Recruitment – Common Mistake No 1

Know What You Want

In this short 2 minute video, James takes a look at what you need to consider before you advertise for a new employee…

What To Look For In A Resume

With dozens, or sometimes hundreds, of replies to a job placement advertisement, you or the person designated to assess/study the resumes will need to pay careful attention to the information in each  application.  From the resumes you will gain your first impression of your applicants’ qualifications, skills and abilities. The information that is ‘not there’ is just as important as the information that is included.

It is important to note that the way resumes are written and presented can reveal a great deal about your applicants.  For instance, how they addressed all the criteria asked for, their spelling and grammar, style and presentation all give clues as to their competency, abilities and level of education.

Some important things to keep in mind……

Presentation
·    Needs to be cleanly and neatly printed on high quality paper
·    It should be obvious that a lot of time and effort was spent in building the resume
·    Layout should be professional and uncluttered and have adequate white spacing
·    Have bullet points, bold or italic fonts and/or indented paragraphs
·    Important information should be easy to find without having to search through the whole document

Content
·    Typing, spelling or grammar mistakes
·    Objectives and/or goals. Are they in line with yours?
·    Educational qualifications
·    Similar job experience to the one being applied for
·    Volunteer experience
·    Inclusion of useful and/or transferrable skills and knowledge or qualifications
·    Action verbs such as; supervised, managed, organised, achieved, initiative etc
·    Any significant achievements in their previous employment

With a large number of applications to consider, those who are savvy and want to grab your attention will place their most important/relevant information early in the first part of the resume.

Many employers will only consider applicants who have had similar experience in a previous job.  We say give equal consideration to those applicants with excellent transferrable skills and abilities….they could even be more suitable.

Watch out for everything from just a little bit of truth stretching to outright lies and fraud.

Everyone wants to present themselves in the best possible light by using a little spin and they will also leave out information that they feel may prejudice their application such as race, religion, gender, marital status and age. Information of this nature is not generally considered to be relevant to employment.  And to a certain extent employers invite this type of spin by their own set of expectations and prejudices.

However, the number of outright lies being told on resumes is becoming increasingly common.  The most common lie will be stretching the dates of employment to hide periods of unemployment.  Some people will say that they were paid a higher salary at a previous job to get more money from a new employer.  And there are other far more serious lies such as inventing University degree qualifications and previous employment positions

For further advice on how to assess resumes and identify top performers using Harrison Assessments in a more objective way, contact James Bryden, The Productivity Coach on 0421 210 444 or leave a comment below.

The Recruitment Process

When business owners decide to employ someone, they often pay little attention to the
importance of having as objective a recruitment process as possible.

Commonly, the following happens:

• Advertisement is placed

• Resume’s received and checked

• Those with the best experience invited for in an interview

• Employ the person who has the most experience and you like the most

As an interviewer, you unknowingly filter the candidate to your own subconscious likes,
dislikes & prejudices. And as any top marketing expert will tell you, we make decisions
emotionally and justify them logically.

The fact is, past experience is not a very good indicator of future performance but past
behaviour IS. There are many people in the workforce who are well qualified but do not
actually like what they do. Add to this their personality, which may cause problems with
existing staff.

There is a better way that will dramatically increase your chances of making the right
choice first time.

What you are looking for is evidence of not only qualifications and experience but also
behaviours that will suit the position. Doing this in as objective a way as possible can
make the recruitment process much more predictable and successful.

You might want to call me to find out how The Productivity Coach Recruitment Process can be
applied to your business, it may well save you a fortune.

Recruitment & Productivity

 

 

 

Hiring Great Staff For More Productivity

Many businesses have huge problems when it comes to hiring quality staff they can trust. The one thing owners don’t realise they need is a comprehensive system that will weed out the potential problem employee BEFORE  the REAL EXPENSE kicks in.

James explains more in this short two and a half minute video.

Committed to YOUR Personal Productivity,

James is a productivity coach specializing in working with people who are procrastinators and those who want results quickly. His ability to get brilliant results with his clients is quite amazing…

The Productivity Coach

Extraordinary Results for Professional and Personal Freedom

To Find Out the “5 Secrets of REALLY Successful People” go to…

The Productivity Coach

P:      0421 210444

Recruiting High Performers

In this short two and a half minute audio James explains what is needed when you are recruiting and hiring great staff members to enhance your business.

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Committed to YOUR Personal Productivity,

James is a productivity coach specializing in working with people who are procrastinators and those who want results quickly. His ability to get brilliant results with his clients is quite amazing…

The Productivity Coach

Extraordinary Results for Professional and Personal Freedom

To Find Out the “5 Secrets of REALLY Successful People” go to…

The Productivity Coach

P:      0421 210444

Are Your Staff Slowly Killing You?

And three emotions you need to avoid if you want to survive.

How do you rate your health?

If you rate your health as very good give yourself a five out of five. If you rate your health as very poor give yourself a one out of five.

Why this is important

It’s important because research indicates the lower you rate your own health, the earlier you will die even if you currently have no disease or risk factors. This self rating system has been research and validated by studying over 44,000 identical twins.

So how does rating ourselves impact our health? It has been discovered that how we feel about our situation in life has a big impact on us physically. Therefore if we feel bad about a certain situation for example lame and lazy staff who are unproductive and drain your energy, then your thinking will trigger an emotional reaction that may well be prematurely aging you and even slowly killing you.

“Thoughts and emotions are interwoven: every thought, however bland, almost always carries with it some emotional undertone, however subtle”

Restak

How quickly thoughts can kill you.

