SME leaders should handle the recruitment of employees themselves, even if they hate it, because it is an essential part of building a successful business, says Xavier de Lecaros-Aquise, co-founder of GirlMeetsDress.com, a designer dress hire firm.  He said: "If the last five people you hired have been through a recruitment consultant, you need to rethink things, because that is a part of your business which you should not be outsourcing. You know your business, you know how to pitch it, you know what candidates are best, and you need to develop your own unique recruitment process. Using recruitment consultants just doesn't make sense."  De Lecaros-Aquise, who was involved in several successful start-ups before co-founding GirlMeetsDress.com with Anna Bance, added: "Many SME founders I know hate the process of hiring new people, but if they put more time into their recruiting and made it a core competence of their business it would pay a lot of dividends. It takes more than one competence to build a business and being competent at hiring is one of those things where you can really make a difference to your business."  A key benefit of doing the recruitment yourself is that it enables you to establish relationships with potential employees long before you are in a position to offer them with a job, so that you can move quickly when you need to recruit, de Lecaros-Aquise said.  He said: "The reality is that you need to be building your network of potential recruits on a regular basis, because you never know when a key person is going to be required. If you are a growing SME you could find that from one quarter to the next you need to hire a lot of people and that is difficult to do at the last minute."  He added: "Don't limit yourself to having interactions with really great, competent people only when you need to recruit someone. Because if you leave it till then, you will not have enough time to go through the market to find out who is good and who is not. People say you have to fire fast but the truth is you need to hire incredibly fast as well, or at least start engaging in a conversation. Also talking to these prospective candidates can even help you shape the right roadmap for the business at times and that can be invaluable, whether you end up hiring them or not."  Doing the recruitment yourself and building up relationships may also enable you to hire highly competent people who might have seemed out of your league on paper, de Lecaros-Aquise said.  "Someone might want to move jobs because they want a high salary, but if they get to know you, and your business has got a culture that they really like where they really feel they can make a difference, they are going to want to be part of it even if you can't compete on a salary package basis."
Getting involved in recruiting right from the start will reap dividends, the   co-founder of GirlMeetsDress.com tells Rachel Bridge