Summer is coming — and the small businesses that are scrambling in June are the ones that did nothing in April. If you haven’t started hiring yet, this episode is your alarm clock.
Bella breaks down exactly why the hiring window closes faster than you think, what to do today, and how to use AI to get ahead of the rush before it’s too late.
TIMESTAMPS:
[0:00] — The summer scramble is real — and it’s already starting
[2:00] — Why April is your actual hiring deadline (not June)
[5:00] — The true cost of being understaffed in peak season
[8:30] — Step 1: Know your summer numbers BEFORE you post
[12:00] — Step 2: Write a job post that attracts, not repels
[16:00] — Step 3: Use AI to screen and save 5+ hours a week
[20:00] — Step 4: Build your pipeline NOW, not when you’re desperate
[23:30] — The Jump Hiring Method in 60 seconds
[25:00] — Your this-week action plan
In This Episode You’ll Discover:
- Why most small business owners wait too long to hire — and what it actually costs them in revenue, stress, and client trust
- The math behind your summer headcount: how to calculate exactly how many people you need before you ever post a job
- What a great job post says versus what a mediocre one says — and the single line that filters out bad applicants before they apply
- How to use AI (ChatGPT or Claude) to screen applications in minutes instead of hours — without losing the human touch
- Bella’s ‘pipeline before desperation’ principle and the 3 things you can do THIS WEEK to make sure summer doesn’t catch you flat-footed
About This Episode:
Bella Vasta is the founder of Jump Consulting and has been coaching small business owners since 2007. She created the Jump Hiring Method — a proven 10-step framework that helps service-based businesses hire smarter, reduce turnover, and build teams that actually show up. In this episode, she brings the urgency of a coach who has watched too many small businesses lose their best summer ever because they waited too long to hire.
Resources and Links Mentioned:
Breezy HR — The ATS Bella recommends for small businesses — post once, track everywhere, screen with AI. Affiliate link with special pricing.
The Jumpers Mastermind — Where Bella works with small business owners on hiring, AI, marketing, and systems — month to month.
Free 20-Minute Call with Bella — One problem, 20 minutes, totally free. Walk away with a clear next step.
The Jump Hiring Method Blog Post — The full 10-step framework in writing — bookmark this.
Connect with Bella:
Subscribe to Bella in Your Business
Find Bella on Instagram and Facebook — search Bella Vasta
FAQ:
When should a small business start hiring for summer?
April is your real deadline — not June, not May. By the time summer demand hits, you need people who are already trained, onboarded, and have handled real work independently. That process takes 4–6 weeks minimum. If you post a job in late May, your new hire won’t be ready until July — and you’ll have lost clients in the gap. Start now, even if summer feels far away. The businesses that thrive in summer are the ones that hired in spring.
How do I figure out how many people I need to hire for summer?
Start with your numbers from last summer. How much work were you turning down? How many days were you at or over capacity? Take your peak weekly workload, divide by the realistic output of one part-time employee, and that tells you how many people you need at full coverage. Subtract who you have now. That gap is your hiring goal. Add at least 20% buffer for no-shows, schedule conflicts, and turnover — because summer always has some of each.
What should a small business include in a job posting to attract better applicants?
The biggest mistake small business owners make is writing a job post that sounds like a generic HR form. Your post needs to do two things: filter out bad-fit applicants before they apply, and make your ideal applicant excited to work for you specifically. Lead with what makes your business worth working for — your values, your culture, what a great day actually looks like. Be honest about the schedule expectations and physical realities. End with a specific, slightly unusual application question — this filters out mass-applicants and immediately shows you who actually read the post.
Can I use AI to help screen job applicants for my small business?
Yes — and you should. Once applications come in, paste each one into Claude or ChatGPT along with your hiring criteria and ask it to flag green flags, red flags, and questions to ask in the interview. AI won’t make the final call for you, and it shouldn’t — that’s still a human decision. But it can cut your screening time from hours to minutes and catches inconsistencies that tired eyes miss after reviewing the fifth application in a row. Pair this with Breezy HR for full pipeline management.
What is the Jump Hiring Method?
