If your employees are the right fit for their jobs, they will be one of your most important assets. Making the right recruitment decision for each vacancy is vitally important. Yet in a poll taken earlier this year of 250 small businesses, 88% felt they’d made a recruiting mistake in the last 12 months.
The poll was undertaken by SHL, a UK company that serves the world in talent measurement and recruitment process support and claims to be the global leader in its field. The results of the poll made its point: small businesses need recruitment process support just as much as major companies.
Can you Attract Suitable Job Seekers?
Their advice starts with the public perception of your business and whether it will attract the type of candidates you want. An investment in this will pay back dividends in future years if you can recruit, and hold onto, the people who will stand beside you on the bridge of your business ship, find wind for the sails, or put their backs into firing up the engines.
Carefully Crafted Job and Person Specifications
Business owners and HR staff also need to take great care over job descriptions and definitions, so that it will be starkly clear what skills and competencies are needed, and what types of behaviour and characteristics of a personality will be a good fit. This will be invaluable to a search organisation you employ if you decide to go that route.
The final recruitment decision is always up to you. Gut feel has a place, but you should also be able to rationalise the reasons for your choice by referring to your job and person specifications. Job talent matching tools are available and could be another wise investment if decisions are difficult.
Keeping Good People on Board
Once the choice is made, it’s important to make the new employee feel that he or she matters. After a short induction period, every employee should have a personal development plan that sets objectives to be met in realistic time scales. These will be personal objectives set in the business context, so that the organisation benefits as well as the person.
Allow self-directed development as much as is feasible, with training and support available if required. Mentoring programmes are invaluable for this and can be introduced at any time when the employee is ready. Set appropriate development review dates to check progress against the plans, give positive feedback and work out how to get around any obstacles in the way. This is the best way to realise and retain your personnel assets.
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