Expansion and Contraction in the World of Small Business

Human beings breathe in and out. Concrete expands and contracts with extreme temperature changes. The world of small business does the same. You experience periods of growth and times when you need to cut back. The past decade has offered plenty of both. Where do you stand right now? Is your company flexible enough to grow or downsize with minimal damage or expense? If the economic difficulties of the past few years have taught us anything it’s that a company needs to be flexible to sudden changes. What we once thought we knew about doing business in the United States or any other civilized country has all changed.

Do you remember when the goal of the American worker or professional was to get connected to a company he or she could work thirty or forty years for and then retire from? That doesn’t happen anymore. The automobile industry taught us that nothing lasts forever, especially in a world where technology moves so fast. Searching for a job now has changed from a quest for permanence to the next step in a long line of job changes. That’s why job applicant tracking has become so important to business owners. With so many changes being made almost daily, how do you know this current candidate hasn’t applied for the job before and been refused?

Once you check references and do background checks once, you should not have to do them again, unless of course a number of years have passed since the last one. Even then, if you find something in a candidate’s history, like a felony conviction for instance, that won’t go away the next time they apply for a job. When you go to expand your business and begin taking applications, details like that already in your applicant tracking system could save you a lot of time and money. Why do the work twice when you can just keep better records?

Downsizing is another animal, but a good ATS applicant tracking system can help you there also. Most companies downsize by cutting down on the number of full-time or part-time employees they have at a physical location. That doesn’t mean that the work doesn’t still need to get done. How can you cut back on employees while still maintaining the same production levels? The obvious solution is outsourcing. You could sub-contract that work to someone that you don’t have to pay for benefits for. Where can you find someone like that? Try your own recruitment tracking system.

Companies large and small waste the efforts of their recruiters and human resource managers all the time without realizing it. The greatest resource a company has is the people who work there. The second-greatest is the people who apply to work there. They have skill sets you could put to use in an expansion drive, or abilities you can tap when you need to downsize. Know the difference and start keeping track of those who are coming to you looking for work. You can employ or at least contract a lot more of them than you might think.