So when you have a legitimate reason to institute a company policy, what should you do to make sure your policy will be internalized and followed? And if your policy doesn’t create the desired effect, how can you learn from its failings and carry these lessons forward the next time you face a similar crisis?  A great company policy is created in seven steps. During each of these steps, take the following considerations into account.

Determine the Necessity of the Policy

Don’t fall into “policy overload” by taking a new-policy-first approach to every staffing and management challenge. If you do, your new policies will be less likely to stick and your established ones may lose their existing traction. So think carefully. If an employee stubs her toe because she was wearing sandals in the office, do you really need to change the dress code? If an employee complains about a coworker’s behavior, or a client receives a package a day late, will a new company policy solve the problem?
If the answer is yes, move forward. If not, find another approach.

Clarify the Policy Goals

How exactly will working conditions change or productivity improve once the new company policy is implemented? Have clear long-term goals in mind before any writing begins.

Gather Information and Sample Policies

Find out everything you need to know about how the new policy will be implemented and what changes will likely result. Gather all the data available on how policies like this one tend to succeed or fail, both in your company’s history and in the larger world. As you do this, learn from the experience of others. Find sample policies in your company files or online.

Write, Rewrite, and Review

Draft the policy carefully, taking every contingency into account. Anticipate the kinds of questions employees will have and the challenges they’ll face as they put these new rules into effect. Make sure every aspect of the policy is relevant, clear, and executable.

Obtain Management and Legal Support

Submit the new policy to your in house counsel or relevant legal authority and make sure it doesn’t represent discrimination, conflict of interest, or any other legal obstacle. When the legal kinks are ironed out, you’ll need to win the approval of management before the policy can be put into place.

Inform the Troops

If possible, give the affected employees some lead time so they can make the necessary adjustments before the new policy goes into effect. If the west parking lot will now be off limits, for example, employees will need to make alternative transportation plans to work. Employees should be informed in a way that reaches everyone and provides enough time to address their questions and concerns.

Implement the Policy

Once you’ve completed the first six steps, be prepared to implement the policy and make it stick. A weak policy is worse than no policy at all. So if the practical realities of enforcement become a problem, don’t just let the policy wither away. Take action and change or revoke it.

Need help with your policy development approach? Contact Expert Staffing and get the guidance and advice you need to keep your workplace running.

On the other hand, actual employees and the managers who review them tend to find the assessment process awkward, uncomfortable, and unproductive. Managers who endure yearly performance reviews wonder how to scold employees for falling short of objective expectations while still keeping them engaged and motivated. Employees often leave the room feeling demoralized or confused about how to move forward. On both sides of the table, numerical assessments seem inaccurate, “goals” are often vague, and the overall time devoted to the process feels unwisely invested, if not altogether wasted.

If this describes the review process in your workplace, what can you do to make sure you’re evaluating your employees in a meaningful way? You can’t just abandon the assessment process altogether. But it may be time to re-examine your current methods and make some adjustments.

Assess Your Assessment Process: A Four Point Audit

As you review your performance management strategy, target key areas by asking the following questions.

1. How are you measuring growth? Growth does not equal performance; Growth equals change in performance from year to year. Review the records. Are you seeing real change in average employee output? If not, something’s wrong with your annual review process.

2. How are you managing your records? With the click of a mouse, can you find data on a given employee going back to her first year with the company? Can you instantly compare her shifts in performance across multiple metrics? If not, find performance review software that can do this for you. What good are numerical, accurate, brilliant evaluations if they don’t carry forward in a meaningful way?

3. How do employees feel when the annual review process ends? If you don’t know, ask, or conduct a survey to find out. If employees leave the room relieved and simply return to their old habits, that’s no good. If they leave the room demoralized, depressed or fearing for their jobs, that’s even worse. Engagement spells success. Disengagement, shame, contention and resentment spell something else.

4. Do your managers take your review process seriously? Again, if you don’t know, find out. If mangers approach annual reviews with resignation or cynicism, this attitude will rub off on employees. And when that happens, why put any of them through the process at all? If your managers don’t believe in the value of your review process, don’t just force them to smile and toe the line. Instead, reshape the evaluation process until it earns their genuine respect.

