fix them.

1. Make Transparency Company Policy

Arguably the worst communication problem is not communicating at all. Why? Because when employees are in the dark on your firm’s short and long-term goals, or are left guessing about why decisions are made, they tend to become disengaged.

Startups like Buffer take transparency to a new level by ensuring there are no mysteries about how their sausage is made. They’ve created a transparency dashboard that is open to the public. It shows the company’s, equity breakdown, employee salaries, revenue, and even code.

Now it might not be realistic to ask management to start publishing employee salaries, but there are many other ways to become more transparent. For example, you can broadcast management level meetings or discussions to all employees so they can better understand why certain decisions are being made. Or after a company-wide employee survey, you can create a report on what management is doing to solve issues — plus what they aren’t addressing and why.

2. More “Talking Up,” Less Talking Down

New enterprise software solutions such as Basecamp and SharePoint help give employees a larger voice. But even with these communication tools in place, managers and leaders in too many companies still talk down to their staff.

Which is a shame because any healthy organization’s biggest asset is its people. Yet when company directives and communications consistently come from on high, employee engagement falls due to a lack of autonomy.

Forward thinking startups like Facebook build “talking up” into their culture with regular town halls with CEO Mark Zuckerberg that are broadcast company-wide. Something much easier to execute, like a live Q&A webinar with management will make your employees feel heard and more invested in your company’s mission.

3. Unlock Employee Devices with a BYOD Policy

Between laptop, smartphones, and tablets, your employees use multiple device throughout the day. However, most companies still lock their employees into specific devices and don’t offer regular upgrades as technology improves.

A great way to keep your employees communicating on company email, intranets, and messaging software is to institute a BYOD policy. By giving your employees a yearly device allowance and letting them communicate with the devices they feel most comfortable with, you can ensure they won’t start avoiding communication simply because of outdated technology.

4. Walk the Talk, HP-style

When Hewlett-Packard was doing its part to help create what we now call Silicon Valley, they started the “HP Way.” It was an internal communications policy that required management to walk around the floors of the office and talk with employees every day.

Bob Kalsey, whose father was one of the original HP employees, has said of the policy:

“People there felt their work and opinions were valued, and they took pride in that. We all want to feel genuinely a part of something larger than ourselves, and when we do, we are loyal and eager to go the extra mile. Unlike many C-level people who insulate themselves from low-level workers, Dave and Bill weren’t absent from their employees’ daily lives.”

For companies with remote employees, daily walk arounds are more challenging. But with telecommuting on the rise, remote worker communication is going becoming increasingly important, Weekly or monthly video check-ins with managers via Skype can go a long way towards making remote employees feel involved with the team. HR can also implement live Q&A sessions with employees via chat or messaging software so issues are regularly addressed.

* * *

It’s important to have technology in place that fosters communication — but it’s all for naught if the tools go unused. This means companies must create a culture centered around healthy communication. Each of these solutions help pump essential communication into the company’s bloodstream. By using these initiatives, you can give your employees a bigger sense of ownership in your goals, improve communication flows, and keep your employees engaged and involved.

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The employees here are no strangers to hard work and late nights. If you manage people, you probably wonder how we motivate our employees. If you’re a worker, you probably wonder who on earth would work this way. Well, you could learn a thing or two from Rob Bellenfant, the CEO and founder of TechnologyAdvice.

Over the years, he has mastered the art of keeping his employees happy and dedicated to the team. There’s a lot that goes into this, but one constant is our monthly team outings. You probably think this is nothing special, since many companies have outings designed for teambuilding (and in your head you probably remember getting dragged to several really boring ones). But that’s not the case at TA. Instead of a bland corporate retreat, you’ll find us going from playing trampoline dodgeball, to running frantically through a laser quest course (confession: I shot my own reflection in the mirror), to arriving at work with a full-blown carnival (complete with an obstacle course and bouncy houses) in the parking lot.

The team here is also no stranger to Sounds and Predators games , which we ride in style to on a party bus.

You might be thinking to yourself, “man, I wish I could work for a company like that!” Well, you can! We’re looking to hire at least another two dozen fresh faces in the next year alone.

TechnologyAdvice prides itself on the motto “work hard, play hard,” and is looking for strong individuals who want to do the same. Rob has given us the opportunity to really thrive here, and has instilled that motto in all of us.

