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What You Should Consider When Hiring Your First Employee

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When you own a small business, you’d expect that over time it’ll start to grow. As it grows there’ll be more tasks to deal with and not enough resources for it.  Help will be needed to manage your build up of tasks, in which case it might be worth considering hiring your first employee. It could be seen as a big step as you’ll now have to teach someone else how you run your business and you’ll be letting someone into something that’s really special to you. But if your business requires extra resources and you want it to grow further, it’s the jump you have to take. So, here are the things you need to consider when hiring your first employee.

What are the Requirements for the Job?

It’s good first of all to identify exactly what person you require to fit a job role and the skills they need. Note down what it is this person needs for them to be successful in the role you’ve put on offer. From running the business and working on day to day tasks, you’ll know where you need the help and what it takes for it to be completed. After you’ve done this, you should get a better idea of what you’re looking for to put into the job specification.

How Does your Brand Look to Others?

SImilar to how customers use a brand to buy services and products from, you want to be able to show the same to potential job candidates too. They should be able to benefit from working in the business and want to be attracted by your business in some way to apply for the job. You could conduct some market research on what others think of your brand, or just ask close family and friends. It’ll help candidates understand what you do so it can help them decide whether it’s right for them.

Do You Offer Any Training?

If there’s space for an employee to grow, it can be a great plus in attracting candidates. This is, of course, dependant on the type of person you’re looking for, as someone more experienced may not necessarily need the training. Someone who’s ambitious though may see training as a valuable asset for later in their career.

What Type of Working Hours Will You Be Offering?

Nowadays, there are more people looking to distance themselves away from typical 9-5 working hours, as flexible working becomes more popular. Consider the type of working hours you’ll be offering as flexible working hours is known to be more popular when candidates are looking for jobs.

Do You Have Any Perks That Come With the Job?

It can difficult when jobs don’t have a good work-life balance. It can be more appealing to job seekers when there are benefits in the role as it can have a great effect on morale, encouraging a better work ethic. Within the job description be sure to outline any benefits that you may be offering as it’s likely more people will consider working for you.

Writing Up a Contract

Let’s say that you’ve managed to find your successful candidate, and you can’t wait for them to start work. Bear in mind that details in a contract are one of the most important things when hiring a new employee. This is crucial in making sure all parties involved are on the same page and everyone’s protected, including your business. If you’re unsure of how to write up a contract there’s always employment solicitors that you can involve who can help you along the process.

It’s always worth considering the best ways your business can grow, and retaining your best staff for a successful future. Considering these aspects can go a long way as you want to make sure the first employee is the right employee.

Predictive Analytics Tools Can Create a Better Workforce

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Understanding What Predictive Analytics Is

Predictive analytics (PA) is well known in many business arenas but has never entered Human Resources until recently. PA is a form of technology that learns from other existing data. This process results in predictive results. It is most frequently used to predict very specific individual behaviors in Human Resources.

Predictive analytics examines data or content to answer the question “What is likely to happen?’’ This is important in any business area but is critical to Human Resources who previously depended on intuition to determine future needs of both the company and employees.

With the support of predictive analytics, it’s no longer necessary to make decisions because of intuitive feelings, or ‘’gut’’ reactions to some issue or plan. Data is gathered, analyzed and presented quickly, without stumbling or bumbling on the data or statistics. Intuition or ‘’gut’’ feelings are often unsuccessful, while data mining information that predicts uncertain outcomes is much more reliable and trustworthy.

How Predictive Analytics Affects Recruiting

Applying predictive analytics in Recruiting and Staffing helps companies foresee and enhance several areas, including:

  • Potential top talent is easier to identify with predictive analytics. This makes a recruiter’s job much easier and accurate. Predictive analytics can easily identify the candidates with the most potential, better understand when these talents can be contacted and understand if and why a job opening may be attractive to candidates.
  • Predictive analytics helps companies optimize the responses to their job openings. The analysis can help companies understand how duration, location, occupation and industry will likely affect recruiting results.

Why Companies Utilize Predictive Analytics in HR

73% of companies surveyed said the primary reason they used analytical data was to make the workforce planning process more efficient. 69% believe the main reason to utilize predictive analytics is to more accurately plan for the future and also, create plans to eliminate skills gaps in their organizations. 65% of companies credit predictive analytics as identifying high potential employees.

Other companies indicated that predictive analytics provided better analysis of company needs to align people and company strategy; while others indicated that analysis provided the needed links between performance and compensation; the remaining companies surveyed stated that predictive analytics provided more in-depth knowledge of external talent pools.

Predictive Analytics Helps HR Look Forward

HR has historically been responsible for forecasting the right amount of talent and knowing when to hire additional talent. Unfortunately, before predictive analytics was utilized in HR, the forecasting was more backward-looking than forward. For example, one or more employees terminate, and HR suddenly decides there is talent disproportion.

