Professional employer organizations, also known as PEOs, offer practical and workable solutions for small businesses. This is particularly true when it comes to handling regular tasks like human resources protocols, payroll, and staff benefits.


Table of Contents

  1. The Benefits of Hiring a PEO 
  2. The Factors to Consider in Your Decision
  3. Streamlined Recruiting Processes
  4. How PEOs Improve Your Recruitment Processes
  5. Final Thoughts

Small business owners can spend as much as 240 days a year tackling administrative tasks. A hefty portion of those tasks pertains to payroll, benefits, and HR-related processes. If you enlist the assistance of a PEO, you can be more productive elsewhere, focusing on crucial operational tasks and improving your company’s profitability.

The Benefits of Hiring a PEO

There are dozens of benefits to outsourcing your cornerstone administrative tasks to a professional employer organization. They include:

  • Improved efficiency. Using a PEO will allow you to focus your attention on expanding and nurturing your business.

  • Reducing labor-related costs. If you allow skilled PEO specialists to handle your HR, you can minimize your potential risk of labor-related violations and issues.
  • Increasing your accountability. A reliable PEO will always ensure that co-employer contracts guarantee accountability where it’s needed the most.
  • Reducing infrastructure costs. Hiring a PEO will nix your need to invest in additional IT infrastructure to manage your human resources department.

The Factors to Consider in Your Decision

You should base your decision to enlist the help of a PEO on several considerations. The size of your business and the costs you face are two essential factors. Other considerations will vary according to the industry in which you operate.

Does your business offer additional employee benefits? Professional employer organizations usually boast a wide range of benefits, including health insurance, 401k plans, and others. Your service provider will administer these benefits to your staff, thereby reducing your payroll and benefits workload.

You also need to consider the number of employees you have on board. Small businesses, which have between 15 and 80 staff members, stand to benefit the most from the services of a PEO. If the number of staff you have on board is straining your focus, hiring a PEO can free up your schedule and allow you to concentrate on growth and development.

The costs of hiring a PEO will depend on numerous factors, including the kind of business you own, the size of your venture, and the range of services you offer. However, their specialized experience will benefit your small business greatly by keeping it in line with local and federal employment regulations.

Streamlined Recruiting Processes

PEOs have the power to solve many of your HR project management troubles, but they can improve your recruiting processes at every level too. HR has become more and more time-consuming for smaller-scale employers, which is why so many have decided to outsource their recruitment tasks.

A PEO can help your business overcome a spectrum of HR challenges, such as:

  • Unappealing or substandard employee benefits;
  • Growing HR costs;
  • Compliance with human resources law; and
  • Usage of outdated technology for HR management.

Over and above this, a PEO can assist your business in attracting and onboarding talented workers who’ll prove to be a consistently good fit for your existing team.

Finding and retaining talented professionals is more of an obstacle than ever in the modern age. You can approach your PEO as an employer to improve your talent acquisition strategies and hire confident and capable new staff members.

How PEOs Improve Your Recruitment Processes

So, how exactly would a professional employer organization help small employers in terms of attracting and keeping workers around? Here are some of the ways that PEOs can help solve a business’ recruiting challenges.

1. Creating Job Descriptions

Candidates may steer clear of applying for positions if your job descriptions don’t concisely describe the nature of the jobs at hand. Even worse, if your descriptions are inaccurate or misleading, you could damage your candidate experience and employer identities.

Smaller employers don’t always have the resources or skills to write comprehensive job descriptions that attract the right applicants. However, a PEO and their recruiting team have the experience and the resources needed to boost your job application and ad conversion rates.

2. Effectively Advertising Positions

Thousands of employers battle to figure out how, when, and where to advertise vacant positions to attract the correct type of talent. There are so many platforms to advertise onthink Glassdoor, LinkedIn, and Upworkthat the decision can become very overwhelming.

The best PEOs simplify this process by ensuring that jobs are posted in the ideal locations for each position. This will make businesses visible to more candidates, assisting them to attract and hire the right staff members who will help their operations grow.

You can gain access to an applicant tracking system (ATS) through your PEO. This essential piece of recruiting technology can make a huge difference in your onboarding department by improving both your recruitment process and your candidates’ experiences when applying. However, they take time and money to obtain and learn. This may not make them viable for your business to purchase outright, especially when you don’t add many new employees to your ranks each month. Your PEO will give you access to this system and provide expert guidance on how to navigate it.

3. Finding and Qualifying Applicants

Finding the perfect candidates to add to your team can take weeks, months, and even years in some cases. If you already have dozens of responsibilities to attend to, this can be a tall order indeed.

Your professional employer organization can take over the process of sourcing and qualifying your applications, screening them for skills, experience, and fit. Instead of having to sort through countless resumes yourself, your PEO can perform initial screenings and then schedule interviews to further streamline your recruiting tasks.

Final Thoughts

Professional employer organizations can take the guesswork out of your business’ HR project management, payroll, and staff benefits demands. Moreover, it can make the process of finding and onboarding new employees significantly more efficient and less time-consuming.

Leading professionals recommend finding a PEO that’s willing and capable of scaling alongside your business as it grows and expands into new sectors and avenues of opportunity. They should also be able to help you with developing solid hiring strategies and compliance guidelines and offer the best possible range of benefits for your employees.