We look forward to getting out of bed in the morning, because to us it’s not just a job.

The fun doesn’t stop at team outings though. Each week we have a round of applause, where coworkers submit great accomplishments, attitudes, or anything positive about another employee. Three of these submissions are chosen and read at the team meeting and the recognized employees receive a $50 gift card! Sure the money part is great, but I personally appreciate that Rob and the team take a moment out of their day to step back and appreciate the hard work of others.

We never would be where we are today without the effort of the entire team , and our clients really reap the benefits of this mentality. It’s pretty much a win-win for everyone , so apply and make it a win-win for you too!

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Not at TechnologyAdvice.

This past Friday after leaving work, about two-thirds of the company headed to the Best Buddies Gala and Casino Night downtown at the Nashville Convention Center. We had dinner and drinks, bid in the silent auction, and gambled away all the poker chips (or “fake money” as we called it) that we were given.

Best of all, we got to do all this in support of a great cause, Best Buddies (if you haven’t heard about them, check out their website). Best Buddies empowers disabled people by matching them with a friend, and helping them find employment and leadership opportunities. The fun and learning that takes place is life changing. Our CEO, Rob Bellenfant, generously supports this cause by sponsoring their annual Gala, and inviting us all along to take part in the philanthropy.

This isn’t the only time we’ve left work in order to give back to the community. In December, we took off a Friday afternoon and spent several hours shopping for Christmas gifts for one hundred children in Youth Villages. I was amazed to find that we were the second largest donator to their Holiday Heroes drive. Earlier in the year, the team went to a Youth Villages home and repainted the inside during the work day.

Rob makes a point of involving the team in these opportunities for service. We don’t just watch him write a check. In fact, he doesn’t accept many excuses for staying at the office during one of these projects. We’re always encouraged to team build, and these trips have a little more purpose than a regular outing.

Corporate giving has become increasingly important to large companies over the past few years. However, a lot of the time individual employees don’t get to directly take part in those donations. My favorite part about our contributions at TechnologyAdvice is that the whole team gets to do hands-on work.

We may be a small business, but we don’t act like it. We give back in a big way.

We also get to know each other better as we contribute to local charities. The involvement really solidified my interest in working here, and I know it has for others as well. If you’d like a job that rewards you with more than just money, take a look at our current openings.

Also check out our photos from the Best Buddies Gala below:

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It’s what always followed when Mom and Dad used your full name in a stern voice. It’s how shock jock radio hosts and TV’s most polarizing pundits have “cut through noise” to ruffle feathers and boost ratings for years.

And it’s how you need to communicate with your team.

Evaluating job performance and providing feedback are two of a manager’s most difficult tasks, which, of course, is why they’re also among the most important. Giving praise can be fun and easy (who doesn’t like a high-five and a “gold-star?”), but when it comes to giving criticism, many leaders would rather chew on glass.

There’s a belief that offering criticism and addressing issues will be poorly received by employees, potentially making a bad situation even worse. In reality though, 57 percent of those polled in a recent study by the Harvard Business Review said they prefer corrective feedback over praise and recognition.

I think five out of five dentists would also recommend you do that over chewing glass (or maybe four out of five — there’s always one in those studies that refuses mainstream thinking).

It’s also becoming increasingly important for managers to have these conversations, positive or negative, considering Gallup’s latest poll on the “State of the American Workplace” shows that 52 percent of employees consider themselves “disengaged” from their workplaces. Another 18 percent consider themselves to be “actively disengaged.” Gallup estimates that this costs the U.S. between $450-550 billion in lost productivity each year. (Tweet This)

How about that for some straight talk?

People want to know how they can achieve more and advance their careers. And they want to hear it from their leaders.

I make it my goal to be up-front and honest with all of our employees and encourage our other managers to do the same. If you’ve struggled with these situations in the past, here are five ways to help make them more productive than eating glass:

5 Ways To Have More Productive Employees

1. Don’t waste their time

When an employee is underperforming, they usually know it. Trying to act like you’re unaware of their struggles or attempting to lighten the significance of their shortcomings only wastes time and productivity. We’re all adults with a job to do. Leave the sugar-coating for their birthday treat of choice (which you should be providing) and start talking about how we can do things better.

