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How To Find Champions For Your Business

Guest post by: Pam Stellema

Article Overview: Finding new staff for your business can be akin to walking through a minefield! One bad choice can lead to much heartache. It is essential that before you begin your search for the perfect employee that you undertake some vital preparation. This will ensure that you have a clear understanding of the skills and attributes needed by the person you choose to employ. Pam Stellema

How To Find Champions For Your Business

Everyone knows that finding better than average staff for their business is just about impossible.

It's a fact that the majority of businesses, whether they have just a few staff or are a multi-national, often struggle with finding great people; but is that because there are no great people wanting jobs or simply because they are not being sourced the best possible way?

A poor choice when recruiting a new employee can cause a multitude of headaches down the track, making you wish you had hired with a little less haste and a lot more caution. Without a doubt, good staff selection and recruitment is vital to the smooth running of your business and there are several things that you can do to ensure that you are employing champions for your business as often as possible.

To begin with, before you even compose your job advertisement, it is essential that you create a detailed job description. This important document will help you to clarify who will be the right person to fulfil the needs of your business. It will allow you to pinpoint exactly what the new position will entail along with the necessary qualifications and attributes your new employee must possess. By doing this, you will already be one step closer to finding the right person for the job.

Even if you are advertising to fill an existing position, chances are there will need to be slight modifications made to the previous job description to ensure that the new employee is going to meet your changing needs.

What Should Your Job Description Include?

• The Job Title. This indicates what the role of the job will be within your business and its level within your business hierarchy. For instance, ‘Accounts Manager" would be at a much higher level than "Accounts clerk" even though both positions belong to the accounts department.

• Hours offered and method of employment. Here you get to decide just how many hours per week this position will require - whether you wish to offer full time, part time or casual employment. Each type of employment has positives and drawbacks so you need to decide which will best suit your needs.

• Essential attributes and skills required to do the job. These are the skills and attributes that the new employee must bring with them to your business. By having this clearly outlined in your job description, you can ensure that your new employee can adequately fulfil the role.
• Desirable attributes and skills for the job. Sometimes a candidate will have all the essential skills but not necessarily all the desirable skills. These skills are the ones that can usually be taught if necessary, but it means that the candidate may take a little longer to be able to work independently.
• Duties to be undertaken. This is just so important especially for a smaller business where multi tasking is a must. If you require a new recruit to do different types of work that would not normally be part of their role, it is important to list these duties right up front. It is pointless getting into an argument down the track because they were unaware that they would be required to carry out these additional duties.

• A schedule of the listed duties. This is like a timetable and allows the candidate to get a better overview of the job.
• Supervisors and Managers. Those people to whom your new employee will report in the business
• People within the business that will report to them. Those people who they will be responsible to supervise.

By having this information carefully thought out in advance of hiring, you will have gone a long way toward making sure that your job candidates will be right for the position. This will not only help you to avoid employing unsuitable people who cannot fulfil the role but will also help to reduce the amount of time you will spend on interviewing unsuitable candidates as well.

Why is a job description important to your business?

By creating a job description prior to recruiting, you will have given:

• Yourself he opportunity to really think about the kind of person that you want to employ. Many business owners employ new staff without having a clear idea themselves of exactly what they expect their new employees to do within their role. Let's face it, if you don't know exactly what it is that you want from your new staff member, what hope do they have of living up to your expectations?
• Your candidates a clear outline about what their role will involve before they accept the position. Springing unidentified responsibilities on an employee after they have signed on the dotted line is often a recipe for disaster.

Only once you have a clear idea of what you want from your new employee you can begin the recruitment process. Now that you understand the skills and attributes needed by your new employee, you will be able to recruit more efficiently knowing who will and will not be an asset to your business. On the other side of the coin, your job candidates will also be more informed about the position they have applied for and will have a much clearer understanding of your expectations and their role within your company.

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Article Tags: attributes, job description, recruitment, staff



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