“YA GOT ANY BENEFITS HERE?” “Well, do ya?” It’s my least favorite question so we’ll come back to it. One of the greatest difficulties in small business is attracting and keeping good employees. High quality applicants are hard to attract and even harder to hire. Hiring them and keeping them begins with the interview process. And who does the interviewing at a small business? Three guesses. Most small business owners do their own interviewing but few realize that the interview is the very beginning to building their company by populating with the right employees. Want to stay in business for more than just a few years? Well, you better bone up on your hiring and interviewing tactics to stay ahead of the competition. What questions do savvy business owners ask in an interview? I was always taught to ask an applicant to expound on their “strengths and weaknesses”. Unfortunately, most of the time I get answers that are all too predictable. For example, you can be sure that one of the applicant’s strengths will always be “I’m a real people person!” Um….OK. What exactly does that mean anyway? Is that opposed to being, say, an animal person or an inanimate object person. You know, now that I think about it, most of my customers are people and so are my other employees. Wow! That’s like an amazing coincidence. You’ll fit in perfectly here. Another favorite strength is to say that they are “detail oriented”. At that point, I usually like to turn around and face the wall and then ask them what color my eyes are. Always good for a laugh in my mirth-starved life. Answers to “What is your greatest weakness?” get some predictable responses as well. It’s usually something totally unrelated. Applying for a customer service job, your “people person” applicant will cite their website building skills as being a bit insufficient. Applicants for a website building job will say that their people skills are weak. How helpful. Or, better yet, the answer is something incredibly obscure. “I’d like to be better at map reading” or “I think I need some work on my yacht sail mending skills.” Ok, let’s go back to my least favorite question. Here I am in my garage-like office, using a slab of wood mounted on two file cabinets as a desk and my applicant asks me if I have any benefits to offer him. Hmmm, let’s see. You get to show up everyday and work. You get paid every two weeks. You won’t get smacked around for asking stupid questions. That’s about it. What part of the phrase “small” business did you not understand? SmallBiz Rule #62: Benefits come in different forms. Small Biz offers growth, autonomy and opportunities. Sell the sizzle. Alright, alright, I admit it. I never say any of those things. Not out loud, anyway. So when you are small and you don’t have even a hint of bennies to offer someone, what can you say? This is what I do: First I say, “You know, this is traditional small business and we really don’t have a benefits package to offer yet but neither did FedEx when they first started out. (Actually maybe they did, but I always gloss over that detail and move on). What I’m looking for are people who would like to help build this into a much bigger company so that we can be competitive and reward our people properly.” Then I go on to describe the company and generally explain our growth plan. I ask them what they believe they could contribute to that cause and then, finally, I talk about the real benefits of working here: the satisfaction of doing a good job; the opportunity to help create policy rather than be frustrated by it; the pure joy of making your own decisions as so many do in small business. I talk about the contrast to a big company where jobs are finely tailored and narrow; where bureaucracy replaces creativity and where conformity to the norm is mandated. By the time I’m done, I’ve re-energized myself. Small business is where it’s at. It’s where all the creative juices flow; where change is the only constant and where America finds its inspiration day after day. Applicants can learn more about business in general by working at a small company than just about anything else they might do. Sell them on that and in the process you’ll find that you are re-selling yourself!