You’re the owner of a small or midsize business and you’re thinking that, when it comes to growth and scale and reaching goals, limitations around your workforce are a major challenge. You’re probably right. And you’re definitely not alone. Now, you may also be thinking that solving staffing problems through outsourcing and offshoring only applies to large business operations. Once again, you’re definitely not alone, but that’s where we’re happy to bust some myths.
The common misconception that only enterprise-level companies can, or should, work with a global outsourcing and offshoring partner is exactly that—a misconception. A major one that could be holding you back. Yes, challenges facing small and midsize businesses (SMBs) are certainly different on many levels than those facing large enterprises, but the importance of knowing where to find the Right People is a common denominator.
And that’s where we find inspiration large and small for this edition of ECLARO’s Five on Friday…
227,000: Jobless claims last week, as reported by the U.S. Department of Labor. The 7,000 week-on-week decline marks the second straight week this number has fallen, bringing the four-week average down to 236,500.
While calming fears that the labor market might have been heading for trouble amid high interest rates, that number as serves as a reminder that the competition for top talent has not decreased at all.
“Even as that number had been increasing, it’s still historically low,” says ECLARO Co-Founder Paul Sheridan. “The quest for hiring top talent remains historically competitive as well, and that degree of difficulty is often magnified for small and midsize businesses.”
20%: Number of small businesses citing Quality of Labor as one of the Top 10 most important problems facing them this year, according to a Statista study.
Want to know the only response that came in higher (at 22%)? Inflation.
Is it really any surprise that those two problems carry almost the same weight for those business owners? Inflation is nothing to trivialize, of course. But when you think about it, what matters more to the success of your business, day in and day out, than making sure you are hiring the best people, the Right People, for every role?
43%: Number of small business owners reporting that they have job openings that they cannot fill, according to the National Federation of Independent Business.
Finding the Right People for hard-to-fill roles has been compared to finding a needle in a haystack, but here at ECLARO we prefer to think of it as threading the needle. It takes expertise, precision, patience and…well, you can read more about it here.
74%: Number of small business owners who say their costs have risen over the past year.
Successful businesses of any size make hiring decisions while keeping a keen eye on the bottom line, productivity and the quality of work. For anyone concerned that these factors can’t co-exist, consider it another myth busted.
15: Years ECLARO has been helping clients with custom outsourcing and offshoring services with top-tier talent in the Philippines.
“We are proud to have continually delivered our clients world-class talent across industries and functions, and at a fraction of onshore rates, all without our clients sacrificing quality or productivity,” says ECLARO Co-Founder Tom Sheridan. “For SMBs with whom we’ve partnered, we’ve found that a well-planned and managed offshore engagement can help those businesses scale, improve productivity and reduce costs, all while management focuses time and resources on other areas.
“We’ve spent decades building our proprietary, curated portfolio of vetted candidates for that very reason—so we can help our clients, large and small and anywhere in between, find the Right People to keep their business moving not only forward, but upward.”