In 1964 a newspaper headline read “Man Freezes to Death in Refrigeration Car”. The man had become trapped inside when the door accidentally slammed on him. When he was found the next day he had all the physical symptoms of having been frozen to death. Yet the refrigeration unit was switched off and at no time had the temperature been at or even close to freezing. The man had in one night talked himself into dying. Your thoughts have a dramatic impact on your body.

“Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The emotional black spots.

There are four emotions that have the potential to send a flood of toxic chemicals through your brain that not only increase the risk of memory loss but also prematurely age you and reduce your life expectancy. These emotional black spots are depression, anxiety, anger and low self esteem. Since 1929 the life span of Oscar winners have been measured against other actors and the findings suggest that winning an Oscar increases your life expectancy by 3.9 years because it elevates the recipient’s self esteem and reduces the prevalence and the impact of the four emotional black spots.

How business owners can protect their brain

Today no business owner should have to put up with prolonged worrying staffing situations that make them prone to bouts of depression, anxiety, anger and low self esteem. There are now brilliant psychometric tests and selection processes that can eliminate the risk of ever hiring a stressful staff member and it makes more than complete sense to use them. The focus of the Profitable Personnel recruitment process is to assist business owners to find staff that will not only build their business, but will do so in a stress free manner that enhances the business owners quality of life both financially and emotionally.

Committed to YOUR Personal Productivity,

James Bryden.

James is a productivity coach specializing in working with people who are procrastinators and those who want results quickly. His ability to get brilliant results with his clients is quite amazing…

“Fast Tracking YOUR SUCCESS… SuccessFULL Living!”

To Find Out the “5 Secrets of REALLY Successful People” go to…

The Productivity Coach

P: 0421 210 444

Who Wants To Know 9 Ways to Reward Good Work That Are More Effective Than Giving Money?

And two crucial secrets to making your team work.

Research suggests that non cash rewards are more effective and less expense than cash rewards. An example of non cash reward is time off and having the choice of working on projects they like. I recently visited a company in Melbourne whose staff set the production goals and all the staff wanted as their reward was to go home when the work was done. Believe it or not the staff set the production targets 25% higher than the management team had ever expected.

This small business is now thriving and has now become a thriving national business, EVEN IN A “RECESSION”. And here’s an interesting point, they don’t hire well trained professionals because professionals have “attitude” and believe everyone should be as knowledgeable as they are, and therefore they tend to talk down to people.

So here are two of their crucial business secrets:

Secret One: They hire based on behaviours not qualifications.
Secret Two: All the systems in the business were so well defined that anyone could come into their business and become productive after 5 days, as long as they had the right behaviours.

Would you like a 25% increase in your team’s profitability?

If you want to change employee behaviour research reveals that the reward will need to be between 5 to 8 percent of an employee’s salary…IF YOU USE CASH. The facts are the best rewards are not cash and they are far more effective. Non cash rewards that are effective are often only half the value of cash rewards, but believe it or not they are far more effective!

Here are nine cheaper and far more effective ways to reward staff that than money.

1. Recognition
2. Time Off
3. A piece of the action
4. Favourite work
5. Advancement
6. Freedom
7. Personal growth
8. Fun
9. Prizes.

Secret Three: The funny thing is staff are often far more satisfied when obtaining non cash rewards and the research suggests staff satisfaction drives your businesses profits sky high.

A recent survey conducted by the Gallup organisation looked at employee attitudes and the impact on business outcomes. They found that businesses where employees had high job satisfaction also had:

2 Brilliant Tips for Getting the Employees You Want!

You Can Save Time, Energy and Money.

Business owners and CEO’s have three extremely valuable BUT LIMITED assets and that’s time, energy and money. The strange thing is that again and again I hear of business owners and senior managers spending their valuable time and energy trying to train their staff to do the right things at the right time to get the right result. Then as the months go by and nothing really changes they realize they are wasting their resources because they have not asked themselves two crucial question and they are:

- How do I know if the employees I am training want to learn and improve?
– How do I know if the employees I am training want to use this knowledge to improve my business or my department?

This is a waste of resources and damages their health that’s guaranteed, there is enough research now to prove that anxiety, stress or anger not only prematurely age you, but they also shorten your life span.

So how do you know if an employee actually wants to learn and improve and how do you know if they actually want to use this knowledge to achieve your business goals?

Answer and tip one: Ensure you check the commitment of an employee during the selection phase by getting them to fill in a rigorous selection criteria.

The Benefit of a Selection Criteria Form is:

A. You will immediately find out whether the applicant is really committed to your position if they can be bothered to fill in the selection criteria and send it back to you. Seven out of ten applicants will not return the selection criteria and this is great because these people are not driven, motivated and committed enough to fill in the form and these people are not the people you want in your business.

B. The selection criteria can collect a lot of objective relevant information about a candidate. This information is directly related to what you need to find out about this person

C. The selection criteria force the applicant to ask themselves. “Do I really want to do this role?”

D. The selection criteria give you great insight about the candidate’s ability to read instructions, understand them, reflect on the content and then comply with your directions. Candidates who fill in the selection criteria are far more likely to achieve results for you than those who can’t find time to fill in the form.

Test Them!

Now how do you know if the employees you are training want to use this knowledge to improve your business or your department?

Answer and tip two: There are some simple but brilliant psychometric tests on the market that clearly show if the candidate you are reviewing or even if an existing employee is truly interested in self improvement. Chet Holmes one of America’s leading sales and marketing guru says:

“You’d be crazy not to use these personality assessment services today,
they are scary accurate and can save you tens of thousands in hiring and management.”

Why waste time, energy and money?

You can now easily find out:

·         If the employees YOU are training want to learn and improve?….And
·         If the employees YOU are training want to use this knowledge to improve your business?

Committed To Building Your Business With The Right Staff.