Feb 17 2012

Executive Search Agents Get Results

Executive JobRecruiting a senior manager or director for your business can be expensive. Placing adverts in the right papers and journals is a huge expense in itself. If you’re recruiting at the top level in your business, it may be more cost-effective for you to use an executive search agency.

Did you know that, in some cases, the fee charged by a recruitment agency may actually be less than handling the recruitment in-house? People often turn to an executive search firm when they have had trouble recruiting for a certain position. They may have had a low response to adverts, or discovered that all the CVs that have been sent in are from people who are under qualified or inappropriate for the role. This can be very frustrating, particularly as it is very expensive to place recruitment adverts in the local and national press.

Businesses who don’t have a full-time Human Resources function, or who are too busy to handle top recruitment themselves often outsource to an agency. Whilst it has a cost attached, it removes the majority of the recruitment burden from the company’s internal resources and makes sure that the best candidates are put forward for the job. This use of external expertise is really no different from using a design agency to run a website, or a sanitary company to do the cleaning, and leaves the company’s management free to approach the interview stage fresh and enthusiastic.

Executive recruitment is normally for specialised roles and candidates therefore need to have a very well-defined set of skills and experience. For this reason, businesses are often less concerned with the time taken to employ someone than they are with the quality of the person they eventually hire. This can turn the search and selection process into a long one and managers can go through several sets of candidates before offering the position.

Specialist recruitment agencies come into their own here. Their databases help to search out possible candidates who have the right combination of qualifications, experience and skills, and can even undertake the first round of interviews on the company’s behalf, so that the final list includes only the best candidates available. This outsourcing of basic recruitment functions allows the company to concentrate on running the business and leaves them feeling confident that the candidates that come for interview are all suitable for the job.

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Feb 15 2012

Interesting Types Of Recognition

Employee RecognitionEspecially when they are new to the business, people see their position in the company as fragile. They often need signs other than formal appraisals and skills inventories to help them to feel accepted and appreciated.

Providing your staff with a diverse range of opportunities to represent the company is a great way of collecting information and rewarding performance in the workplace at the same time.

Training

Managers sometimes look on training as a necessary evil. They must release their staff on an irregular basis to improve their skills, possibly selecting the poorer performers first to ensure that the average performance in the department rises. The flaw in this thinking is that training should not be seen as a punishment for poor performance; it ought to be a reward.

Training courses, especially those conducted off-site, can be viewed as a motivational tool. They are an opportunity to learn, to compare experiences, to network and to gather information about life in other businesses. They also allow your people to stand back from their jobs and think more clearly about how best to do their jobs.

Exhibitions

Trade exhibitions are often believed to be the province of the sales and marketing team or the technical people. However you should consider how exhibitions can help with day-to-day motivation for any of your people. Having permission to spend a day out of the year attending an exhibition can only be a positive experience. This exposes your people to the wider industry that they work within and can give them inspiration about making their job even more effective.

You may even have your own stand at a trade exhibition. Normally you would staff the stand with your sales and technical people plus, perhaps, a couple of administrators. As a reward for a particularly good piece of work, you could assign junior or non-technical people to the stand that would not normally be chosen for this duty.

Conferences

Every year your competitors and sister companies will be tempted to attend a variety of conferences. Some of these are essential viewing as they concern government regulations in your industry; others are nice-to-do, dealing with industry trends or introducing new technologies. In the same way that we generally send technical specialists to exhibitions, we tend to concentrate on the same group of people to gather information from conferences.

You may or may not know that this is viewed as favoritism by many of your people who have never seen a conference. They only see the glamour of having a day away from the office and will not be convinced that conferences can be stressful, tedious and boring.

In the same way that exhibitions expose your employees to personalities in the industry, conferences achieve this too. They also provide your people with a point of view about some of the competitive issues with which your business is grappling. It is not unusual for these seemingly junior people to see solutions that you or your normal conference attendees may miss.

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