Human Resources Kit For Dummies
Overview
The talent professional's one-stop reference for best practices and tips
Human Resources Kit For Dummies is the guide talent pros turn to for improving their leadership across the businesses they serve. The world of HR is full of unforeseen challenges, and this For Dummies reference will help you to handle them with grace and professionalism. This book provides tips and tricks for creating an engaging employee experience from the get-go, prioritizing employee well-being and health, navigating the recent wave of resignations, and implementing better hiring practices. In this new era of virtual offices, you'll also learn to implement remote and hybrid onboarding and work models. Plus, you'll explore HR technologies, learning and development strategies that get results, hiring ethics, diversity and inclusion best practices, social media uses and policies, and beyond.
- Learn all the functions of the human resources role
- Discover new software, HR best practices, and employment trends
- Make your organization more ethical with diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives
- Get insights on how to navigate remote workers and other common HR challenges
New and working HR professionals will love this friendly, easy-to-read resource for developing HR skills. If you're a business owner, this book can also help you recruit, hire, and retain the right people, or build an HR function that gets results!
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About The Author
Andrea Butcher is the CEO of HRD, a leadership development company. She is a renowned keynote speaker, talent strategist, executive coach, and expert facilitator. She also hosts HRD’s weekly podcast, Being [at Work]. She is also the co-founder of Next Gen Talent, an organization focused on the development of emerging HR and talent leaders.
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human resources kit for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
Becoming a so-called expert in human resources (HR) can be a complex endeavor because, well, people are complex. But for someone starting out in an HR role, attracting the right talent and creating a positive and meaningful employee experience can be boiled down to a few basics: evaluating résumés, interviewing candidates, and creating an employee-friendly work environment.
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Human Resources
One of the main tasks in any effort to create an equitable and effective wage and compensation system for employees is to develop a consistent protocol for setting pay levels for every job in your organization. In setting the actual pay scale for specific jobs, you have several options.
The more essential a job is to the fundamental mission of your company, the higher its job value and, thus, its pay range is likely to be.
Human Resources
Employee training should be an ongoing process. As new employees get acclimated to your company, they should continue to develop skills and take on new responsibilities. There are many ways to provide continuing development opportunities to your employees.
Professional association conferences and public seminars
Professional association conferences and seminars can provide a wealth of information on a broad array of topics and professional issues.
Human Resources
Employee training can take many forms. Here are some of the factors that most often influence the effectiveness of a program, regardless of which form it takes.
Student receptivity in employee training
You should consider the extent to which participants are open and receptive to the concepts that are covered in the training.
Human Resources
Here are some of the factors on which different Human Resources managers base their hiring decisions and what you need to keep in mind as you’re considering each one.
Past experience
The best indicator of a candidate’s future potential is past performance. If a candidate was hardworking, highly motivated, and team oriented in his last job, the same is likely to hold true in the new job.
Human Resources
Job descriptions, although not essential, can be very helpful when hiring a new employee. But it is important that a job description accurately reflect the current job duties of the position you want to fill. If a description hasn’t been updated in a while, the duties it includes may not match the duties actually performed by the employee who previously held the job.
Human Resources
Even an established employee recognition program doesn’t run itself. You need a capable administrator. If you’re handling your company’s HR function, that point person may well be you. If not, it’s helpful to have one person charged with the administrative and technical duties of running the program. That makes overall administration and troubleshooting that much easier.
A succession plan is important, but it’s not enough. That’s because a plan doesn’t develop your employees. They need experience, advice, mentorship, and feedback from you.
Your reviews, check-ins, and performance metrics are essential to tracking progress and keeping everyone accountable. Here are a number of barometers that can prove helpful in determining what works and what may warrant reconsideration in your succession planning efforts:
Are your new leaders successful?
A growing number of consulting companies and individuals specialize in helping clients identify the training needs of their employees. If your company is large enough, and you don’t have the time or resources to engage in this process yourself, it may well be in your best interest to hire one of these outside sources.
Human Resources
Even when you have good cause, firing an employee is not an easy process. The following guidelines can help you avoid some common mistakes in connection with employee terminations:
Is there a rule, policy, practice, or performance standard? Be sure to identify a rule, policy, practice, or performance standard that an employee violated that warrants his discharge.