2. Make your reasons clear

While many employees may want to hear constructive criticism, that doesn’t mean it’s always easy. Be respectful and be sure to explain that the purpose of your feedback is to not just to boost team performance, but also help them develop individually and achieve their personal career goals.

3. Don’t ask them to solve problems themselves

Starting the conversation with questions like “How do you think you’ve been doing lately?” or “Why do you keep making these mistakes?” puts too much of the focus and pressure on the employee. If they could solve their problems themselves, there would be no need for this conversation. Managers should identify the areas that need to be improved, then work with employees to find solutions and execute them.

4. Set relationship boundaries

Giving criticism is hard enough, but it’s made more difficult by personal relationships. The line between being a friend and being a boss is a tough one for many managers to walk, but boundaries have to be set for both parties – and the company – to be successful. Strong friendships can force hesitation in addressing troubling trends, which can establish a troubling trend of its own. Be human and be a boss who cares about the people you hire, but also establish the limits of those personal relationships.

5. Reinforce your belief in them

It’s the old “compliment sandwich.” Or at least the open-face version of it. After addressing the issues and working to find a solution, be sure to remind employees that your involvement doesn’t end there. Let them know you’re going to be in their corner, and you’re still confident in their abilities.

Have some tips or some “real talk” of your own? We’d love to hear them in the comments section below (though keep that criticism constructive, wink wink).

If you’ve been avoiding a conversation on a tough topic, now’s the time to have it. Don’t wait until it’s too late to solve a problem or get a valued employee back on track. It won’t be fun and it probably won’t be easy, but it will be worth it.

That’s straight talk. No filter.

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That’s always been my entrepreneurial motto. Time wasted becomes opportunity wasted, so just dive in and experience everything you can.

This approach has produced great success in both my life and business, but not without a few challenges along the way. These challenges make up my “database of mistakes,” a mental database that (hopefully) keeps me from repeating such missteps as I move forward.

While flipping through these setbacks, it’s clear that many of them come from the same area: hiring.

At TechnologyAdvice, we’ve learned the hard way that “growing pains” are more than an overused cliche and an under-appreciated Alan Thicke sitcom from the ’80s. They are a harsh reality for small businesses trying to expand in both revenue and manpower. This is especially true when your company values action first and discussion later.

We needed a bigger staff, so we moved fast and assumed we’d figure it out as we went. Turns out, we needed to invest more time and more thought into identifying the employees that were the best fit for our team and our culture.

And we are not alone.

A recent CareerBuilder study revealed seven in ten businesses were affected by a bad hire in 2012. 41-percent of those businesses estimated the cost of that mistake to be at least $25,000. So much for those IT upgrades you had planned for the office.

That number fluctuates depending on the size of the business, but you can use this formula from The Undercover Recruiter to determine what it would be for your company. That same report also reminds us that 75-percent of demand for new employees is to replace workers who left the company.

We’ve lost more than our fair share of time, money, and productivity in the black hole of bad hiring over the past few years, so hopefully some of the lessons we’ve learned will help you avoid these same mistakes.

Here’s a few “highlights” from our hiring adventures:

We hired talkers, not walkers

Have candidates ever seemed too good to be true? Sometimes they are. We no longer go with our gut after being blown away in an interview. We focus on past work patterns, and let tangible examples speak for themselves.

This lesson came from a recent hire who sold us on being able to adjust to our pace, mission, and culture. This person had great work experience, great references, and skills that fit the position. However, it was all in a different career field, and different office environment. We made the hire anyway, convinced by the person’s seeming passion. Less than a week later, the person quit — citing differences with our focus, schedule, and culture. Lesson learned. Now we make sure they’ve “walked the walk.”

We hired people more interested in making friends than working hard

We work hard. We grind. We set big goals. But we also like to celebrate accomplishments and have fun. It’s a balance. We play ping-pong and drink beer while sharing laughs and high fives. We like fun people – you might say they’re our weak spot. But they have to be productive. Our expectations of each position are now clearly set in the interview process to eliminate any blurred lines between “work hard” and “play hard.”

We hired employees who didn’t know their job requirements

Okay, maybe we were part of the problem. We weren’t always clear up front, and a lot of roles evolved as we grew. But we also need people who are motivated enough to investigate what they’re getting themselves into when they accept a job. To do our part, we now test drive the position for a potential hire. We invite them in for a half day to experience the work they’ll actually be doing before accepting our offer.