Unfortunately, few companies have implemented predictive analytics for their HR groups. According to Deloitte, in 2015, only about 8% of global organizations have adopted PA for their Human Resources groups.

The few companies that utilize predictive analytics have had great success and freely share their efforts and results. For example:

  • Google: This company is a strong advocate of statistics and freely admits that it is the most critical tool in their Human Resources group. All interview questions in their hiring process are computerized and perfected to ensure that the best candidates are hired. Additionally, Google’s predictive analysis can estimate the likelihood of future terminations, why they are terminating, and what could have been done to circumvent the termination.
  • Hewlett Packard (HP): HP is also a leader in the HR predictive analytics arena. Recently, HP shared with news media that ‘’when their attrition rates started moving upwards, they utilized predictive analytics to predict which employees were likely to leave by developing a ‘Flight Risk’ score.” This analysis was able to define both the ‘who’ and ‘why’ of their 300,000+ employees who would potentially terminate. For example, higher pay, promotions and better performance ratings were negatively related to flight risk, but the analysis proved that there were strong relationships between these findings. For instance, they were able to analyze that a promotion without a substantial pay increase would likely result in a termination.

“HP’s Flight Risk scores helped managers make better decisions since the early warning signal from Flight Risk allowed time for managers to intervene or if the loss was unavoidable, it prepped the manager to react accordingly. The predictive analysis in Flight Risk allowed HP to save an estimated $300 million.”

The extensive time previously spent on creating charts, reports, quotients, etc., will soon be history because predictive analytics easily allows organizations to analyze the past and predict upcoming trends for both positive and negative analytics.

The end result of having predictive analytics in Human Resources is the ability to predict future needs that are accurate and verifiable. This becomes the organization value to business that Human Resources has long struggled to create. HR has for years attempted to get the infamous ‘’seat at the table’’ and predictive analytics will ensure this happens.

You CAN Get The Staff These Days: Improving Your Hiring Process

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Tired of hiring the wrong people for your company? Improving your hiring process could allow you to find better candidates, allowing you to build a stronger team of employees. Here are five ways that you can improve your hiring process.

Fine-tune your job description

Your job description should be carefully worded to attract as many applicants as possible. Advertise the perks of the job and use a professional sounding job title. Whilst you should detail certain qualities that you’re looking for, try not to make the job sound too demanding as you may scare off applicants – the bad ones and the good ones.

Use social media

There are all kinds of places to advertise job vacancies including job listing sites, newspapers and public bulletins. Social media is fast becoming one of the best places to advertise jobs. It’s also a great means of screening applicants to check that they’re the right fit. LinkedIn is one of the best social media platforms for screening applicants as it tells you which previous job people have worked. You may also want to check someone’s Facebook profile – even if it’s set to private, an inappropriate profile picture could be enough to tell you that a certain candidate isn’t right for you.

Create an online tests and quizzes

Online tests and quizzes are great ways of deciding if people are the right fit for your job. This could be a personality test, a decision-based quiz or test of knowledge. Afterwards, you can look at the results and determine which candidates should progress forwards. Online quizzes could save you having a trial shift and could help to weed out applicants that are good blaggers.

Hire a recruiter

To save yourself time and increase the range of your search, you could hire a recruiter. This will cost you extra, but it could help you to find better candidates. Recruiters can be useful when it comes to hard-to-fill vacancies – these may require very niche skills or could simply require gruelling responsibilities.

Leave yourself enough time

The biggest mistake that employers make when hiring new staff is rushing the process. By giving yourself more time to advertise the vacancy, read CVs and interview candidates, you’re more likely to make the right decision. Manage your time effectively so that you’re keeping interviews on schedule and replying to queries from applicants promptly. If you’re struggling to find the time to do this, you may be able to get help from a senior employee of yours or use a recruiter to handle aspects such as interviews. On top of leaving yourself enough time for the hiring process, remember that you’ll also need to pour some time into training this new staff member and taking them through introductory paperwork. Many employees that leave soon after being hired do so because they haven’t been trained properly or haven’t been made to feel welcome – even if you’re hiring someone with ample experience, you company may have a different way of doing things, so help them to adjust.

Tips for Employee Appreciation

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All employees like to feel appreciated but not all managers know how to show gratitude. When employees feel valued, their levels of productivity and happiness increase. Here are some tips that will help you to appreciate your employees:

Notice Daily Contributions

You should not wait for the annual general meeting to tell your staff how much you appreciate their contributions. You can make them feel your gratitude on every day of the week. If possible, you should say thank you to each person that works for you daily.

