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How to Avoid The “Too Busy to Recruit” Staffing Trap

One of the most dangerous traps you can lead your business into? Believing that you’re too busy to hire. Whether you’re having too much success or too much turnover, if you ignore the need for hiring new employees, you can send your business into a perilous downward spiral. How can you avoid this?

Prioritize

You need to make time for hiring. And you need to commit to that time. The only way to avoid being swamped with too much work is by bringing on more people. If you use the excuse that recruiting takes too much time and too much effort, you’ll just keep struggling to finish the work you have—and it will never get done because you don’t have enough people, but you don’t have the time… and so on, and so on, until you find yourself losing clients and even more employees. The only way to ease the load is by hiring someone to share it. So every time you find yourself thinking you can’t spare an hour a day on recruiting, ask yourself: “What am I doing that’s more important?”

If you’re spending too much time in meetings or other non-productive activities, cut them out of your schedule, and replace them with recruiting activities.

Step Up to The Plate

If you’re in a leadership role, hiring is—or should be—a core part of your job. You need to build and lead a team that can accomplish more than you could ever do on your own. You may be more accustomed to focusing on sales, programming, marketing, or whatever your specialty, but now you have to think like a boss. Who do you need on your team? What kind of people do you want to have around you? The HR department can’t do it for you nearly as well as you can do it for yourself. So jump in and create a plan for finding the best people you can.

Go For It With Gusto

The people you hire will make or break your company, so you have to put forth the effort and do it right. Remember, if you make a bad hire, that person could mess up the balance of your team, the productivity of your department, or the client relationships and customer service you’ve worked so hard to build. And if you have to fire them? Then you’ll incur a whole new set of costs and risks. On the other hand, if you invest the resources and time to hire someone great, they might make you a million dollars, land a huge client, develop a key innovation, or solve a crucial problem for your product. They might also inspire and motivate their colleagues and shape your company culture.

Smart, thoughtful hiring fuels innovation, growth and employee morale. If you’re truly too busy to do it, partner with a trusted, experienced technology recruiter like Triumph Services to help you out.

By Logan Bragg: Partner, Triumph Services. As head of the Recruiting Division of Triumph, he has helped thousands of candidates find rewarding positions.