Fund Management, Business and Marketing Resources at Pubdef Weekly

The Recruitment Process – Finding the Needle in a Haystack

Advertising and filling a vacant position in your organisation can be straightforward if you follow these guidelines. New tools are available.

You run a business and that enterprise is made up of people. Ultimately how you treat your people is how in turn they are going to treat and respect you. The recruitment process is an ongoing affair. By now you should be an expert at it. People move, relocate, get married, have children, whatever. Furthermore the good people seem to move on while the problematic ones seem to hang on…

You run a business, not a church or a philanthropic organisation. If there is no profit made there are no wages to be paid. Why do you have to always be on their back for accountability and productivity? How can you attract the right crowd that will make your business fly?

Raise the bar – be specific in writing the job description
If you want someone with skills A, B and C spell it out even if you think it is improbable someone will have a grasp of them all. The job description is also an internal document to be added to your procedures manual. It details the job specification, the responsibilities and the chain of reporting. Advertising a job is also a public relations exercise. Suppliers and competitors alike will notice so-and-so is hiring now!

Use psychometric tests before the interview
People have no shame in lying and fudging things. Foreign qualifications are an unknown quantity. Other folks have done stuff in the past but they have forgotten it or don’t want to do it again. How can you be fair and assess everybody on a plain level field? How can you check how people perform under stress?

Setup a selection panel
There is wisdom in the counsel of many. It pays to open up the process with members of your team. You might not pick up on a technical incongruence. You might miss some non verbal clues. There could be some gender issues. Discuss the results of the aptitude tests with the candidate. See how they feel about their performance. Were the tests relevant?

Contract or permanent?
If you need to train somebody on the job can you get them to commit to stay with you for two years in return? Is a no-strings-attached deal better than all the trappings of workplace regulations? Can you throw in some extras like medical insurance, a canteen, gym facilities, child minding? What does it take to make people feel comfortable and give you their best?

Hiring Chauffeurs

There are many people who would never think of hiring chauffeurs to get them from place to place. They may want one for a special occasion, but this is not someone they would think of keeping on staff as a personal driver. Most people do not have the financial means to have a personal driver, but for those that do, it’s important to hire someone who can effectively get you from point A to point B and that has a level of professionalism that is necessary to succeed in that position.

There are several ways to go about hiring for the position of a personal driver. You can contact a placement agency that specializes in filling vacancies in household staff for high end clientele. You can also place a help wanted ad in various locations. There is also always just asking friends and peers for their recommendations on chauffeurs and seeing what they have to offer in the way of candidates.

Whatever method you choose to track down a few candidates you need to make sure that you get a list of at least three candidates that you will consider hiring for the position that you have available. You will want to set up a consistence interview process. With a consistent interview process you should easily be able to find someone that will meet your needs and that is charging a reasonable price for their services.

When conducting the interviews you will need to meet with each candidate face to face. You want to see what each one look like and how they behave during the interview process. It is important the person you hire have a high degree of professionalism. They will be driving you and your family around. They will also be driving you and various business associates. It is likely that they will hear many things during the course of those drives and it is important that you know they can be trusted to keep the conversations they hear to themselves. Discretion is the name of the game for personal drivers in any household staff that they become a part of.

During the interview process you need to ask each candidate a series of questions. This is as much about the answers as it is beginning to understand the demeanor of each candidate. You will also want to have a complete background check run on any candidate that makes it to the round of serious consideration. You need to make sure that they have a safe driving record and that their references check out. Once you have done a thorough background check and feel you’ve found someone that you are ready to hire there is just one more thing to do. You need to negotiate price and then get them hired.

Schedule Shifts Automatically With Personnel Scheduling Software

What if shifts could be allocated automatically to employees each week? This could potentially save shift managers hours of time each week. Thankfully personnel scheduling software can handle this task automatically.

Each week the shift manager can enter the shifts available. Employees can also enter the times they are available during the week. The software can then generate a successful shift schedule that suits every employee. The algorithm can take into consideration complex scheduling rules such as minimum and maximum working hours. Since the system is computerised human error is also eliminated.

Additionally since the system is web based it can be accessed from any internet connected computer. Therefore employees can access the system from home – they no longer need to contact their workplace to find out their next shift. Most web based systems will also allow employee to transfer shifts to another employee (usually with the shift managers permission) if they unexpectedly cannot work a shift.

Furthermore some software allows employees to request what shifts they would like when the next schedule is generated. If employees are involved in the creation of the shift schedule they will be much happier with the end result. If multiple employees request the same shift, a ranking system takes place with the highest ranking employee getting the shift.

Personnel scheduling software also usually has a feature to manage the time off taken by employees. When they are added to the system they can be allocated a certain number of days of per year or month. Using the system they can then make a request for a day off which the shift manager can approve or deny. If the request is approved they are automatically removed from the schedule for that day.

Is Your Job Satisfying?

How many of us go to work with cheery attitude and positive framework of mind. Most of us treat work as a duty or accountability. Either way it does not solve the purpose. If you treat job as a duty, there can never be any enjoyment attached to it. In case of accountability, you work to reach some targets without any passion for the job or you spend most of your time dreading the thought of reporting to your superior. Without involvement and love, any job is not complete and people experience only “Job Satis-friction”and not satisfaction. Have you thought about it?

In most of the developing countries the proportion of dissatisfied group dominates the satisfied set of employees. This is because preference and priority is to earn the daily bread rather than any sense of achievement. Well, this attitude shall be attributed to the low income group where without work their lives cannot go on. But the bottom line remains the same, the work should be satisfying. So, what are the terms?

In high income group and higher level jobs where the work is very challenging, we see that the employees are very much satisfied with their work. They need constant battles to win over and are provided with such an environment that puts their think tanks into full use. But is it enough to keep them satisfied, no, the reward system has to be equally compensatory. Rewards in terms of pay, perks, recognition, appreciation, social status, awards and what not. So, how do we correlate satisfaction factor with productivity? The organization has to maximize the positive relationship between performance and reward systems.

Repetitive and monotonous jobs make a person dull headed and a stereotype and his enthusiasm is absorbed to the extent that he fails to understand and rejuvenate his skills. The job content should provide at least some sort of cheer and interest to the performing individual. Say for instance, you manufacture plain paper cups, if you decide to incorporate some floral designs on the covers, you very well witness a fresh whiff of enthusiasm amongst your work force. Such is the power of variety and change that brings cheer into human lives and attitude.

If you are a terrific boss everybody will like you but if you are a source of terror, chances are there that there is a high turnover ratio in your company. People after all expect certain level of consideration and warmth from their bosses. Organisations must make the individuals perceive their roles properly to affirm satisfaction and to avoid conflicts.

Career advancement is what most of the people aspire and when they don’t find any scope for advancement their interest in the job gradually decreases. Merit versus experience factor also has its say over deciding the next probable candidate for promotion. The top level management, especially the human resource dpartment must ensure the employees with a supportive environment that paves the road for collaborative effort and in turn internal satisfaction.

Job satisfaction has to be considered from a broader perspective that encompasses all the independent and dependent variables that affect the nature of a particular job. This is very vital to an organization as job dissatisfaction leads to absenteeism, high turn over or attrition and decline in productivity. A dissatisfied employee is always a pain who can create problems by voicing his protest, gathering the union, neglecting his work or quitting. To avoid friction in the minds of employees create a cordial atmosphere that promises a positive approach to upgrade the employees and also to empower them in due course of time.