The Jump Hiring Method is a 10-step hiring framework Bella Vasta developed for small, service-based businesses. It covers everything from calculating your headcount needs and writing a compelling job post, to screening, interviewing, onboarding, and retaining great people. The method is designed for business owners who are not HR professionals — it gives you a repeatable system so hiring doesn’t feel like starting from scratch every time. You can read the full framework on Bella’s blog at Jump Consulting.
Full Episode Transcript
Okay, I need you to listen to me right now. Not before you finish your coffee, not save this for later, like right now. And obviously you’re tuning in, so you’re ready to go. But I’ve been watching something happen every single year for like the 18 years that I’ve been doing this, and I don’t want it to happen to you. So today we’re gonna talk about it. Here’s the scene. It’s June. Like your phone is blowing up or your email. Clients want more.
hours, they want rush jobs, they want the same week bookings, like they want it now. And because some are hit and everyone needs something done at once, it’s your best shot at your biggest revenue season. OK, and you don’t have enough people. You’re texting your one reliable employee asking if she could please, please, please, please take on like six more jobs or clients. And she can’t. You’re doing them yourself. You’re exhausted. You’re turning away clients.
You haven’t had them for years and they’re coming back. You have nowhere to put them. And somewhere in the back of your mind, little voice is saying, I should have hired earlier. Yeah, you should have. But here’s the thing, you can still fix it today, this week. It is April. And April is actually your hiring deadline. I cannot stress this enough. So many of you guys are going through this right now. Now, April, not May, not June, okay? And if you’re listening to this right now,
Like you’re not too late, but you’re not early either. Like this is really important to figure out. I did an episode a couple of episodes ago, all about the 10 step jump hiring method. And that would be a really good one to go back and listen to, to just refresh your memory about a proven method that actually works. But today we’re definitely gonna go in and talk about what you need to do now. Hi, I’m Bella from Bella in Your Business.
And I’ve been coaching small businesses since 2007. I’ve seen a lot of summers. And the ones that went sideways or almost went sideways for the exact same reason. They waited too long to hire. And I don’t care if you’re in the pet business or you’re in the roofing company or you’re a house cleaner or whatever it is. Today, we’re gonna fix that. Like I am bringing this directly to you to make sure that you understand this is something we need to do now.
Bella (02:27.316)
And unless you have a button that you know you can push and just make it rain your ideal kind of higher, then you need to listen to this episode today. Okay. We’re going to figure out what you need to do to close that window faster, how to calculate what you actually need, what to do with your job post and how AI can save you hours in screening and what to do this week. Like this week, not someday.
Not next month, today, okay? Because it’s really important. All right, let’s get into it. Before we go further, I do want to make a note that our last episode where I talked about the difference between SEO and AIO or AEO and why it’s important to have both of them, you guys really, really, really appreciated that one and I love that.
I wanna just tie that up really quickly. If you haven’t listened, you definitely wanna go back and hear that one. Today I posted something that really went along with that and it’s that a cat’s life was saved using Grok. Go check out Bella Vasta on Facebook. It’s my personal profile, but it’s public. And what I talked about there is there was a cat in distress and it was a diabetic cat.
and the owner went to Grok and Grok was like, get it to the vet now. It’s going into shock and this is what you need to do and ultimately save the cat’s life. Now, why is this important to last week’s episode? Well, last week’s episode, I was literally driving home the point that what we’re doing now is not Googling. We are literally asking our AI people, agents, LLMs, hey.
this is my problem, what do I do about it? We’re starting, our human behavior collectively is starting to trust that. And so if you’re not showing, if your business isn’t showing up as the suggested resource for multiple questions, then you’re missing out on really great opportunities because the people that are asking the LLMs right now are the ones that are like, their intent to buy is really high. So if you’re just joining me or you,
Bella (04:41.998)
missed last week’s episode, I really encourage you to go back to episode 465 and listen to it. Okay, so let’s talk about why April matters, because I know some of you are listening to this thinking, summer’s still like two months away, I have time. You don’t, and here’s why. Think about what actually has to happen before a new hire can work independently with your clients. You post the job, the applications come in, which takes time, right?