Here at Expert Staffing, we can help you build a positive, meaningful and objective performance review process in order to make the most of your valuable human capital. Contact our office and arrange a consultation today.

If you’re an HR pro with a strong understanding of your company’s culture and the needs of your managers, how can you get the most out of your relationships with external recruiters? And if you’re a recruiter with only a tangential understanding of the cultures of multiple firms, how can you showcase your candidates in the best light and make the most of your sprawling connections?

Most important, how can both of you work together to match the right candidate with the right job, every time?

Working Together: Tips for Recruiters

1. If the client considers something a red flag, it’s a red flag. A candidate who traveled for a year after college may seem ideal in your eyes, but if the company wants obedient grinds who didn’t miss a day between graduation and work, then that’s what they want. Try to keep an open mind.

2. Be thorough with due diligence. Some recruiting firms include full criminal background checks in their search process as well as reference checks. If your firm offers a detailed investigation as part of the screening process, be careful not to miss a step.

3. Follow through. Without being a pest, stay in close touch with both the candidate and the hiring manager until the deal is sealed.

Working Together: Tips for HR Pros

1. After the job interview, reach out, one way or another. Don’t leave a recruiter/candidate hanging when the interview is over. If you have good news to share, share it, and if it’s taking a long time to finalize the decision, share that too. Just don’t damage your company’s reputation by letting the line go silent.

2. Treat recruiters with respect. They’re on your side, after all, even if some of the matches they suggest seem inappropriate.

3. Help the recruiter make the best use of every online resource. If she needs your support to publish a posting via blog or social media, respond quickly and provide the tools she asks for. The wider her net and the more efficient her process, the better the results will be for both of you.
Here at Expert Staffing, we have the experience it takes to help you staff your office with the best available talent. If you have any questions about recruiting, retention, or maintaining a productive and profitable relationship with your employees, contact us today.

Personal branding means attention to minute detail. The way you look, sound, and come across on paper all contribute to the impression you leave behind. Weave all of these scattered impressions together into a coherent and appealing story, and your potential employers will want to read on. Consider the following elements of a finely tuned personal brand:

Personal Branding: Color

Don’t tamper with the colors you use on your resume or CV. Both of these documents should be presented in black and white with no fancy formatting or playful fonts. But pay attention to color in every other impression you have an opportunity to make.

Start by choosing a signature color scheme for your job search. Slate blue and tan, for example. Or bright red. Work your color scheme into your interview outfits and design your business cards around it. Wear a red tie with your suit or a red blouse under your blazer. When you send handwritten thank you notes after an interview, send them on red stationary.

Choose a color that works for you, meaning one that matches your skin tone and also represents your personality. Bright yellow is sunny, green is creative, dark blue is serious, grey is traditional, and red suggests intensity, ambition, and boldness.

Personal Branding: Style and Consistency

Like your color, your overall style should reflect your true personality. But in order to do that effectively, it needs be consistent. If you choose red, make sure red represents the way you carry yourself, the way you walk into a room, and (this may sound silly, but it works) the music you listen to get yourself into the right frame of mind before an interview.

Personal Branding: Theme

What’s your story? You’re a person looking for a job, certainly, and you have an adequate background and education, for sure…But who are you? The story that underlies your cover letter, your resume and your conversation during interviews should follow a coherent theme.

For example, if you worked as an electrical engineer for years before deciding to leave the field and go to culinary school, that’s a key underlying theme of your story. Now that you’re looking for work in the food industry, your unique background has had a shaping effect on who you are and what you’ve become, and these things represent a defining aspect of your personal brand. The events of your life and the details of your personality are more memorable when they’re delivered as stories. It might sound dramatic, but if you don’t write and control the novel of your own life, who will?

For more advice on building a personal brand and using your brand to support your job search, contact Expert Staffing.

But before a candidate explores your site, he or she will need to see the posting in the first place. And social media can help with this. To attract a wide pool of applicants, you’ll have to broadcast your message to a large audience. And you don’t just want any applicants; you want talented, qualified applicants who see themselves as a cultural fit for your workplace.