Human Resources
University campuses can be rich opportunities to engage with potential entry-level employees. You should consider the following points in preparing for any campus recruiting activities:
Hit your message points. Make sure that you (and other company representatives you bring with you) are well prepped to cover the key benefits of working at your company.
Human Resources
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.
Human Resources
Pre-employment testing is probably the most controversial of all evaluation options in use today. Everybody agrees with the basic rationale that test results often can alert you to attributes and potential problems that you can’t infer from a résumé and that don’t necessarily surface during an interview. No one, however, has proved in a scientifically conclusive way that testing leads to foolproof or even better hires.
Human Resources
With only a few minutes to go in an interview with a potential employee, you can bring the session to a graceful close by following these steps:
Offer the candidate a broad-brushstroke summary of the interview.
Sum up what the candidate has said about her fit for the position, reasons for wanting the job, and so on.
Human Resources
At one point or another in the process of creating an employee performance appraisal process, you have to address the “people” component — what should happen when managers and employees sit down together or otherwise meet for the purpose of discussing the employees’ actual performance review.
The one thing you can’t afford to do is assume that this aspect of the process will simply take care of itself.
Generally, in a nonunion, private work environment, when an employee is laid off, there is no expectation that she will be returning to work. Some companies use the term in a different sense, however.
When business is slow and they don’t need the entire current workforce, some firms (particularly those operating in a unionized environment) notify workers that they’ll be placed on furlough for a period of time and will be offered the opportunity to return to work on a certain date or in stages.
An effective, well-balanced disciplinary process does more than provide a means for dealing with employees’ problem behavior. It also gives them an opportunity to speak up (and be heard) when they’re not happy with the way things are going in the workplace. Their complaints are technically known as grievances.
Human Resources
Some companies like a formalized disciplinary process, one that reasonably and systematically warns employees when performance falls short of expectations. A progressive discipline system is one in which problematic employee behavior is addressed through a series of increasingly serious disciplinary steps.
A formal progressive disciplinary procedure tends to work best in companies that are highly centralized, where personnel decisions for the entire company are made within one department (most likely HR), which makes sure that each step of the disciplinary process is implemented properly.
Human Resources
Every job has a set of technical requirements for the employee, but a job description is not complete without those broad but telling aspects of a candidate known as soft skills, interpersonal abilities, or simply qualities and attributes.
These include an aptitude for communicating with people of all levels, abilities, and backgrounds; the capacity to work well in teams (as both a leader and a team member); and other factors, such as a strong sense of ethics and a talent for efficient and creative problem solving.
Human Resources
In a way, succession planning of employees is the culmination of career and leadership development. It’s where you identify — from among your developing leaders — individuals who have the most potential and whose movement toward key positions, either laterally or upwardly, you want to accelerate.
A mistake some smaller organizations make is feeling that they aren’t big enough to need to boost their bench strength.
Human Resources
Companies handle their interaction with employees who are succession candidates in different ways. Some hire and promote people with the message that they’re being groomed either for a specific position or for a more senior but unspecified leadership role; other companies hire and promote less specifically for succession and place candidates into a high-potential pool (a designated group being groomed generally for higher leadership or critical executive roles).
Human Resources
Employees can develop leadership abilities entirely on their own initiative. But it is more likely to happen if you create a comprehensive leadership development program. Like career development itself, identifying and nurturing potential leaders can prove central to your business’s success — and its future.
To begin building a leadership development plan, consider the following questions:
Do you have or anticipate any leadership gaps?
Layoffs differ from firings in a variety of ways, but one critical aspect comes to mind: The people being let go haven’t necessarily done anything to warrant losing their jobs. Layoffs occur for a number of reasons, which can include
Seasonal shifts in the demand for the company’s products or services
An unexpected business downturn that requires the company to make drastic cost reductions
A plant or company closure
An initiative that restructures work practices, leaving fewer jobs
A merger or acquisition that produces redundancy in certain positions
Whatever the reason for a layoff, the pressure on the HR function is the same.
Human Resources
As part of the appraisal meeting, supervisors should identify areas for improvement and, together with their employees, build a set of workable performance development activities. To prepare, supervisors should take time prior to the meeting to create a concise, one-page list of potential developmental activities for the employee.