We hired for inconsistent reasons and gave inconsistent expectations

This one was definitely on us. We didn’t do a great job of establishing goals and expectations for some positions. For others, we weren’t clear enough in how the position affected others and fit into the company’s mission.

Now we make sure to do three things:

1. Share more about our history in hopes of being transparent and fostering commitment.

2. Explain how we developed the current need for the position and how it fits into our company’s vision.

3. Make a clear list of goals for the first month, quarter, and year for each position, then have regular check-ups to help everyone meet these goals.

We hired team members who suffered from “millennialitis”

It’s a real condition. Look it up. (Okay, actually don’t). But it is a concern. We have a very young staff — about 90% millennials — in a city that Forbes ranks among the top ten destinations for millennials in the US. That means we’re always looking for young people with great potential. However, we had to learn to better identify that potential. Do they still share a checking account with their parents? Did they work through school, or at least actively participate in clubs or groups? Can they provide evidence of dedication to self-improvement and growth? If most of the answers are “no” (besides the bank account), then it’s likely a real-world job will be a tough adjustment.

I know. A lot of this is common sense, but it’s amazing how blinding it can be when you’re going full speed.

More action. Less thinking. — except in hiring. If you’ve also learned this lesson from a bad experience, we’d love to hear your story in the comments below.

Investing more time and more thought helped us double our staff to 35 over the past 14 months, and we’re hoping to add several more teammates before the end of the year. Check out our open positions and let us know if you think you’d be a good fit for our team.

With these nuggets of hiring knowledge now filed away in our database of mistakes, our focus is forward — meaning growing pains are again a thing of the past.

Apologies to Alan Thicke.

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Photo Credit: RobertCross1 (off and on) via Compfight cc

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The post How to Hire Great Employees: Move Slow, and Think First. appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

Either way, these are powerful patterns. Pulitzer prize winning author Charles Duhigg wrote The Power of Habit to explain how habits work, and how they can be changed. In his extensive research, he examines everything from our personal routines to the habits of businesses and organizations, to the power of habits in social movements. To understand how to change these patterns, we must first examine where they originate.

Duhigg proposes the “habit loop” to explain this concept. The habit loop consists of a cue, which triggers a routine, which results in a reward. To change our habits, we must identify what our cues are and the reward we seek. Keep the cues and the rewards the same, but change the routine, Duhigg explains , that’s the key to successful change.

This advice can be applied to almost anything personal, from eating to working out. But Duhigg takes this basic concept and scales it to organizational and societal behavior, examining how changes to habits can have powerful and lasting effects.

So what are 3 ways you can harness the power of habit in your workplace today?

1. Deactivate email notifications

When I first started identifying cues that interrupted my productivity, I immediately thought of the constant email notifications. I noticed that when a new email popped up, I would instantly check it, shift my focus, and wander off of the task I was working on. Not only was it tricky to recover that lost time, but I felt distracted the majority of my day. Deactivating notifications worked wonders on my productivity.

2. Block off time

We block off our days by habit , allotting time to shower, cook, commute, and watch TV. These things aren’t a struggle to find time for. Similarly, it’s possible to block off time for areas of our work life that we want to make a priority. For me, it is reading for professional growth. Since blocking off 30 minutes a day for reading, I’ve finished at least one book per month. I’ve gained new insights into business that have motivated and encouraged me in my professional journey. You can block off time for nearly anything you want to make a priority , outbound calls, networking, organizing your inbox, you name it , you can make it a habit.

3. Maximize the “5 Minutes Before”

Meeting in 5 minutes? That doesn’t mean you should shut off your brain and coast. Instead, use the 5 minute deadline to give yourself an added boost. Maybe it gives you the energy to crank out a couple more ideas, send a few emails, or connect with a team member. Using those 5 minutes for productivity, instead of turning off, can make a huge difference over the course of a day.

At TechnologyAdvice, we’re always finding new ways to increase our workflow, improve our lives, and grow professionally. If you want to join a team where we strive to make excellence a habit, check out our current career opportunities!

Also be sure to check out Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit for more examples and explanations about habit in personal life, organizations, and society. What are other ways you’ve changed your habits to become more efficient or productive? Tell us in the comments!

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