So how can you use social media to reach out to these people? And once you’ve found them, how can you capture their attention and encourage them to apply?

Attract Candidates with Social Media: Twitter and Facebook Business Profiles

Your Facebook and Twitter business profiles are an excellent place to start. Applicants who “like” or follow your company should be on your list of desired potential employees. Make sure these people can immediately see when you have a position available, and make sure you provide appealing, complete, and targeted information about the position using your profile, Tweets and status updates. You can lay the groundwork for this strategy by taking steps to increase your company’s “likes” and followers.

Attract Candidates with Social Media: Company Blogs

Every open position at your company should have its own blog. This is not as complex or expensive as it sounds; Worpress, Blogger and several other platforms are available that can support these blogs for free. A blog for an open position should provide detailed information about job responsibilities, messages (or even video interviews) from the hiring manager, and updates on the candidate selection process that continue until the position is filled. Include links to the blog in all job postings and on all social media profiles.

Attract Candidates with Social Media: LinkedIn

You may also want to include links to the personal LinkedIn profiles of the potential employee’s new boss, fellow team members, and company CEO. This can give a potential applicant a little more insight into the position before she takes steps to apply.

Attract Candidates with Social Media: Testimonial Sites

Talented employees are often digitally savvy, and since they’re always in demand, even in a bleak economy, they tend to look before they leap. Testimonial sites like JobVent, JobBite and Glass Door offer current and former employees an opportunity to speak anonymously about a company’s culture and workplace, so take steps to make sure these sites represent you well.

Start by running a search for your company’s name and seeing what you find. If the news is positive, great. Feel free to encourage current employees to post on these sites and share their good will. If the news is negative, attempt damage control. The best way to do this? Take criticism to heart, and make some honest improvements. Do everything you can to make sure your workplace is fair, welcoming, and representative of the company’s core values.

Contact Expert Staffing for more tips on using social media to support your recruiting strategy.

Family Benefits

The men and women of today’s workforce are having smaller families than they were a generation ago, but these families occupy the top of their list of priorities. If you make life difficult for an employee’s family, prepare to lose that employee. Medical benefits for dependents must be affordable, salaries need to account for cost of living increases, and maternity and paternity leave need to be not just available, but offered generously and in good faith. Childbirth and childrearing are part of life for modern employees, and if you don’t provide appropriate accommodations for new parents, recognize that your competitors can and will.

Room for Growth

In an earlier era, a relationship with an employer often lasted for the duration of an employee’s working life. Loyalty was considered a matter of courtesy, if not a core aspect of ethics, and if talented employees felt secure and respected, they had no qualms about staying with an employer for many years at a time. But modern employees need to plan ahead when it comes to navigating a long term career path, and if you can’t offer the advancement they need, they’ll eventualy search for opportunity elsewhere.

Your talented employees are your most valuable form of capital, so don’t let them stagnate. Cultivate their skills, pair them with mentors, support their educational goals, and make sure that you’re ready to restructure the workplace in order to provide them with increasing levels of responsibility.

Schedule Flexibility

Modern employees, those with and without children, recognize that a successful life requires balance. If you can help them attain this balance, you’ll earn their loyalty and respect. Try to cultivate a workplace in which employees can complete their work from remote locations and interact using wireless devices. If possible, allow talented employees to come in early in order to leave early. Employees will appreciate this, and studies show that workers who are offered more schedule flexibility are often more productive that those who are required to be on the premises between 9:00 and 5:00.

For more guidance on staffing and retention issues in an evolving workplace, contact the team at Expert Staffing and arrange a consultation.

But before you can motivate and engage your team members, you have to make sure they’re showing up. And you have to find ways to keep them on the premises until the workday officially ends. This might seem simple, but experienced managers know how challenging it can be to keep employees on the clock without undermining morale or becoming overly authoritarian and losing their respect. And when it comes to time management, success isn’t optional. Chances are, your employees represent your most valuable form of capital, and how you measure and utilize their time can have a powerful impact on your productivity.