And because the good ones are not sitting by their phone waiting for you to post, you screen them, you interview them, you do a background check. And then, and only then, are they actually ready to serve your clients independently. And how long does that all take? You know, like it varies for all different businesses. The ones that I’ve worked with and we’ve optimized, it takes about a week. And from posting to getting them out in the field, because we’ve optimized the process. But the majority of people, this takes like four to six weeks.
if everything goes smoothly. So you post your job on June 1st, your new hire is ready around June 15th at the earliest, and you’ve lost six weeks of your peak season. You have left money on the table, you’ve declined clients who, you know, they’re not gonna wait for you, they’re gonna go find somebody else to solve their problem, because their problem is now. And you will have to find someone else, and some of them will stay with that someone else. This is why April is the deadline. I wanna like literally be like, hello?
And I know it’s not necessarily good news because you probably already have a hundred things on your plate, but this is something that is going to directly help your bottom line in your revenue. All right. And so I want your new people ready and you confident in them by Memorial Day. That’s the end of May. And so that’s when summer searches usually start. And that’s the math. So once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
I wanna talk to you about what being understaffed peak season actually costs you because maybe just looking at it from this perspective instead of something I have to do will also help motivate you. And I’m not just talking about money, although we’re also gonna talk about money. So there’s the obvious. The first thing, it’s obvious, right? You’ll turn revenue away. Every job you decline because you don’t have the capacity for that money goes straight to a competitor. And it adds up fast.
Bella (07:00.47)
If you turn away just three jobs a week, right? That could be, I mean, it varies with businesses, but let’s just say for the sake of the podcast, $150. And that’s over $3,000, you know, like it adds up, gone without a fight. Then there’s this stuff that doesn’t show up on a spreadsheet. Like the client who’s been with you for four years, loyal, refers people to you, never complains, and then they call you in June in a peak season.
and you’re already slammed and you have to tell them you can’t take them because you literally do not have any more business. Like you are praying every time you open up your email that there’s not more booking requests or service calls, right? And they’re gracious about it. They say that they understand, but now they call someone else. Now they’re being courted by another company and that someone else actually does a good job because they’ve got good systems and processes.
Maybe they’re even using AI, which is making them that much more lethal. And now in the fall, they’ve got a new person and you’ve lost them. You’ve lost the value of their account. Not because you did anything wrong, but because you didn’t have the capacity to say, yes, you didn’t plan ahead. You did not heed my advice right now. Right now you might be thinking, but Bella, I’ve got enough people. There’s also burnout.
running it at 110 % for weeks because you or one or two of your reliable people are covering everything, over committing. That’s a tax on you or their’s body, their creativity, patience, enjoyment for the business that you built or their job. And I’ve talked to so many business owners who dread the summer. It’s their best season, the season where they worked all year to get to.
Typically the beginning of the year is pretty low or low. And now we get to summer and it’s exciting, right? And they dread it because they’re running on fumes. Not to mention their personal life suffers. I mean, let’s just acknowledge that. And then here’s the one that really gets me. It’s the missed growth. Okay. We talked about like the existing clients having spots for them, but what about the new ones that might be worth thousands of dollars every year?
Bella (09:17.356)
Summer is when new clients find you. Maybe they move into the area, you know, especially the ones with kids. They do a lot of moving in the summer. That’s maybe when they need a house cleaner or a pet sitter or a landscaper or whatever it might be, okay? So when someone moves in the area, a competitor closes, a referral finally comes through, a person who has been meaning to hire help for two years finally picks up that phone.
And if you’re at capacity when they call, you can’t take them. You miss a potential great long-term client because you had no room. Understaffing doesn’t just cost you summer. It could cost you months. Okay, I’m gonna step off that Stope box. I think that we’re all like in agreement. So let’s talk about what to do about it. So step one, before you post a single job, you need to know your number. How many people do you actually need? Now I know a lot of business owners
really struggle with this and they don’t even think about this. And that’s why I want to talk about it today. And what I want you to actually do is this, not just listen, but grab your phone, open up the notes app and follow along. Or if you’re like some of my other jumpers, they actually go to the show notes of this episode and they grab the transcript and then they put it into their favorite LLM and then use that LLM as a thought partner to figure out how to figure out their own stuff because they already have their information in there.
