75 Ways for Managers to Hire, Develop, and Keep Great Employees

Paul Falcone

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780814436691
• eBook ISBN: 9780814436707
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Products and services will change with demand, but one thing that will always be required for a company’s success is having the right people working hard for you.

As a manager, are you cultivating this vital resource? Is there more you could be doing? In this accessible and practical playbook, HR expert and author Paul Falcone helps take the guesswork out of this crucial element for success.

In 75 Ways for Managers to Hire, Develop, and Keep Great Employees, Falcone shows managers how to:

• Identify the best and brightest talent
• Hire for organizational compatibility
• Address uncomfortable workplace situations
• Create an environment that motivates
• Retain restless top performers
• Delegate in a way that develops your staff

Every HR executive has a laundry list of things they wish managers knew--best practices that would enable the entire organization to operate more effectively. Falcone’s book 75 Ways for Managers to Hire, Develop, and Keep Great Employees has encapsulated all of this for you in a single indispensable resource!

1 Effective Hiring and Selection

ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT and significant responsibilities and opportunities that comes along with leadership lies in hiring the right people for the jobs in your company. Think about it: whether you’re an executive vice president or a first-time supervisor, your individual performance is a direct reflection of your team’s productivity. Hire the right people who are self-motivated, have a high level of self-awareness, and who hold themselves accountable for bottom-line results, and your career sails happily along while building and growing the careers of those following in your footsteps. Conversely, hire the wrong people, and you’ll end up spending considerable time counseling and disciplining workers who struggle just to meet minimum expectations. Often, you will be forced to do the work yourself—at the expense of your family time, your social life, and your sleep.

Self-motivated new hires find new ways of handling the work flow, assume broader responsibilities beyond their basic job description, and do their best work every day—with little need for your intervention. And you recognize these workers when you see them; they typically stand out from their peers in terms of their willingness to assume additional responsibilities, take creative approaches to their work based on their natural, healthy sense of curiosity, and they appreciate the opportunity you’ve given them and they behave with gratitude. If you can find these kinds of hires for every job opening, you’ll be well ahead of your peers and develop a reputation as a team builder and people developer.

Unfortunately, many leaders in corporate America have become jaded over the course of their careers. They reason that finding exceptional hires is more a matter of chance than planned strategy, and they’re so busy doing their day-to-day work that they often don’t pay enough attention to the open positions they’re responsible for filling. Then again, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of downward spiraling because if you don’t take the time to fill the open positions on your team, then you and the rest of your group become overburdened making up for the talent shortage and often plunge into a tailspin that will soon lead to burnout.

So let’s make a decision at the beginning of this book to change all that. I’ll commit to you that there’s a way to partner with your in-house or external recruiter in such a way that making outstanding hires can become the consistent norm—rather than the occasional exception—in terms of the fresh talent that you bring aboard. On the flip side, you’ll need to commit to making effective interviewing and hiring your top priority from this point forward in your career. My part of the bargain as the author of this book is actually easier than you think; a few tweaks to your interview questioning techniques and reference checking activities will go a long way in helping you land motivated and engaged new hires who are looking to make their mark in your organization as top-notch performers. Your part of the bargain is a bit more complex; focusing on effective hiring remains challenging when you’ve got so many other responsibilities that demand your immediate attention.

Our goal, then, in this chapter, is to change your perspective on the hiring and selection process. To achieve this, you’ll need to make a leap of faith with me on two critical fronts: First, with the chapter tools in hand that you’re about to access, you must believe that you can catapult your candidate evaluation skills to new heights and become a magnet for top-notch talent. Second, no matter what exigencies lie before you at any given time, you have to commit to filling openings on your team as your top-most priority under all circumstances. To do anything less isn’t fair to you or the other members of your team. In short, you’re only as good as the people you hire. Let’s venture together now and determine what new approaches and tools for recruitment and hiring are available to you as you address this critical leadership responsibility head on.

1 Establishing Your Brand: Social Network Outreach, Recruitment Brochures, and Adding New Life to Your Recruitment Advertising Campaigns

Up to the early 1990s, the business world ran ads in newspapers to attract candidates. Recruitment ads were short and almost cryptic because newspapers charged by the word. In large-city newspapers, you could easily end up paying $800 to $1,000 for an ad that barely stretched the length of your thumb, so needless to say, there was very little fluff about the company or its culture and vision, and the entire message was dedicated to the job’s critical requirements. Around the year 2000, Monster and other online job boards were established, providing much more room for the hiring organization to be creative and express its true spirit. Job applicants uploaded their résumés online, and both internal recruiters and headhunters had volumes of résumés to choose from at the click of a button.

Flash forward to today’s job market, and LinkedIn and other social media sites have clearly overtaken the larger online job boards in capturing talent. Researchers will tell you that employers and recruiters today are looking to the “Big 5” social media locations to source top talent:

Websites Where Employers Are Searching for New Talent

Website or Type of Site	Percent of Employers Using the Website
LinkedIn	94
Facebook	65
Twitter	55
Blogs	20
You Tube	15

Source: Jobvite Social Recruitment Survey, 2013.