Here are a few time management considerations that can help you navigate this universal challenge:

 Emphasize Documentation

The old fashioned method of tracking time by having employees punch in and out using an actual card and time clock is still used in some workplaces. But time management technology has come a long way. In environments in which employees don’t sit at desks or use desktop computers, it may still make sense to implement software with a check-in/check-out requirement at the building entrance. But for office venues that rely on desktop computers, time management software programs can be installed that allow employees to simply log in and log out as they turn their computers on and off. These sign-ins provide an accurate attendance record that can be transmitted directly to HR.

A discreet and precise employee time clock software system offers vast improvements over public, voluntary systems. Automatic prompts can keep employees from forgetting to sign in and out, and private time management systems keep employees from becoming competitive or cagey about the hours their co-workers may or may not be maintaining. Accurate documentation also helps resolve HR disputes about attendance before they begin.

 Don’t Rely on Time Alone as a Measure of Productivity

Make sure your time management software system is up-to-date and appropriate for your workplace and industry, but remember: No matter how sophisticated your software may be, time alone can’t provide a complete picture of overall productivity. Use weekly reports and appropriate performance metrics to fill in the gaps.

Balance on-the-clock-time, overtime hours, and general attendance data with analytics like 1.) rate of performance improvement, 2.) project completion times, 3.) control over project budgets and resources, 4.) new clients gained, 5.) new revenue streams created, and any other metrics that help you evaluate how profitably your employees use their time.

If you can measure and document at-work hours, you can measure and document these other data points as well. Building employee productivity isn’t a guessing game—Base your evaluations on data that’s fair, accurate, and directly tied to performance.

Maintain Control over Your Image

Physically watching your employees come and go may seem like a foolproof way to control their attendance. But too much of this, as experience managers know, can backfire. It’s true that you have purchased, and therefore rightfully own, your employee’s lives between the hours of nine and five, but don’t push this. Employees resent bosses who hover too closely or who don’t seem to trust them. And when employees get resentful, productivity and morale both tend to slip. The extra minutes you may gain by tapping your watch and raising your eyebrow significantly when an employee arrives late are not worth the damage this can do to your managerial image.

So don’t put yourself in this position. Just place your trust in a software system that can keep accurate, documented records of employee work hours, preferably one that can be accessed from anywhere. Then you can take your attention off your employees and bring it back to the responsibilities of running your business.

Searching for ways to maximize your workforce?
Contact Expert Staffing. Our team of human capital experts will help you leverage one of your most important assets to drive productivity and reduce costs.

Here are a few considerations to bear in mind as you move forward with your post-interview reviews:

1. The post-game review only adds significant value if multiple team members participated in the interview process. And remember: Each person who weighs in on a candidate should have had a chance to evaluate him or her in the interview setting. There’s no need to solicit opinions from those who weren’t in the room.
2. Make sure junior employees voice their opinions and thoughts about each applicant before senior employees weight in. That way, junior members are less likely to be swayed and more likely to express their feelings honestly.
3. Give everyone a chance to discuss their impressions of the candidate. Have each member of your team share 1) the feature of the candidate that impressed them the most, 2) any additional questions that came to mind as the interview progressed, and 3) any concerns or red flags raised by a candidate’s answers. Encourage honesty, and make sure the first and last candidates in the sequence don’t receive a disproportionate degree of attention and scrutiny, as sometimes happens.
4. Have your team score each candidate numerically across a short range of metrics, like 1) personability, 2) trainability, 3) experience with the position at hand, 4) passion for the field, etc. Keep the list short and limited to talking points; Too many metrics can create clutter and reduce the value of the process.
5. Have each participant choose their top three candidates and rank them in order. That way, participants will be forced to compare their options and make a clear decision.
6. Keep the post-review meeting cost-effective by staying on task and in motion. Remember that if you gather five people in a room for a two hour meeting, that’s ten work hours expended on the process. Make sure the value you gain from the meeting matches the investment you put in.
7. After you’ve narrowed down a short list of candidates that you intend to call in for second round interviews, keep the entire team in the loop. Let them know how the results unfold, even if they won’t be asked to participate in any further interviews.

Searching for ways to maximize your workforce?
Contact Expert Staffing. Our team of human capital experts will help you leverage one of your most important assets to drive productivity and reduce costs.