Human Resources
Open houses to recruit potential employees are most commonly held by companies in industries that experience high turnover and, thus, have an almost constant need for new employees: mass market retailing or fast food restaurants are examples. But open houses also can be an effective recruiting strategy for companies that are about to expand into a new region.
Human Resources
It may sound obvious, but it’s worth pointing out: Job seekers go where the employment opportunities are. Because of the sheer number of openings they list, job boards and aggregators and company websites are among the first stops on a typical candidate’s itinerary. But social media is not far behind.
Many job candidates have an incredibly large online network of friends they contact for insight on various jobs and companies.
Even when you have ample cause for doing so, firing employees is difficult — not only for the employees losing their jobs and the supervisors making the decision, but for co-workers as well.
You can do only so much to ease the pain and disruption that firings create. You can do a great deal, however, to help ensure that your company’s approach to firing protects the dignity and rights of the employee and protects your company from legal and/or retaliatory action by a former employee.
Human Resources
Apart from whatever strategic benefits the use of contingent employees in your business offers, their growing presence in the workplace introduces some thorny legal issues as well. One key question: To what extent are companies that hire temporary or project workers directly (instead of relying on staffing firms) obliged to provide these workers with the same benefits and protections that regular employees receive?
Human Resources
Contingent employees have become a significant part of today’s workforce, and there are sound reasons for this growth. More and more talented people are drawn to contingent work because of the flexibility and opportunities these arrangements provide. Contingent assignments allow job seekers to try out work in different firms and office cultures, and, in fact, many times a contingent engagement may become a full-time employment opportunity.
Human Resources
Employee referrals used to be considered a somewhat risky practice — an invitation to nepotism and favoritism. But today employee referrals are considered one of the most reliable recruiting sources. Few employees would risk their own reputation by recommending a friend or relative who may turn out to be a source of embarrassment.
Job fairs are recruiting events that bring together employers and potential employees in one location. They’re not only held on college campuses but also sponsored by professional associations and community organizations or non-campus educational institutions such as state teachers associations.
The sponsoring group rents a meeting or exhibition space, invites potential employers to set up recruiting and/or information booths and tables, and handles all the administrative and publicity arrangements.
Human Resources
If your company is like most, the toughest thing for your managers to do during the employee appraisal meeting will be to talk about where an employee’s performance is lacking. Here, again, it’s in your best interest to work in advance with your managers so they’re prepared to handle this undeniably tricky aspect of the process.
Human Resources
What do employee hiring managers have in common with youth sports coaches, high school teachers, and college administrators? All these professionals are likely to encounter helicopter parents.
Helicopter parents are parents who are hyperinvolved in their kids’ lives, holding their hands through every stage of growing up, whether the kids want them to or not.
Human Resources
If your company hasn’t developed one, work with your management to develop a disciplined, clearly defined procedure for what happens after you fire an employee. Make the break as clean as possible — albeit with respect to the feelings and dignity of the person being fired.
Harsh and humiliating though the practice may seem, accompany the dismissed employee back to her workstation, give the employee a chance to collect her personal belongings, and escort the employee out the door.
Human Resources
Developing and implementing a mentoring program takes more than the best of intentions. First, pinpoint your specific goals and make sure that they align with the organization’s goals and will benefit the employee in his current role.
With those objectives in mind, consider what sort of mentoring arrangement may be most helpful.
Human Resources
When you set up a new performance appraisal system, you need to gather input from both senior management and employees. You also need to make sure that the program is workable and well communicated throughout the organization. The success or failure of an appraisal system hinges on factors that are based more on company issues than on the system itself.
Human Resources
In theory, alternate work arrangements offer a win-win situation for you and your employees. Many studies have shown that flexible scheduling policies improve morale and job satisfaction, reduce absenteeism, cut down on turnover and minimize burnout — and with no measurable decline in productivity.
The downside is that these arrangements don’t work for every company or for every position.
Human Resources
You’ll want to know whether your leadership development efforts are paying off. Here are some questions to ask your employees and yourself to help with that critical measurement:
Do participants feel they’re progressing? Ask people in the leadership program if they’re enjoying the process. Do they feel they’re learning and growing?
