Human Resources – Page 3 – HR ADVICE CENTRE

How to Inspire Your Team or Employees

As a manager, one of your key responsibilities is to inspire your team-to motivate them to give their best on the job, make difficult changes, and overcome major obstacles. Your communication skills can make or break your ability to provide inspiration.

To sharpen up, practice framing a call to action as a challenge; for example, “We can turn our struggling business unit around.” This approach lets your people know that if they want a new and better team, they ‘ll have to work for it. You’ll lead the charge, but you need their support. As you present the challenge, communicate a sense of hope. It will help your team push through the tough choices necessary to survive and succeed in the current climate.

How to Hire the Best Temporary Staff

When you need temporary workers you want to hire the best temporary staff available: Those with the right skills, drive, and attitude who will add value to your bottom line. As more organizations move towards a model of treating human resources – including temporary resources – as an asset rather than an expense, the competition for the best workers is increasing. Through the right temp agency, you can access the help you need to find, screen, and hire the best temporary staff for your organization.

Hire the Best Temp Staff: It Starts with Your Temp Agency

Every organization is different, including yours. Every temp agency is also different; some agencies may specialize in very narrow industry niches, while others are broad and established enough to specialize in several industries. As a hiring manger, it can be difficult to determine which type of agency is the right one to use to hire the best temp staff for your particular industry. There are, however, several advantages to choosing an agency with specialties in several areas:

A multi-specialty temp agency is more likely to be able to meet your current demands as well as future demands
A multi-specialty temp agency is likely to have a greater number of qualified temporary workers in its databases
A multi-specialty temp agency has deeper resources in the staffing industry to help you hire the best temp staff whenever and wherever need arises

These factors can save you from hiring temps through multiple channels, which can escalate into a confusing, and costly, endeavor when your organization is working on a tight schedule, detracting from your ability to focus on the drive to hire the best temp staff. A multi-specialty temp agency can also save you time through streamlined candidate screening, since an agency accustomed to working in multiple areas will already be familiar with best practices in hiring wherever your need may be.

Hire the Best Temp Staff: Thorough Screening Ensures Quality Candidates

All too many organizations shorten the candidate screening process when hiring temp staff. Although the temporary nature of these assignments makes it tempting to try to save expenses through reduced screening, organizations that follow this practice are usually putting themselves at a disadvantage. Several benefits of temp staffing, including the ability to move to permanent hiring based on a temp’s performance, are diminished or erased when screening is skipped.

Especially for longer assignments, your organization needs to know the skills and attributes of those on temporary payroll. Experienced temp agencies make it easy for you to screen candidates for quality by putting a range of technological and more traditional screening tools at your disposal, ensuring that you hire the best temp staff possible. Make sure that your agency screens its candidates before recommending them for your open assignments, and perform your own secondary screening whenever possible.

Hire the Best Temp Staff: Adopt a Long Term View

Temp agencies are of enormous benefit when your organization needs workers at the last minute for assignments of short duration. Still, last minute changes and rushed temporary hiring can be taxing and reduce your chances of recruiting top quality candidates. What if you could project when and where such help was likely to be needed and plan accordingly? An established temp agency will have the experience needed to partner with your organization to create a long term hiring plan that addresses your needs for temp staff and can make the best temp staff on its roster available to you during your rush times through such prior planning.

The competition to hire the best temp staff is not expected to slow anytime soon. Make sure that your organization is prepared and in a position to hire the best available candidates by working with your temp agency to address your organization’s temporary hiring needs. With a comprehensive temporary hiring strategy you can add value to your organization while saving costs, a winning approach.

Identifying High-Potential Employees

Who will be ready to run your company when you can’t be everywhere anymore? Here’s how to pick your next generation of leaders.

As your company grows too big for you to do everything–the way you do now–you’re going to give over some of the leadership. (Relax. This is a good thing!) For reasons of staff morale, economy, and your own precious peace of mind, it’s better to find your new generation of leaders inside the company. But there’s a rub. Not every longtime loyal employee is really suited to be a leader.

