hiring

What to look for in hiring a recent college graduate

May 12, 2010 by admin Leave a Comment

At some point, a small to medium businesses may want to hire a recent college graduate, a person that they might be able to fast track into management. This is also a person that you can “mold” and may not have to break any previous habits that they may have acquired from working at other companies. But since the person you’re looking at may have zero or very limited work experiences, you have no track record with which to judge them. Beacause you are going to sink a good deal of time and money into their training, you want to make a wise choice. What do you look for?

One thing some employers look at but for the wrong reasons is grade point average. They use GPA as a way to evaluate intelligence, but grades actually are not a very good indicator of intelligence according to a University of Dayton Survey. What GPA is an excellent indicator of is motivation. People that have high GPA are extremely motivated according to the same University of Dayton survey, so if you are looking for a “can do” type of person, this is a good place to start.

Another thing to look at is involvement in and leadership in groups or teams. Is this person multidimensional and have a wide variety of interests? If this person is eventually going to help lead your businesses, they will have to relate to peers and subordinates. A person with limited people skills might be an excellent employee in the right circumstances, but will make a very poor leader. People involved in groups probably know how to communicate and get things done.

Is the person willing to “pay their dues?” One of the biggest mistakes any organization can make is to put someone with limited work experience in authority over seasoned professionals. At best this can cause resentment, and at its very worst it can cause excellent employees to look for employment elsewhere. When this situation happens in a large group, it is disastrous for your business. Look for a person who is willing to learn your business from the bottom up. If this person is to be “fast tracked,” it should not be well known by front line workers.

Following these tips should help your business in hiring a recent college graduate be a great success!

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Why you should treat “the Temp” well or the $14, 465.63 postage stamp

March 29, 2010 by admin Leave a Comment

To borrow from an old TV show, the story you are about to read is true; the names were changed to protect the innocent (and guilty). As you hire people as your business progresses from small to medium, some times you make hiring mistakes. One of these can be the person who brings all their personnel baggage with them to work. Let me say, from the bottom of my heart, you can’t get rid of these people fast enough! They bother co-workers, whine at supervisors, bully subordinates, and treat temps or contractors with distain which leads us to the story of the “14,465.63 postage stamp.”

Many years ago (over 20) I worked (as a contractor) for a company we will call “Ramshead.” Ramshead had let its receivables run amuck for a while and when they were audited, the HQ gave them a marching order of “clean this up!” Ramshead contracted with a major accounting temporary firm to have 4 A/R specialists come out help them: Big D (me), Billy Bob, Steve, and Jill. We were escorted to a back office to tables (no desks), set up with phones and an aged trial balance, and told to collect all the past dues. We were in the same office as Tracy T (nicknamed tsetse fly-by the company’s founder-Mr. Jones)-the “A/P girl” whose goal seemed to be making everyone else’s life miserable by taking/ making many personal calls from the office and by bothering co-workers, whining at her boss, she had no subordinates, but she did treat the temps with obvious contempt.

Over the course of the 6 month project Jill was married and moved out west, and Steve became a cost accountant in Louisville, so for the last couple of months, it was just Billy Bob and I. Billy Bob had a great deal of experience with the auto industry and some good contacts. Billy Bob had taken on a special project to get about 15K of hopelessly messed up invoices paid. This was something that Ramshead personnel had little knowledge, but Billy Bob had succeeded in getting “buy off” to pay from a big 3 automaker. Our last day there, Billy Bob and I went to lunch and we when returned (and were going to pack up and leave early) there was Tracy T (TseTse) with a sour look on her face. “I understand that Anna in the mail room is letting you send in your time cards through the company postage meter,” she said flatly. We answered “yes,” she extended that courtesy to us. Tracy then proceeded to state that she was “revoking that courtesy,” and stomped off to “speak with Anna,” adding that if we were going to run our time cards through the postage meter, to “either leave 22cents, or go buy a stamp.”

Billy Bob and I stood there in stunned silence, but then Billy Bob spoke. “I had one thing left to do before we left here, mail the packet of big 3 invoices (there were about 20), but I am not going to do it now.” Instead Billy Bob flipped on the company’s paper shredder and proceeded with great delight to feed each corrected invoice into it. We then walked out the door; shook hands, and drove off. I never saw Billy Bob again; he had spoken of moving back to Atlanta.

About a month later, I received a call from the agency asking me if I had seen or heard from Billy Bob. I replied no, and related that he had spoken of moving back down south somewhere. I inquired why. Well, Ramshead was under the impression that they were going to get a large payment from an automaker and it never showed up. Snickering in my coffee, I said, “well, you will have to talk to Billy Bob, he was working it.”

The high maintenance employee had cost the company fifteen thousand dollars! I later heard from one of the sales people at Ramshead that it was rumored that Mr. Jones the company founder suggested to human resources that they find a reason to “swat the tsetse fly” and that she was finally terminated.

I know the in vogue thing in HR theory is to constantly rotate your bottom 20% employee, but for me if you have a high maintenance employee, get them on the express train out of your business, or your company too might buy a $14,463.65 postage stamp!

SMBs are Hiring

March 7, 2010 by Sarah Leave a Comment

New data suggests the smallest businesses in the country are beginning to add new jobs and some experts say that’s a great sign for bigger companies. This info comes despite a March 5th report from the Labor Department that suggests the United States is still losing jobs.

Intuit released some information on March 1st that suggests companies with less than 20 employees have been adding new jobs since June 2009. That’s based on the 50,000 customers using their online payroll service. Also, after two years of decline, the average paycheck amount for someone working for a company of less than 100 employees is beginning to stabilize over the last three months, and in some cases, is increasing. This includes data from salary, hourly, and contract workers. That information came out on March 3rd from a company called SurePayroll.

The numbers look like this: since June, employment at small businesses as been growing at 1.1% annual rate. With that information, Intuit suggests 150,000 jobs have been created by companies with fewer than 20 employees since June. That includes 40,000 last month alone. Granted that’s a long way from re-employing the 8.4 million who have lost jobs since December 2007, but it’s still a start and it’s left some people pretty hopeful.

Brian Headd, an economist at the Small Business Administration says this is a potentially good sign. He says that in 2002, recovery began when small businesses began hiring before larger companies did and in some cases when larger companies were still losing jobs. According to census data from 2006, companies of 20 or less employees make up 89% of all businesses and 18% of the private workforce.

Meanwhile, Congress is working on a number of different bills in an effort to put people back to work and one way they’re trying to do that is tax incentives. Last week, the House passed a bill that gives employers who hire people who have been out of work for two months a year free from paying the Social Security payroll tax. John Bishop of Cornell University has proposed a hiring tax credit that he says could will encourage about two million jobs in the next year. But a lot small businesses don’t wait on the government to pass bills before they hire and don’t sit around, waiting for incentives.

For example, Michael McKean, the CEO of the Knowland Group in McLean, VA told Business Week he has already hired ten people this year and hopes to hire about six more. The company makes sales, marketing, and lead generation products to help hotels attract conferences and events. He says he believes the industry is due to pick up soon and knows he can increase his credit line

Official data from the Labor Department about hiring won’t be available for several months, but if history is any indication, this data is good news. Companies with less than 500 employees have made up 64% of new jobs created between 1993 and 2008 and it looks like that trend will continue.