After receiving a potential employee’s response to your offer, be prepared to negotiate. Job seekers today have access to an abundance of information on salary negotiation through websites and books, so most will enter the meeting knowledgeable on the topic. To reach a fair deal, you need to be equally prepared.
Human Resources
Businesses manage employee succession in different ways based on their individual cultures. Most businesses agree that the primary goal is to create a pipeline of talent by offering top performers extra support along their developmental paths. Some corporations have a centralized succession planning function, whereas others empower people or teams throughout the organization to manage the function on their own.
Human Resources
In a well-managed company, most employees are probably performing adequately or better. However, some people simply don’t take criticism well, no matter how minimal or appropriately delivered. In any performance appraisal meeting, an employee whose work is being critiqued may very well become agitated, confrontational, verbally abusive, and, in very rare instances, violent.
Human Resources
Wrongful discharge cases remain a mainstay of litigation against employers. Even more sobering is the fact that plaintiffs win most wrongful discharge suits that reach a jury trial largely because juries tend to favor employees over employers. How does a company protect itself? In short, protection comes from preventive action.
Human Resources
One key to career development is keeping employees motivated. It’s not always easy for busy prospective leaders to take time out to acquire new skills as part of a formal professional development plan. They need to be recognized for their hard work at their “regular” jobs, as well as efforts they’re making down the career development path.
Human Resources
No set rules exist for evaluating potential employees. The important thing is to have a system in place before résumés begin to arrive. The process should include a set of hard criteria to use as the basis for decisions so that you don’t end up making choices based on factors that may have no bearing on desired work performance.
In many cases, particularly if your company is small, you don’t have a hard time getting a good read on the general atmosphere among employees. But if your company is larger, periodically conducting a more rigorous employee survey can be exceedingly valuable. It can help you gain a comprehensive sense of how employees feel about your company and convey the message that you genuinely want their opinions and feedback.
Human Resources
Recruiters can be an invaluable part of your employee candidate search arsenal. If you know how to maximize their services, recruiters can more than pay for themselves. Using outside recruiters has several key advantages:
Outside recruiters generally have access to a large pool of applicants. After all, it’s their job to continually locate quality candidates.
Human Resources
An advantage of establishing a presence in online social networks is that you can build a large community of people who are actively engaged with your company — including potential hires. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+ are among the largest and best-known social networks. But you may not want to limit yourself to these services only.
Figuring out which programs to offer employees used to be fairly cut and dried. Most corporate training was delivered the old-fashioned way: through instructor-led, classroom training. Today, more than ever, learning is a highly individual process.
With in-house classroom training, the traditional and most familiar form of training, employees gather in a classroom and are led through the program by an instructor.
Human Resources
Smaller companies can’t afford all the employee perks larger firms can provide, as a rule. But attractive employee perks don’t have to expensive. Here are some inexpensive but no less appealing perks:
Movies: These can either be a group outing or complimentary tickets.
Game time: Some companies provide foosball, table tennis, or pool tables in their break rooms.
Human Resources
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.
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.
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.
Human Resources
The basic ingredients in all employee appraisal systems are pretty much the same: setting performance criteria, developing tracking and documenting procedures, determining which areas should be measured quantitatively, and deciding how the information is to be communicated to employees. Here are factors to take into account in choosing between systems:
The level of employees being appraised: The degree of an employee’s autonomy is one key variable that can help shape your range of evaluation techniques.
Human Resources
The use of computer-based and online technology to deliver employee training content has become commonplace throughout corporate America. The great payoff of e-learning is its flexibility and speed, delivering the real-time immediacy of classroom instruction without the need to actually be present in a classroom.
Human Resources
Leadership development is a natural subset of career development. If you think about it, many employees who are good at attending to their overall career development would naturally like to segue that effort into a leadership capacity. Leaders are different from mentors because they lead entire teams of employees — the work of these teams, as well as their professional development.
Human Resources
There are many all-too-common practices used in interviewing potential employees that create a surefire recipe for hiring mistakes. Beware of these five mistakes:
Not enough time for the interview process
Failing to give the interviewing process the time and effort it deserves is, by far, the main reason interviews fail to reveal useful information about a person.
Plenty of websites address various aspects of the human resources function in a business. These ten sites are the ones every HR professional should know about and use.