Some have reached their potential and are quite comfortable where they are. This doesn’t imply mediocrity. It simply means that their role at the company and their ambition have converged, and a degree of leveling has set in. Others on your staff might be the “me-me” type–utterly convinced of their own limitless potential and blind to the overwhelming evidence that they’ve gone as far as they’re going to get.

How do you decide who among your longtime lieutenants have what it takes? I point to five criteria:

1. They know the business. Your high-potential employees are the ones who have true expertise and keep learning. Their knowledge may be technical or it may be institutional, but it’s invaluable for the organization. More important, they understand how their activities, their sector, and their realm of knowledge is related to the company’s goals.

2. Others respect them. Your staff members, not just you, also have to appreciate how much your high-potentials know. It’s not enough that your top people know their stuff. Everyone else has to know they know it.

3. They are ambitious. High-potential employees aren’t just career-minded; they’re ambitious in a focused way. The best way to get a sense of this is to evaluate their commitment to career progression. Look for signs that they long to accumulate new responsibilities, new successes, additional knowledge, and, for better or worse, additional recognition.

4. They work well with others. Though your leaders need to be driven, they also must be able to form partnerships with others besides you. This attitude goes beyond amiability; it’s a pragmatic, tactical skill that allows them to make better, more informed decisions. Lone rangers may be creative and ambitious, but they make lousy leaders.

5. They have guts. Your next generation of leaders must understand that no matter how much research they do, no matter how many cost-benefit analyses they conduct, no matter how many market surveys they complete, they will always be deciding under conditions of uncertainty. The information at hand will always be less than the information you wish you had. Leaders need to have the courage to take risks.

Though you don’t want your next generation of leaders to be clones of you, you do want them to have the traits that drove you to build a growing company. You want them to know their stuff. You want them to have a good reputation on your team. You want them to be driven but able to give and accept help. Finally, you want them to have the courage to make tough decisions, even if there’s a chance they’ll fail. Because that’s how entrepreneurship works.

How Staffing Agencies Can Save you Time and Money

There are a number of ways that staffing agencies can assist you in hiring the right talent for every job opening, but essentially they act as an extension of your existing human resources department. If your HR department consists of only you, the owner, then outsourcing some of your hiring practices can be a tremendous boost to both your productivity and your sanity.

Certain HR decisions, like hiring, can be overwhelming and often bring no immediate monetary return to your company. And hiring the wrong person can have a lasting impact on company morale, productivity and the bottom line. Here just a few ways staffing agencies can take the headache out of hiring.

Easier to Find Employees with Specific Talent

While you probably know your industry very well, you may be hopeless when it comes to understanding some of the niche roles in your company. If youre not a writer or a designer, you may not know how to attract the right marketing professional to your team. If youre looking to launch an annual fundraiser, youll need an event planner who can help realize your vision. Staffing agencies can help you identify and contact talented individuals you might not know how to find. They can help you assess employees, check their references and identify candidates who will fit your needs.

Reduce the Cost of New Hire, Bad Hires

Hiring any employee is a large investment of time, effort and resources to post a job, screen applicants, interview and then train a new employee. Staffing agencies take that cost out of your hand when you contract their services. Yes, it requires a relatively hefty fee to actually work with the recruiting company, but think about it in long term.

Additionally, using a staffing agency can drastically reduce your chances of making the wrong hire. The Department of Labor estimates the cost of replacing a employee to be one-third of their salary. However, hiring the wrong employee and fixing the mistake within 6 months can cost as much as 2.5 times the person’s salary. Even at $40,000 a year, that is a $120,000 mistake, including their salary. Isnt that worth the cost of doing it right the first time?

A Motivated Job Search

Lets face it: there are a number of tasks that you would prefer to do instead of combing through resumes and applications for the right hire. Many small business owners will drag out the process, costing themselves more money as they struggle by without the proper staff. Since youre paying them to find the right employees, a staffing firm will not suffer from a lack of motivation. And since they can only compete on their reputations, these agencies have become skilled at weeding out potential job candidates who are not properly motivated or lack the skills necessary for a specific job. Since they are working for you, not a jobseeker, a recruitment agency will work to assess potential employees to make sure theyre a perfect fit. This will help you cut down the risk of a bad hire, while also minimizing the time and effort spent identifying quality candidates.