Staff Selection Is Critical To Success
A business is only as good as the people who manage it. Customer service throughout the organization is the culture that contributes to both employee and customer morale. As an employer, you want to hire and retain the employees most qualified for the positions within your company.
Important policy standards should be in place before you begin hiring employees. Develop a personnel policy for hours, overtime, fringe benefits, sick leave, annual leave, training, dress code, personnel reviews, grievances, termination and retirement. Each company employee should have his or her own copy of the manual, which serves as a guide for his or her conduct and benefits.
Before you advertise a job with your local newspaper or with a personnel recruitment firm, prepare a job description. Each position within the company, including your own, should have a job description that outlines responsibilities and duties. Add to each job description a list of the position’s objectives with specific and measurable goals. The job description provides you and the employee a clear road map for the expectations of the position from both the standpoint of workload and expertise required to accomplish the job.
Develop an application form. You can buy standard forms or computer software for employment applications or create your own. Ideally, the form will be simple and should focus on relevant employment history including names of supervisors and references you can contact. This application should allow some space for the applicant to add a narrative summary of his or her career accomplishments. This section gives you a chance to see what the applicant viewed as important successes and milestones in his or her career. Call references to confirm your belief and to ascertain if previous employers’ accounts of the person’s job responsibilities and performance match what you heard in the interview.
Hiring the right people for the right positions can mean the difference between top performance and profitability and weak performance and operating difficulties. If you would like assistance in developing an employee manual, job descriptions or interview questions, contact the SCORE Association.
Service Corps of Retired Executives, or SCORE, was formed in 1964 as a nonprofit association dedicated to entrepreneur education and the formation growth and success of small businesses. Contact the Savannah chapter at 912-652-4335. For information go to www.scoresav.org.