American Society for Training & Development: Access to most of the ASTD website is limited to members, but nonmembers can browse through the library and get useful information on a variety of training-related topics.
Human Resources
If the purpose of a layoff of employees is to cut down on business costs (as opposed to reduce redundancy), you may want to explore options that, at the very least, can reduce the number of people who need to be terminated:
Temporary pay cuts: Reducing salary costs is probably the simplest and most direct way to cut staffing costs without cutting staff.
Human Resources
Selecting the right test for an applicant to your business probably won’t be a problem because choices abound. Dozens of commercial test publishers collectively produce thousands of tests. You can find out about these tests by looking in two reference books — Tests in Print and Mental Measurements Yearbook, both published by the Buros Center for Testing.
Human Resources
Some businesses require candidates to take certain tests after being offered conditional employment. Be careful with these tests, though, as there are some laws that may influence what you can require.
Personality and psychological tests
What do they do? Measure certain personality characteristics, such as assertiveness, resiliency, temperament, or stability.
Human Resources
Applicant tests are business tools meant to measure specific aspects or qualities of applicants’ skills, knowledge, experience, intellect, personality or psychological makeup. As a Human Recources professional, you should figure out what you want to find out about a candidate and then choose the appropriate test.
Human Resources
A good job interview question does two things: it gives you the specific information you need to make a sound hiring decision and helps you gain insight into how the candidate’s mind and emotions work and her experience and style.
Here are some questions to get you started:
“What interests you about this job and what skills and strengths can you bring to it?
The job description is where your business’s hiring criteria are first formally set forth. But this doesn’t mean just any garden-variety job description will do. The job description you’ll construct will be airtight because the job description will eventually drive the job ad, the candidate selection process, and a new employee’s first performance appraisal.
Human Resources
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.
Human Resources
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?
Human Resources
Diversity in your company’s workforce includes a lot more than minority representation in your employee pool. Trends such as delayed retirement, second careers, and increased longevity mean that the age spread of workers is also greater today than ever before.
Diversity means that a wider range of people are bringing a greater variety of approaches, ideas, and lifestyle issues to the workplace.
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.
Strategic staffing in your business begins with an effort to reassess your department’s human resource requirements in the context of your firm’s business priorities. It’s a mindset rather than a process. The idea is to begin thinking in terms of need rather than job, long term rather than short term, and big picture rather than immediate opening.
Violence in the workplace is an issue that no company — regardless of how large or small the company or where it’s located — can afford to ignore.
What steps can your company take to provide reasonable protection for your employees? Your best source of information on this matter is your local police department.
Résumé writing is a good example of the law of unintended consequences in business, which can help you understand a potential hire. Sometimes what’s not in a résumé or what’s done through carelessness or a mistake can reveal quite a bit about a candidate. Here are some things to watch out for:
Sloppy overall appearance: This is a fairly reliable sign that the candidate is lacking in professionalism and/or business experience.
Getting a candid reference for a job applicant from an employer is tougher than ever these days. Because employers know that both saying too much and saying too little can have legal consequences, they’re increasingly wary of being specific about past employees and their work histories.
Although companies have been sued for not disclosing enough information about former workers, others have paid enormous settlements because they provided negative references — whether true or false.
Human Resources
The case for using a staffing firm to help execute a contingency staffing strategy is fairly airtight. Firms that specialize in providing contingent workers already have a pool of experienced people they can assign to your company. They understand the complex legalities (including tax-related issues) of contingency staffing.
When interviewing a candidate for your business, how you phrase questions, when you ask them, and how you follow up can go a long way toward affecting the quality and value of the answers you get.
Have a focus
You want to have a reasonably specific idea of what information or insights you’re expecting to gain from the interview.
Human Resources
The really tough part of any business hiring evaluation process is attaching numerical ratings to the intangibles, those attributes that are difficult to measure. Here are some suggestions on how to tell whether the candidate measures up in some of the intangible aspets.
Industriousness and motivation
Definition: Candidates’ work ethic — how hard they’re willing to work and how important they feel it is to perform to the best of their ability.
Human Resources
Key procedures you need to put in place in your business to set up a successful internal hiring process include establishing a way to communicate job opportunities to your employees and a procedure they can use to submit applications. Go out of your way to ensure that everyone understands the scope and basic duties of the job, as well as the hiring criteria you’re using.