So, but we’re going to just pretend you don’t have that set up. We’re going to do very basic, basic suggestions. Okay. So first go back to last summer. What was your peak weekly workload? Look at your absolute busiest. How many jobs, orders, appointments or clients were you and your team handling in a week? I want you to write that number down. Okay. Now how much can one reliable part-time employee reasonably handle in a week? That’s going to depend on your industry and your service model, but
You know your business the best, okay? Think about what a good employee also has a life outside of work. What’s their realistic ceiling? It might not be the same for everyone. Write that number down and divide your peak workload by that number. And that’s how many people you need at full capacity for your summer. Now, look at how many people you actually have right now and who is available and reliable, okay?
Bella (11:43.478)
Not how many are technically on your roster, but how many could you actually trust with your best client on a Tuesday afternoon? Subtract the reliable people you have from your ideal number. That gap is your hiring goal, okay? But here’s the thing, whatever number you just wrote down, add 20%. I really want you guys to pay attention to this. I really, really do, because I think what happens is we reactively hire a lot. It’s like someone quits and then we have to hire.
But I need you to do these projections. OK, this is really, really important. Summer always has turnover. Someone gets a full time job, someone moves, someone takes a really long vacation, never comes back. They stop showing up after their third week. I’m not trying to be cynical. It’s just the reality of part time service staff. Build in that buffer now. You always want to be overstaffed. You want to give yourself options. So now that you know your number, maybe it’s just one person.
Maybe it’s four. Either way, you’re not guessing. You know what you need and that makes everything easier. All right, step two, your job posts. And girl, we need to talk about this because most small business posts are not good. And I say this with love. This is why I have it in my jump hiring method as the love letter. Okay, most of them sound like this.
We are a growing company looking for a motivated team player to join our dynamic environment. You must be reliable and professional, part-time, flexible hours, competitive pay. Wow, that gets me excited. I get it, like you’re overwhelmed, like you’re flooded out. have no ounce of creativity energy in you ever again. Every small business owner in your industry posted something almost identical. It says nothing, it tells the applicant nothing about who you are.
and what it’s like to actually work for you. There’s no 3D part to that. They can’t see it, they can’t feel it. There’s nothing. It’s very sterile. you’re giving them no reason or why they should pick you over the other 20 listings out there that they’re watching and reading and also feeling depressed about. And so here’s why a great job ad, it does instead. It makes your ideal client say, my gosh, this is me.
Bella (14:04.822)
and it makes the right, the wrong candidate self-select out before they even apply. This literally like will change your life. Both of those things save you time, a lot of it. And so what’s, here’s what you actually include. Open up with what makes your company working, like worth working for. Not your mission statement, but like the real stuff. Like do you pay for gas? Do you have a team group chat where people actually support each other? Do you have a coordinator?
who handles the messy stuff so your team doesn’t have to deal with the direct client drama. That stuff matters to good candidates. Two, be honest about the physical reality. Whatever the real physical or logistical demands are in your business, say them out loud, in the post, honest and specific. It’s not like a, this isn’t a deterrent for the right person. It’s just a filter. All right, don’t be afraid to stand on your ground.
And three, be clear about the schedule that you actually need. Summer availability, weekends, holidays. If you need someone who can work Memorial Day and the Fourth of July, say it in the post. Don’t find out in May that one of your new hires has family plans. It’s not like can work holidays. It’s like you’re excited to work with us on Fourth of July, 2026. There’s a difference in that. And four, this is my favorite. I want you to end with a specific.
and slightly unusual application steps. Something like send your resume in a one paragraph answer to this. Tell us about a time when something went sideways in your work and how you handled it. Something like that. Something specific to your business. It’s that a copy paste applicant would skip right over because it required too much. It’s like your first little hoop. That could be inside your knockout questions too, all right?
