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 Assessments: Invaluable Hiring Tools
Many employers say employee retention is a huge personnel challenge, even in these tough economic times. The difficulty can often be traced back to a poor fit between the employee and the organization. Using assessments as part of the recruiting/hiring process may significantly lessen this issue.
Some put all their faith in assessments; others don’t give them much credence. Let’s face it…some assessments are very insightful and accurate while others are downright useless. Many, however, can be very valuable tools to help you hire the right person for your team.
Have you ever been in this situation? You find someone who you feel is the “perfect” person for the job. The skills and experience are exactly what you are looking for. The reference checks are all positive. The interview was perfect. And still, in six months, it’s obvious that it isn’t working for anyone on the team, and the “perfect” candidate quits. What happened?
Well, every workplace has a particular culture—how people interact with one another and with the boss, how work gets done, etc. If a new team member can’t fit into that dynamic, that person will fail, despite having the perfect credentials.
Here’s where assessments come in. Assessments help you determine whether a person will be a good cultural fit with your organization and your team. They show how a person approaches things, how they may react in certain situations, how they relate to others. They can really help make a good match between an existing team and the new hiree. That means all the hard work and effort and money that went into hiring someone will have been put to the best use.
And it will benefit the ones you are seriously considering hiring. Think of how devastated you would be if you were excelling in your career, if you had busted your butt training and working to get to where you are today, and then you failed because you couldn’t seem to fit into your new team and work well with your new boss. Assessments lessen the possibility of this happening to your new team member.
There are so many assessments out there. It will take a little time and research to find ones that work well for you and your organization; however, it’s time and effort well spent when you see the beneficial results of using assessments in your successful hiring decisions. If you have any questions about assessments, we’d be glad to help. Give us a call at 306-586-2315.
 Stand-up Meetings
Do you need a quick meeting without any long-winded oration? Just need to give or get an update on a project, or help focus coming priorities? Consider holding a stand-up meeting: a short 20-minute or less time limit, no food or drinks, no distractions. There’s no time for people to get bored and fight their minds from wandering, and it can help energize and focus everyone on what needs to be done. |
—Communications Tips—
Detailed PowerPoint Handouts
Here’s a great tip for creating information-rich handouts for a PowerPoint presentation.
Sometimes we pack the slides with way too much information because we’re using the slides as the handouts and we want the audience to have every detail. Not a good idea! They’re so busy reading the slides, they aren’t listening to you, and they are visually overloaded and bored.
Why not use the Notes Page instead of the slide itself as the handout? Rather than putting your speaking notes there (how many of you do that, anyway?), you can put in all the bazillion details you’ve taken off the slide. Then, print the Notes Pages as the handout.
This way you can deliver a visually stimulating presentation AND give the audience the details they need.
Quotes
“The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime.”—Babe Ruth
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