PEOs Help Rural Businesses Attract and Keep Top Talent

We know that the world is full of talent, but some businesses have easier access to great people than others do. If you’re in a major urban center, you have loads of high-performing talent all around you. What do you do if you’re somewhere more remote and there aren’t as many people around?

Take the example of Jay, a financial advisor in a small New York town. He’s a W-2 employee of a large financial firm that provides great benefits -- he’s covered. Much of his business is paid to his entity via 1099, though, and that independent business is growing. He’s ready to expand with an assistant and perhaps a partner.

To do that, his business needs to take the reins and provide excellent benefits, easy payroll, and more. Without those services, he’ll have trouble attracting the best talent in his limited geographic area.

Think of it from a potential employee’s perspective. You need access to great health care for you and possibly for your family. Stability is good, too, so your best options might include a local hospital or school. You aren’t surrounded by big, Fortune 500-level companies, so you look for the closest thing you can get.

But you’d love to work with a small business who gets to know you, your family, and your unique circumstances. You want a more closely-knit work environment with autonomy. It would be awesome to combine the two… and small businesses who can do that in rural areas appeal strongly to the best talent around them.

That’s the solution a relationship with a professional employer organization (PEO) gives to people like Jay. He’s trying to attract his first batch of employees and he wants to make effective hires. By streamlining payroll, offering Fortune 500-level benefits, and having solid workers’ compensation/HR functions in place, he can provide an excellent working environment that can compete with any other business around him.

All of a sudden he’s posting a job to work in a small-scale operation people want with the high-end benefits they need -- and that makes hiring top talent much easier. Instantly, he’s more appealing than that hospital or school.

He knew that a PEO would help him land the right people, but he was concerned that bringing on new staff might overwhelm him with on-boarding, employee guidelines, and training. That’s not the sort of thing he needs right when he’s working on ramping up his business.

PEOs not only handle many of those responsibilities, but they also allow small business owners like Jay to focus efforts on the things that drive growth. For him, that’s following up on more leads and taking more meetings. It’s extra time and money for networking, advertising, and outreach. It’s time he can spend on developing his new employees and more resources to give them everything they need to succeed.

He’d hired an assistant in the past and was all too familiar with the hassles that came along with employment -- and he wasn’t able to offer health insurance at all. He thinks the lack of benefits contributed strongly to her decision to move on. Now that he’ll be working with a PEO, he knows that he can find people who fit, support them properly, and see his business grow.

What, then, can a PEO do to help you attract outstanding talent that will help you grow your business together?