The Tough Jobs: Hiring, Evaluation and Release Part 1
Finding staff, evaluating their efforts, and releasing them from service, are among the toughest roles for small organizations. Unless you have a background in human resources, the area of staffing is a struggle for most owners and managers.
Assessing the Risks
There are a number of risks with hiring new staff, and their are risks with releasing existing staff. To reduce these risks there are a few things that anyone can do, that involve educating yourself. This doesn't mean you need to go back to school for 5 years, it does mean you need to familiarize yourself with your local and federal laws on hiring practices, and follow a few hiring guidelines.
What do You NEED
The first thing to determine is what will be the role of the person(s) you will be hiring. You need to make a list of the duties they will be doing—this is VERY important (as you will see later). The list of jobs and duties will help guide you to a clearer definition of the type of person you need.
As the role becomes more important with the company, so will the list of duties and jobs become more important. If you are hiring someone as a laborer, picker or other seasonal work, it will not be as important to have an individualized list of duties. If you are hiring for a management or 'overseer' type of job this will become very important.
Where to Look
Once you have determined that you do need to hire new staff, the next big question is where to look.
Running ads in news papers or periodicals will provide you with candidates; but this may be your most expensive way to find the largest number of least-qualified applicants. The expense is not in the cost of the ad, but the staff time to field the calls and applications, then to “winnow the wheat from the chaff” from possibly hundreds of applicants.
Better areas to find personnel are through the use of hiring firms (“headhunters”), or by “Heart Hunting”.
By far the best candidates, and ultimately the best employees, come through Heart Hunting, which simply means they were recommended to you by someone else (another employee, a neighbor, a friend, a relative, etc.).
Don’t ignore the possibility of contacting your industry association or even your “competitors” in other towns. Even though you may compete for sales, you may not be competing for skilled workers in the same labor pool. It is a win all around if a competitor has a good employee who is moving to your town and they can refer them to you.
The reason that employees located from recommendations of others are generally among the best employees is that both parties will want to make the other look good—there is a vested interest in a successful relationship.
There are a variety of resources on the Web that can assist with Hiring, Evaluation, Release processes, many of them are posted by your individual federal, state or local governments.
In Canada, a Web site is dedicated to the Agricultural job market - <http://www.agri-labourpool.com>.
Your state Extension Service or Employment Department may have something similar.
Who is your most expensive employee?
The most expensive employee is the one that you have recruited, trained and then lost.
Employee retention is one of the cornerstones of business cost reduction. When you find good people, keep them. This doesn’t just mean paying them promptly on payday—it means setting clear expectations and responsibilities, letting them know they’re valued, accepting their input, paying them well, and giving them the opportunity to learn and advance on the job.
Unless you want to finance your competition by continually training people that end up working for other firms, this is an investment you cannot skimp on.
Quill's new Distributed Internet Messaging System (DIMS) was developed to provide associations with a means of disseminating information to it membership. It needed to be reliable, easy to use, cost effective and above all, a valuable communication to for members to keep up-to-date with.