And so it does two things. It filters out people who mass apply to 50 jobs without reading and they’re just like, apply, apply, apply. They won’t bother with that, all right? So that’s actually a filter. takes two seconds for you to do. And it shows immediately who can follow instructions, who communicates clearly, who actually wants to work for you. And that’s gold. I mean, you might even say, why do you wanna work for, insert your company here? All right, step three.
Bella (16:26.402)
And this is actually where it gets good. Once applicants start coming in, most business owners do one of two things. They either read every single application themselves, which takes forever and gets exhausting, or they skim so quickly that they miss things. And they end up with a phone call with someone who clearly was not a good fit from their first line of their application. But there’s a better way. And it involves two things working together, a good ATS, applicant tracking system, and AI.
So the ATS that I recommend for small businesses is Breezy HR. For those of you who’ve been with me for a long time, it used to be Jazz HR, and I have a whole entire blog explaining why Jazz HR does not support small businesses anymore. And I just in my right mind, I put my reputation on the line, could not tell you to keep using Jazz HR. I’ll link it in the show notes. But I’ll also put Breezy HR in the show notes as well.
If you go to jumpconsulting.net forward slash Breezy, you could actually sign up for a free account. Breezy lets you post multiple jobs to multiple boards all in one place. It goes from like JazzHR, which was like 15 to 50 job boards. I mean, that alone is amazing. No more applicants lost in your Gmail or sifting through Indeed. No more spreadsheet chaos. It’s built for small businesses. And honestly, if you’re still managing hires through email,
Switching to Breezy will change your life. So applications are flowing into Breezy, now what? Here’s the AI piece, and this is something I actually do. Take the application, copy the text, paste it into ChatGPT or Cloud, and then add your hiring criteria. Something like, here’s the job application. My key requirements are, and then please identify green flags, red flags, and three questions I should ask in the interview. This is basic.
because I know a lot of people have not set up their huge 10 step hiring process that runs automatically. So if you’re still doing it and you’re still a hot mess and you have not taken the time to do it, this is the method I would do if you’re still involved with it, all right? And then read it what it gives you, right? And AI is not making the hiring decision, but it’s helping take the critical thinking away and it’s working as a thought partner with you.
Bella (18:51.168)
Okay, I would not recommend this as a long term thing, but this is, I needed to give you all something that’s a little bit more basic than that 10 step hiring method, because I understand not everyone has implemented that yet. Okay, but I also want to be really clear that AI is a screening assistant, not a screen saver or screener. Okay, you still have to talk to your finalists. You still have to make the final call. The human judgment,
is what’s really gonna matter and you really have to have that avatar and that like list so that when they’re sitting in front of you, you can say, yes, this is my person or no, this does not fit the avatar of the person that I’m looking for, okay? Now step four is more of a mindset tactic but it’s one that ties everything else together. Call it a pipeline before desperation and it’s simple. You build the candidate pipeline before you’re desperate to fill a role.
Okay, and this is also where applicant tracking systems really help save your butt because you’re getting in all of those applicants that you can then look at when the time is right. And the hiring desperation, tell me if you can relate to this. Like you’re at 110 % capacity. Your employee quits with two weeks notice. You panic post for a job. This is the reactive hiring I was just talking about.
You interview the first person who responds and they seem okay. You cut the background check short because you need someone now and your hire is fine, they’re not great. But three months later you realize you’ve got someone on your team who’s bringing the vibe down. They’re not exactly like the greatest fit, okay? And the clients who are lukewarm about and who you would never have hired if you had options, right?
So the pipeline before desperation means that you are always recruiting, always be recruiting, not necessarily actively hiring, but always building a list. And when someone amazing sends in an application you don’t have a spot for, you respond warmly and you stay in touch. When someone impressive sends in an application, but you don’t have a spot, you put them on a list so that you can come back to them.
