Small and medium-sized businesses already know how working with a PEO can help you hire better talent more easily and more efficiently. PEOs can take over the recruiting process to find candidates from a larger pool, they can handle salary negotiations, and they facilitate on-boarding.

What’s less obvious to most business owners is how working with a PEO positions your company to convince great candidates to work with you.

It’s easy to get caught up in the employer’s point of view throughout the hiring process. You know that you run a great company on an upward trajectory. It’s a place people love to work, and the job you’re interviewing for is a challenging, rewarding role for the right person. How, then, could any candidate not fall in love?

The truth is that the best candidates tend to have options. Good options, and lots of them. At a certain point, companies go from offering a job to convincing top talent to sign on with them instead of the other guy.

It’s a delicate path, but you want to approach every hire as an opportunity not just to add value to your company, but also as an opportunity to add value to a potential employee’s life and career path. During the interview process, you can touch on a few issues that will help convince talented candidates that they’ll thrive working with you.

Explain the Benefits of Your PEO Relationship. Working with a PEO gives you access to high-level resources -- that’s an asset to you and your potential employees. You can come right out and say that you’ve made sure that your employees can be covered by great health care plans, retirement programs, and clear, efficient HR just like at a blue chip company.

Contrast That With the Appeal of Your Small Business. Everyone wants all the benefits of working with the big guys, but they increasingly want the actual work environment of smaller companies. They want to know everyone around them and be more than just a first name or employee number. Sell great candidates on the close-knit environment your small business can provide as you offer the value of a Fortune 500 company.

Assure Them That Experts Handle Everything. With the future of health care, taxes, and more up in the air, it’s not just employers who are worried -- everyone is dealing with uncertainty, and that includes potential hires. You can assure candidates that no matter what happens, your company works with experts who can respond, adjust, and make sure that everyone hits the ground running if there are any policy changes. Most small businesses are wringing their hands and hoping for the best; you can be confident.

More Time and Resources for You Pays Off for Them. Top talent doesn’t want to be stuck in a stale job at which every day is the same. Stability is good, but boring is not. Your relationship with a PEO will allow you to devote more time, money, and resources to growing your product/service and developing your employees. They should know that working with you means opportunities for growth and support. Lots of companies promise this, but few actually demonstrate an ability to do it. You can.

Treating the recruitment process as a two-way relationship will go a long way toward attracting the types of employees who will satisfy your business’s needs while positioning you to grow. It is, after all, a relationship. Showing prospective hires that you offer what they need -- and that a PEO helps you do it -- is just as important as making sure they’re the right fit.