Human Resources
Making your company a great place to work will help you attract — and keep — great employees. But creating an employee-friendly work environment involves more than just offering an attractive paycheck. Keep the following tips in mind to build an appealing and stimulating workplace:
Invest in your employees. Offering a variety of training programs shows your workers that your firm is dedicated to helping them improve their skills and grow professionally.
Human Resources
No company today can afford to ignore this issue of sexual harassment among employees, and no one with HR responsibility can afford to forget that what one person may view as a harmless joke may well be perceived by another as an aggressive and unwelcome sexual advance. Sexual harassment is one area of HR management in which you can never be too careful.
Human Resources
The easiest way to make a hiring decision for your business is to weigh the options and simply go with what your intuition tells you to do. Easy — but risky. Gut decisions, whether they originate from one person or a group of people, are almost always biased in the following respect: Their roots tend to be firmly planted in wishful thinking.
When hiring, the résumé is your first contact with a job candidate. To get the most from this important document and determine if someone is worth calling in for an interview, you'll need to know how to read between the lines. Here are some telling characteristics.
Signs of a solid résumé:
Sufficient detail: Although you don't want an overly wordy résumé, you do want complete descriptions of the applicant's accomplishments in previous jobs and a sense of the skills she's gained over the course of her career.
Human Resources
Whether through surveys or meetings, you need to get feedback on your business’s onboarding program for new employees so you can make improvements for future new hires. Here are some questions that can form the basis of any feedback mechanism you develop for new employees immediately after the initial orientation:
What elements of the initial orientation event(s) were most useful?
Human Resources
You choose a recruiter for your business the same way you choose any professional services specialist. You take a look at what services are available, you ask colleagues for recommendations, and you talk to different recruiters. Ultimately, you want a recruiter you feel confident will be able to effectively articulate your company’s mission, values, and culture to job prospects.
Human Resources
Blending contingent workers into your company’s existing workforce requires a certain amount of preparation at the departmental level to make sure that you’re getting the most out of these professionals. Here are some ideas:
Brief your staff. You’re inviting trouble if you don’t communicate beforehand to your staff the rationale behind your strategy of engaging contingent workers for a project.
Human Resources
You should always have a general idea before you start any employee recruiting effort of how you intend to conduct and manage the process. A good way to begin is to set a deadline for when, ideally, you want to see the position filled. After the deadline is in place, you can establish a sequence of steps, each with its own deadline.
Human Resources
When contingent workers finish their assignments with your company, make a record of what you thought of their performance. Depending on whether your experience was positive or negative, you may want to ask the staffing firm for a particular person again — or ask that she never return!
Sharing your assessment with the staffing firm helps the firm do a better job of meeting your company’s needs.
After you make your final choice of whom to hire for your business, you may think that you and the other decision makers can just sit back and relax. Not just yet.
You still must make the offer official, and you still need to remember that if you fail to handle this phase of the hiring process carefully, you can lose the candidate, or, even if the candidate comes aboard, you can start the relationship off on the wrong note.
The traditional business hiring notion of finding the best people to fill job openings has been replaced by a much more dynamic concept. It’s generally referred to as strategic staffing, which means putting together a combination of workers — both internal and external — that is strategically designed to meet the needs of your business and the realities of the labor market.
Human Resources
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.
Human Resources
The definition of sexual harassment, on the surface, seems fairly straightforward. Broadly, it is imposing an unwanted condition on a person’s employment because of that person’s sex.
Then again, maybe not. At issue is the connection between the behavior and the working circumstances and conditions of the person who is being harassed and the role of the alleged harasser.
Based on résumés alone, you’d think all the job candidates for your business are such outstanding prospects that you could hire them sight unseen. Anyone who does any research at all into how to look for a job knows how to write a résumé that puts them in the best light. And those who don’t know how to write a great résumé can now hire people who do know.
Human Resources
College campuses have long been fertile hunting ground for businesses recruiting entry-level talent. Smaller firms without well-organized college recruiting programs have always been at something of a disadvantage. If you’re one of the “smaller guys,” here are some tips on how to level the playing field:
Get to know the folks in the career center.
