“The employer generally gets the employees he deserves.”

– J. Paul Getty

Most businesses are only as good as the people who work there. If your team is sub-par, your business will be sub-par. In some rare cases, a terrific team can become more than the sum of their resumes and unite to form an exceptional business. It’s a challenging task and finding the right people in a timely fashion is incredibly important to achieve what we all strive for—a great team.

Finding great employees in the promotional products business has always been difficult. Here are five resources that you can use to make it easier and increase your chances of assembling an exceptional team.

Networking – For years, this has been the default method for finding talented professionals in the promotional products industry. Word of mouth is free, it’s also extremely unreliable. You can ask around for months before you see results. It’s a crapshoot. Because our industry is built on relationships this is a reasonable tactic and a good place to start your search, just don’t expect speedy results.

LinkedIn – Think of LinkedIn as a job fair with 332 million people in attendance. It’s the most professional social network and our industry is well represented there. The benefits of using LinkedIn go well beyond the search for great employees. If you aren’t on it and active, you are missing the boat.

CareerBuilder – Along with Monster and Indeed, CareerBuilder is a very popular resume board. Indeed is the largest of the three, but CareerBuilder is the most well-known. CareerBuilder boasts over 45 million resumes. The trick is fine-tuning your search to provide you with just the right candidate pool. Too broad and you’ll waste a lot of time, too narrow and you’ll miss out on strong candidates.

Internal – Odds are you have plenty of talent in your organization right now. Are you making the most of it? A well-managed business should have some sort of succession plan in place. Who has the potential to advance? Who can excel with some additional responsibilities? Before looking to add new members to your team, make sure that you are making the most of what you have.

Competitors – When it comes to employers our industry is full of compensation and benefit variables. These variables make up the chief differences from one distributor to another or one supplier to another. Some of the major areas of variance are:

• Commission percentage
• Pay schedule (paid on booked, paid on shipped, paid on paid)
• Sales support
• Marketing support
• 1099 vs. W-2
• Room and support for advancement
• Interpersonal relationships
• Honesty & integrity

Analyzing these variables is difficult to do. Most positions tend to fall into the middle of the job spectrum and can be considered “fair/good”. If the jobs that you are providing your employees are on the low side of the spectrum, you are a sub-par business and are at risk of losing your people. Being good to your employees isn’t that difficult. It simply takes common sense and the desire to make it the cornerstone of your business.

Our next blog post will discuss how to attract talented people to your business!