So what can you do to keep your top performers on your team? And how can you keep them motivated and engaged so they continue dedicating their powerful skills to the success of your enterprise? Here are few general guidelines.

Know Who They Are

First things first. You can’t target your retention efforts at your top performers unless you know who they are. Employees who perform within the top 3 to 5 percent of your workforce across all relevant metrics are invaluable. So are employees who perform at average levels across some metrics but who offer one or two rare talents that contribute in an outsized way to your bottom line. Examples of this often occur in sales; some otherwise-average workers possess selling abilities that approach the supernatural. If you have a few of these on your team, don’t let them get away.

 Mentor Them

Guide and motivate top employees by providing them with trusted mentors. The mentor-mentee relationship brings a personal element to employee development and offers star workers a dependable source of nuanced feedback. Employees who have been assigned to mentors often experience higher levels of engagement, greater loyalty, and accelerated growth.

 Push Them Into the Deep End

Top performers need to be challenged periodically in order to test their limits, keep them striving, and prevent them from getting bored. But this means pushing them beyond the boundaries of their comfort zones, which can be unnerving for employees and managers both.

By nature, the act of pushing someone in over his or her head increases the chance that things may go wrong. But great managers take this chance when they can, and they reap the rewards when star employees gain valuable experience.

Provide them With Adequate Opportunities for Growth

Star employees need room to move their careers forward. If you have a top performer who’s ready to step into management, but there are no management positions available, find another way to increase her level of responsibility. Restructure in order to create new jobs and titles when you have to.

Providing opportunities for growth can also involve creating a fertile environment for employee ideas and new initiatives. Maintain an open door policy and keep lines of communication clear. When employees come to you with their thoughts, stay receptive. Make sure they know their ideas and solutions are being heard.

Recognize, Praise, and Compensate Them

This advice may seem obvious, but some managers often get so caught up in getting the most out of great employees that they neglect to give something back. Employees like being rewarded. Who doesn’t? If you can afford to pay your top performers at a level that reflects their contributions, by all means do so. If you can’t, that’s okay, but you’ll need to provide a counterforce to keep them from being tempted away by your competitors. To do this, make sure your relationship stays positive, warm, and respectful, and don’t underestimate the value of verbal praise. Even a simple “thank you” for a job well done can cost nothing and return big dividends.

Searching for ways to maximize your workforce?
Contact Expert Staffing. Our team of human capital experts will help you leverage one of your most important assets to drive productivity and reduce costs.

Research and advance planning will help you understand the dress requirements of a prospective employer and plan your interview wardrobe accordingly. As a general rule, it is always a good idea to dress in the same manner as your interviewer. You want your valuable first impression to be a good one; your interviewer will make an assumption about who you are in the first few moments you are together.

A few tips:

1. Get ready in advance. Lay out what you will wear the night before. Make sure everything is clean and neat.
2. Shoes say it all. Be sure that your shoes are neat and polished and appropriate for the work you will do.
3. Focus on personal hygiene. Neatly trimmed nails and a professional haircut or hairstyle can make all the difference.
4. Less is more. Don’t overdo jewelry or accessories. Avoid heavy aftershave, perfume or excessive makeup.
5. Stick to the conservative side. Most experts say that your clothing should not really be noticed. You want the focus to be on you, not what you are wearing.
6. Stay up to date. Toss out old clothes or have them altered. Look like you are at least aware of recent trends and pop culture. But be yourself, too.
7. Do not carry unnecessary items. Leave the gum, coffee or soda or media player at home, and be sure to cover tattoos. Take along a breath mint and use it just prior to the interview.

Clothing suggestions for men:

• Suit – solid color, preferably dark
• Long-sleeved shirt
• Conservative shoes with dark socks
• Minimal jewelry
• Neat, recent haircut
• Portfolio or briefcase

Clothing suggestions for women:

• Suit or skirt – generally dark
• Matching blouse
• Conservative shoes and neutral pantyhose
• Well-manicured nails
• Neat, professional hairstyle
• Minimal makeup and jewelry

Following these interview dress guidelines will help you make a great impression, and set you apart from other candidates.