Bella (21:12.47)
And when a client mentions that their neighbor just moved into town and is looking for flexible work, you get that person’s number. You collect this stuff. You fill the pipeline. OK, you’re building like a bench. when you do need to hire and you will, you’ll have people that you can call who you already know that want to work for you. And maybe their situations change, but maybe it hasn’t. Maybe they’ve just been following you online, like waiting. I have a lot of clients that have done this very well that have had people
call and check in with them every couple of weeks because they wanted to work for their organization. That’s a whole nother story too, but what they’ve done is they’ve done a really good job on social media of inviting people in. We always forget that marketing is not just for clients, it’s also for employees. And this is how small businesses that never scramble in the summer, this is how they operate. They don’t suddenly need to hire in June. They’ve been nurturing relationships since February. And when May hits, they already know their job.
top job candidates. This is where I want you to be. I want you to think about this vision and think, how can I make this a reality in my life? You deserve to have this vision be your reality. And even just posting the job now and having those conversations now, even if you’re not quite ready to hire, we’ll put you on that path. All right, a real quick note before your action plan. I wanna give you a 60 second overview.
of what the Jump hiring method is, just in case you haven’t heard about it before, because this might be your first time on the podcast, or you might’ve just forgotten about it. So really quick. So the Jump hiring method is an entire framework I’ve developed for over years of working with small businesses hiring. It’s one of the first things, one of my first products I did, it started with the employee quick start program that I created back in 2008. It’s a 10 step hiring process that covers everything, figuring out your numbers, writing posts,
setting up your ATS, screening, interviewing, making the offer, onboarding, training, retaining great employees so that you’re not starting over every six months. Each step literally builds on the last and it makes you figure out what you want and put your flag in the sand, which is uncomfortable for a lot of people. The whole thing is designed for business owners who are not HR professionals, who just wanna hire good people without it eating up their entire life or trying to
Bella (23:36.226)
redo the process every single time. So if you want the full hiring method, I do have a blog post about it. It’s jumpconsulting.net forward slash jump dash hiring dash method. I’ll link it in the show notes. And if you actually want to implement it with my support and with a community of other business owners doing the same, that’s what the mastermind is for or my intensives. We work through this stuff together and I’ll put that note, that link in the show notes too. All right, action plan time. So here’s what I want you to do this week.
Not someday, this week. Step one, run your numbers. Today, after this episode, take your peak workload from the last summer, divide by realistic capacity, compare it to who you have now, and add 20%, okay? Write that hiring goal number on a Post-It and put it somewhere. You’ll see it. Step two, rewrite your job post. Open it up or write one from scratch, if you haven’t already.
Cut out the generic stuff, the AI slop, if you will, and put in what makes your business worth working for. Make it honest, physical ability that you need, right? Add specific filler questions at the end, and then post it on Indeed, your local Facebook groups, your Google My Business profile, wherever, honestly, everywhere. And again, if you have an ATS, you can do it straight from there. Step three.
If you don’t have an ATS, you can set it up. And Breezy is where I’d start, jumpconsulting.net, excuse me, jumpconsulting.net forward slash Breezy. Breezy. Get your applicants going to one place instead of scattering across email, text messages, and DMs. And then step four, when the applicant comes in, use AI to help you screen. Paste each one into Claude or ChatGBT, I personally love Claude, with your criteria, read what it flags,
and then decide on who to invite on that phone call. That’s it, four things this week. You have time to make summer 2026 different, but the window is closing. And I would so much rather you be a business that has to turn away applicants in May because you’ve already filled your spots, than have to turn away clients. Because that’s what it comes down to. Comes down to your being able to plan and then do it on a system.
Bella (26:01.078)
Instead of having to rewrite it every single time, you need to reactive hire. I know this is a pain point in your business and I hope that this inspires you to solve it. All right, that’s a wrap on episode 466. Everything we talked about today, Breezy HR, Jump Hiring Method blog post, the mastermind, a free 20 minute call if you just wanna talk about this and tell me about your specific situation. It’s all gonna be in the show notes. All right, at jumpconsulting.net, just click podcast.
No digging around, it’s all right there. And if this episode hit, can you please like share it with your friends? Can you leave a comment or a review back or rate it? It truly, truly, truly would give me a really great signal that this is landing and this is helpful for you. Of course, it’s a free podcast and it’ll always stay free. This has been another episode of Bella in Your Business. Remember, when life gets you down, always keep jumping. Bye now.