Human Resources
Job boards are extremely popular with job seekers. These websites, used by employers to advertise jobs, may be the best way for a company to reach a large number of candidates quickly. Literally thousands of job boards cover virtually every industry, profession, educational background, experience level, ethnic group, and much more.
Human Resources
There was a time when ambitious employment candidates would try to study up on the company they were applying to by requesting company literature — annual reports, sales material, marketing brochures — or by visiting a library to conduct various forms of research.
The Internet has rendered this form of old-school sleuthing virtually obsolete.
Human Resources
Bad hiring decisions in any business rarely happen by accident. In retrospect, you can usually discover that you didn’t do something you should have in making your decision.
Anchor yourself to the hiring criteria
The hiring criteria that you establish from the beginning should serve as your strict guide throughout the evaluation process.
Human Resources
An applicant tracking system (ATS), sometimes called an e-recruiting system, offers a central location and database for an organization’s employee recruiting efforts. Information can be gathered from internal applications, as well as from applicants on job boards.
An ATS enables the review and management of applicant information and status.
Human Resources
Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS) can be a great tool for your business to use to track and manage employees and potential employees. Many systems include benefits administration and payroll administration systems.
Benefits administration systems
One of HR’s biggest challenges is overseeing the administrative complexities of a business’s benefits plan.
Human Resources
An employee management system, often called a human resources information system (HRIS), is the traditional foundation of a company’s HR technology. It serves as a central repository of employee data. Most HRISs include employee profile systems and time management systems as part of their packages.
Employee profile systems
Employee profiles begin to take shape when job seekers submit online candidate profiles and are built from there by employee profile systems.
Human Resources
Human Resources Information Systems (HRISs) designed with an employee self-service interface give workers more ownership of their data by providing ready access to information such as their profiles, benefits, and payroll records. For instance, employees can see how many sick days and vacation days they’ve accrued, check on health insurance issues such as deductibles and co-pays, and review personal and dependent information.
Human Resources
After you’ve sorted through résumés and selected the most promising candidates for your business, conducting a telephone interview can help you narrow the list of individuals to call in for an interview. Before calling a candidate, review résumés and cover letters carefully, noting questions to ask. You’ll likely see a pattern emerge among applicants who are a good fit for your firm.
Human Resources
Even if your business has only a handful of employees, keeping your basic policies and procedures well documented through an employee handbook and procedures manual is always a good practice. Whatever effort may be required to get basic company information in print or on your intranet can save you time and headaches down the road.
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.
As you conduct your business’s hiring process, you’ll need a job description – a set of criteria as you attempt to find, attract, and make a job offer to the best candidates. Among other things, these criteria define the duties to be performed in each position you hope to fill, as well as the credentials and qualities candidates should possess to perform well in those positions.
Human Resources
Becoming a so-called expert in human resources (HR) can be a complex endeavor because, well, people are complex. But for someone starting out in an HR role, attracting the right talent and creating a positive and meaningful employee experience can be boiled down to a few basics: evaluating résumés, interviewing candidates, and creating an employee-friendly work environment.
There's no substitute for the guidance of an attorney, but HR professionals need to have a basic understanding of the many legal issues and challenges that come with hiring and managing employees. Here are several important federal laws you should be aware of.
Many states have enacted laws similar to those listed here, and some state laws provide more generous benefits and protections to employees than the federal counterpart.
Human Resources
A company’s ability to attract and retain employees with the expertise it requires relates increasingly to the human side of the day-to-day working experience — the general atmosphere that prevails in the workplace. This includes, in particular, the extent to which company practices help people balance the pressures they face at work with the pressures they have to deal with at home.
Human Resources
Avoid timeworn, clichéd questions, such as “What are your strengths and weaknesses?” when you are interviewing a candidate for a new job. Instead, develop a list of questions designed to elicit responses that will be most helpful in evaluating a candidate’s suitability for your position and organization.
Here are some questions to get you started:
“Who was your best boss ever and why?
Human Resources
When looking outside the company to hire new employees, you have a number of options. If core team members are fully occupied, and you have new tasks that must be handled on an ongoing basis, it probably makes the most sense to hire additional full-time or part-time employees.
If, however, upcoming projects are of limited duration or you need specialized skills unavailable internally, then a mix of full-time employees and contingent workers may be your best bet.
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