If this is not possible, you can hold a weekly meeting and thank your employees at the end of it. Staff members can also raise their hands to shout out the coworkers who helped them. Love is contagious and fostering it at your workplace will create a better working environment.

You can even give out small, non-monetary rewards, that reflect team-spirit, hard work, endurance and persistence. Description sounds familiar? Well, the army has already found a very sentimental way to express this gratification using challenge coins. You can find more information about them here.

Invest in Them

You can acknowledge outstanding work by giving your employees a bonus or raise. On the other hand, if you want to recognize a specific contribution, you should give spot bonuses. Moreover, you can reward the staff by offering development opportunities. This refers to opportunities for learning new skills, presenting their work at large team meetings, or taking the lead on big projects.

If you pick employees as a way of acknowledging their contributions, you should tell them why you chose them. This will help them to reinforce what they are doing and increase the efficiency at your workplace.

Be Specific

It is important that you give recognition to your employees in a way that is clear and significant about why it matters to the company. Instead of telling an employee that you like his work, you should consider delving deeper into what you liked about his work. When you are specific about what you like, you will encourage them to keep doing the right thing instead of leaving them wondering.

Ask What They Prefer

Managers usually make the mistake of showing appreciation in the way that they would like to be appreciated. If you do the same, you will have a recipe for disaster on your hands. Instead of making assumptions about people, you should ask them how they want you to be shown appreciation.

Giving shout outs during a company meeting might work for some employees but others might find it embarrassing. Some people prefer text messages to verbal thank yous or small bonuses to vacation days. Each person is different, which means that making assumptions is not right.

Offer Flexibility

You should make it obvious that you want to keep your top employees by giving them the best job arrangements. For instance, if you want to appreciate an employee who is also a mom, you can help her to find the right daycare or giving her a flexible work schedule that works for her. If possible, you should consider allowing your best employees to work remotely for several days a week.

If you track their time using software such as Clockspot, you will know how to assign extra time for rest and relaxation.

Surprise Them

You can choose to surprise your employees with a shortened workday or unexpected treats. You should also opt for activities that benefit the company and its employees: team building activities and fully paid education courses.

Encourage Their Feedback

You should give your employees a survey that allows them to provide anonymous feedback. Ask questions about teamwork, career growth, and leadership to measure movement on all directions.

Appreciating your employees goes a long way towards fostering a good working environment. Moreover, you will notice an improvement in the levels of productivity at your company.

Tips For Managing Retail Staff Effectively

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If you are a retail manager or store owner, then you’re probably already aware of the difficulties in managing staff. However, business success is dependent on doing it properly. Now you don’t need to read up on the latest management techniques. By getting the basics sorted, you will be more prepared to deal with any problems that arise.

Maintain A Professional Attitude At All Times

Everyone is human and powerful emotions can crop up during the workday. When you’re stressed out or just plain annoyed, it’s important to remember that a professional attitude is key. Losing your composure in front of team members (and even worse, customers) can make tense situations worse and lower morale.

If you are required to mediate a dispute between two staff members, then aim to be considerate of their feelings while also adding a touch of authority. Doing so will allow you to resolve the issue quickly and prevent it from cropping up again in the future.

Keep Track Of Staff Information With Excel

The simplest way to keep track of your team is to use an Excel spreadsheet. You should make sure all their information is documented accurately. Remember people’s phone numbers, availability, and other info routinely changes, so make sure you update records when necessary.

Excel is also handy for recording staff holidays and sick leave. If one of your team hasn’t shown up for duty, then you can quickly assess whether they are sick, on holiday, or are, in fact, mysteriously absent.

If your Excel knowledge is a bit dated and you can’t remember an Excel text function, then it may be time to brush up on your skills.

Watch Out For The Common Flu

During winter, the dreaded flu can strike and quickly work its way from staff member to staff member. It is that time of year when you must be prepared for a sudden overload of absences.

To minimize the spread of the virus, try and send home any staff that are showing symptoms. You don’t want your entire workforce getting sick.

Be Doubly Prepared For Christmas

Although Christmas is far away, all business owners should understand that over the holiday period, there will be, of course, increased illness.Your standard team won’t be enough to deal with this influx of customers. Be prepared to bring on new recruits and offer overtime hours to your current staff.

Christmas is the time of year when late staff and unexplained absences can cause chaos. Make it clear to your team that this is the key time to perform.

You should also tell staff to schedule leave for a different time of the year (this may be easier said than done).

Final Thoughts

Retail managers get put under a lot of pressure, and the job isn’t for everyone. However, many people can succeed in this chosen career by being organized, respectful, and determined. Remember, by paying attention to the basics, you will be able to make life easier for yourself and the staff under you. So consider incorporating some of these tips into your professional life.