Hiring Tips When Scaling Your Liquidation Business

2021-11-29

Hiring the first employees is an important step when it is time to grow your liquidation business. We will talk you through the process of deciding when to hire, your obligations when hiring, and how to start the process.

When is it Time to Hire Employees?

Before taking steps down this path, you will need to know when you need to hire employees. The time to look into employing is when you find that the lack of time or labor is holding back your growth. Key points that you will come across when it is time to start hiring include:

You’re starting to become overwhelmed by the volume of work.
You’re starting to ask too much of family and friends to help you keep a business running.
You’re wasting your time on low-value work when you know you can concentrate on more important and strategic tasks.
Your customer service and networking tasks are slipping.
You’re turning down new business due to a lack of time.

If any of these points are true of your business, then it is time to look for help.

Source: Payment Cloud, 2021.

Although hiring someone to take some of the workload off you may seem an attractive prospect, there are important things you need to have prepared and researched before you bring someone on board.

Before Considering Hiring

As you go through your work day, take note of any tasks that you can delegate to another employee. This will help you draw up a job description, and figure out the difficulty of the job.
Make sure you can meet state and federal regulations – the US Small Business Administration has put up a helpful guide to this here.
Research average salaries in your area for unskilled and skilled jobs. How do the jobs advertised compare in complexity, responsibility and skill compared to your operation? For example, you can consider unboxing pallets, inventory keeping, and packaging for delivery as unskilled tasks. However, managing sales, customer service, networking & outreach, decision making on product sourcing and research, as well as accounting tasks are all skilled tasks. If you’re expecting an employee to be working in these roles, they will expect a wage to reflect this.

Writing a Job Description

The next step in hiring is to write a job description.

What Will Employees be Working On?

List everything you’re looking for them to work on day-to-day and additional items you may need help with occasionally, or that you would like them to undertake training for. Be as explicit as possible to avoid candidates leaving the job for being something other than they were expecting.

Source: Small Business Trends, 2021.

What Chance Do They Have for Progression?

If you’re planning to expand, and there is the opportunity for a candidate to expand their roles (e.g. from part-time to full-time, or additional responsibility), let them know in the outset by including it in the job description.

Be Honest About the Role’s Challenges

Don’t hide issues such as long hours, physical labor, or working alongside fickle clients in order to reduce the chances of employees leaving once they start the job.

Top Tip: Save your job descriptions and training materials. These can be reused when you need to hire again.

Where to Advertise

There are plenty of local and online job posting opportunities. We suggest you start by checking out these:

Facebook
Linkedin
CareerBuilder
Glassdoor
Indeed
Job2Careers
Monster
Nexxt
Resume-library.com
Snagajob.
US.jobs.
ZipRecruiter
Your local community groups
Ads in local papers/store windows
Your own website
Spread the word with family/friends – ask if they can refer anyone.

Invest in Proper Training

How you train your employees will have a significant impact on your business. Of course, you will have to show them how to execute the tasks you want them to do. Patience will be key here, as different people have different learning styles.

Proper, organized and patient training is essential for attracting and maintaining top talent, and if hiring multiple people, will help you figure out who is most suited to certain jobs. Spending more time on training will also cut back on mistakes and bad judgments, once the employees start performing their tasks on their own. It will also save you from having to constantly supervise their work or micromanaging them.

You will find guides to preparing a training routine here:

Source: The Manifest, 2021.

Employee Growth and Job Retention

Teach them about areas outside of their tasks, as this will help them understand the business better. This will also allow you to delegate when you’re unable to perform other tasks, and can give them the skills to train other future employees.

Key aspects of employee retention include:

Training and Development

The chance to train and develop their skills motivates employees to stay with their current jobs.

Compensation and Rewards

Although the level of pay and job satisfaction are not the only factors in an employee’s decision to leave their job, it is important that you take them into account. For this, you can adopt one of three strategies:

Offer better compensation and rewards than others in your market.
Provide rewards that target each employee individually.
Link rewards to staying in the job, by tying certain benefits to seniority and years of service.

Supervision

The quality of the supervision provided to employees is a very important factor. So it’s important to focus on developing your supervisory and management skills as well as your communication skills.

Benefits

Offering optional benefits can help attract and retain employees. Keep in mind, though, that even optional benefits may have to comply with legal requirements. For example, health plans offered by businesses must comply with federal law. Read more from Department of Labor’s advisory guide.

The Affordable Care Act allows employees to expand coverage. Some employees may also qualify for COBRA (Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act) benefits. Businesses are legally required to extend COBRA benefits to terminated or laid-off employees.

An employer-sponsored retirement plan (for example, a 401k plan or a pension plan) is a popular employee benefit. The federal government provides resources to help small business owners choose retirement plans and pensions.

Once your business takes off, it’s natural to want to expand, to fulfil more and larger orders. If you don’t have enough time, or you are not spending your time as effectively as you could, you may need to hire help. Take into account all the additional costs of hiring employees when scaling your liquidation resale business before plunging into it, but don’t be afraid to make changes to help your business grow.