Books and Articles by Max Messmer

Mentoring among employees can be a great tool for fostering overall career development for your staff. It provides an eye toward career development that can last a professional lifetime. That means using mentoring to build attributes that are effective today as well as farther down the road.Some abilities, such as people skills, are not easily taught in the classroom or through online courses.

Your ability to get the most out of the interviews you conduct for your business invariably depends on how well prepared you are. Here’s a checklist of things you should do before you ask the first interview question: Thoroughly familiarize yourself with the job description, especially its hiring criteria. Do so even if you draw up the criteria yourself.

The job interview is perhaps your best opportunity to determine if a potential hire will succeed with your firm. But most applicants now have ready-made answers to standard questions such as "Where do you see yourself in five years?" Here are five questions that can help elicit more candid responses: "What interests you about this job, and what skills and strengths can you bring to it?

Writing a good job posting is a critical step in the hiring process, but the task is often more difficult than many people think. Obviously, you won’t have candidates beating down your door to apply for a position you want to fill if they don’t know about it. You have to get the word out in the form of a job posting.

The questions you or others in your company ask during an interview of a potential employee can result in legal problems for the company if you fail to follow certain guidelines. Antidiscrimination and consumer protection legislation passed since the 1960s and court decisions and administrative rulings restrict the type and scope of pre-employment questions that you can ask.

Today’s employees want flexibility. To attract and keep top performers, more and more companies are striving to be what’s called employee-friendly. Essentially, this means that your scheduling and general operating policies take into reasonable account the personal needs of employees — in particular, their desire to balance job obligations with family responsibilities and outside interests.

Advances in technology and more sophisticated online search capabilities have increased the popularity of reference checking via the Internet. The practice will undoubtedly grow as more record holders create databases that employers can easily access. Everyone knows about the practice of searching for a person’s name online to see what comes up.

A workplace that’s designed to keep employees happy and productive helps pay for itself in many ways, such as greater retention and a sense that the company genuinely values the people it employs. Although the snazziest perks may be beyond the reach of many small and mid-size businesses, following are examples that a number of companies offer.

One major trend in wage systems in recent years is to base pay on what workers can do — the skills, knowledge, and talents they bring to the company — and not the nature of the positions they fill. To do so, the company adopts a pay structure that best supports the compensation philosophy and job valuation method used.