In similar fashion, job candidates are defining their résumés by search-able key words, creating a comprehensive social media presence, and identifying which social media platforms are optimal for their target audience.

Where does this massive change in such a short time leave you? You guessed it: investing in and beefing up your online presence to compete and attract the best and brightest talent that your industry and local job market have to offer. It’s nothing less than critical that your company—large or small, public or private, international or domestic, union or nonunion—invest heavily in creating and developing your online brand across multiple platforms such as the Big 5 listed above. Ask yourself:

What are you doing to create visibility and credibility to attract highly qualified applicants?

Would someone looking at the career page on your website, your company’s LinkedIn or Facebook pages, or your You Tube presence be over- or underwhelmed by your message? Likewise, when was the last time you made a significant change to your online presence?

Are you engaging in best practices in terms of maintaining your online persona, and are you aware of the ROI (return on investment) of social media in terms of your recruitment brand?

If you are unsure of the answer to any of these questions, you’re probably missing out on one of the most fascinating and creative times in recruitment history! Enlist the services of an external consultant for a short-term project to spruce up your online profile and tell your organization’s story. Understand that applicants will access your company’s website on Google first and foremost, but LinkedIn, Facebook, Glassdoor, and similar sites will also be accessed. The Internet has made so much possible in terms of company intelligence gathering that it would be very shortsighted of an organization to fail to establish a compelling presence on the Internet that describes its company’s vision, values, and achievements. Be sure you make your Internet presence especially friendly to mobile devices, where so much initial access and research take place.

Next, create a recruitment/marketing brochure that can be downloaded from your website’s career page or otherwise emailed to candidates once they’re selected for interview. (Your applicant tracking system should be able to automatically email a brochure once an individual’s résumé is moved to the interviewing bin.) Your marketing and communications department or a recent new hire who just graduated from college and has solid writing or graphic arts skills can create a recruitment brochure. Sections of a typical recruitment brochure might include:

A brief company history (year founded, founder’s mission and vision, annual revenue, number of employees, stock market ticker symbol, locations, corporate governance structure, customers served, market niche, and the like).

The hiring process, including the fact that your organization conducts background checks and drug screens as well as reference checks before someone can begin working. You can also use this as an opportunity to clarify in writing that you generally expect new hires to provide you with copies of recent performance evaluations to demonstrate their strengths and areas for self-development.

Starting salaries and performance reviews: Clarify that merit increases occur either on employee anniversary dates or on specific dates for the whole company (e.g., the second payroll period in January) and that first-year merit increases are typically prorated based on the number of months served up to that point. Likewise, address whether new-hire evaluations include salary increases or are used strictly to provide initial feedback after 60 or 90 days.

Benefits: Take this opportunity to sell the value of your company’s benefits programs! Benefits and paid-time-off privileges are typically worth 30 to 40 percent of a full-time employee’s base salary at many organizations, so be sure to highlight the value of your programs that will attract new talent. Defined-benefit pension plans are rare these days, but if your company offers one, be sure to explain how it works and how employees will benefit. Do the same for tuition reimbursement, wellness programs, generous paid-time-off (PTO) policies, and the like.

Miscellaneous information that employees normally might not learn about unless they ask: parking options and costs, mandatory versus voluntary union membership, employee services (e.g., gymnasium, on-site childcare, movie discounts, and ride-share public transportation subsidies). Casual dress days on Friday can serve as a positive inducement for strong candidates choosing among multiple offers.

Likewise, consider creating and posting a video in your company website’s career page or on You Tube that introduces prospective candidates to your current employees. Companies are even creating online avatars so that prospective employees can walk through the online hiring experience and learn first hand what it’s like to work for you. The various ways and means of developing your online presence and your website career page go beyond the scope of this book because Internet technology changes so quickly, but the point is simple: The recruitment process has become highly automated and digitized, and your investment in developing a best-in-class online experience will pay considerable dividends.

Similarly, consider drafting a freestanding document titled “What to Expect When You First Come to Work for Us” if you’re hiring large volumes of entry-level employees who may not have prior industry experience. Such expectations flyers can serve as a one-sheet handout for applicants who want a clearer understanding of the job they’re applying for, and, better yet, they can be used as a tool during the interviewing process to discuss the challenges of the position. A typical expectations flyer might include:

• The particular challenges of customer service in your organization

• Work schedule demands, including weekend work, shift structure, and last-minute overtime

• The physical demands of the job, especially if they include anything out of the ordinary (like standing for eight hours or spending excessive amounts of time in a warehouse freezer)

• An emphasis on internal audits and compliance

• Excessive travel demands, on-call requirements, and the like

The point is not to let these workplace requirements surprise the new hires in their first few weeks on the job. Such transparency will not only...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Permissions
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Effective Hiring and Selection
• Chapter 2: Effective Leadership and Outstanding Communication
• Chapter 3: The Importance of the Written Record
• Chapter 4: Avoiding Litigation Land Mines
• Chapter 5: Inspiring Employee Engagement
• Chapter 6: Putting It All Together
• Index
• About the Author