Hiring Techniques
More than Hide and Seek
The experience can be somewhat
discouraging. You are driving to see one of your accounts, and
because you are in a hurry you decide to stop at one of the local
fast food places for lunch. As you pull in their driveway you
see the "now hiring" sign that we are all accustomed
to seeing in front of nearly every business.
But today you notice
an additional sign; one that indicates they are offering a "$300
signing bonus". As you ask the manager about the new sign,
he explains the bonus is paid when the employee completes the
first ninety days of work. He tells you he has picked up a couple
of new employees since first using the sign.
However, when you
order your lunch and pay for it, you observe how the fast food
staff struggles to complete the order and make the change for
you. Obviously, the idea of a signing bonus may not be the best
solution for finding quality employees. Where are the good employees
hiding?
Surely your goal is to create
a team of employees, both front counter and production end of the
shop, to make your business profitable. Achieving your goal will
also allow you a level of comfort in knowing how your business will
function when you are out of the building.
One common misconception
occurs when you begin the hiring process, and you are expecting
to "upgrade" the
quality of your staff. The printer that decides, "I am going
to build a great team, and it will begin with this new employee" will
find that the current team will bring the new hire down to their
level quicker than you can hire more people to surround this new
employee.
To prevent this problem from
occurring in your print shop, you should be having regularly scheduled
staff meetings. Unless you have staff that work both the front counter
and production end of the business you may want to have separate meetings
for the different sections of your staff.
From personal experience,
meetings that work best are those that are held after the shop
closes, one hour in length, bi- weekly, and covering topics such
as new papers, inks, and ways of better using the equipment you
now have. You may even want to occasionally invite one of the
sales representatives that call on your shop to be a guest speaker.
The ongoing educational program
is crucial to your demonstrating to any new hire that you have a
commitment to improving the quality of your staff. From that point
we can continue with our efforts to improve your hiring. Let's begin
with the ad that you might place in a newspaper. If you begin your
ad with information about what the person is going to be doing in
your business, you will be eliminating a lot of the questionable
applications before they even cross your doorway or call on the phone.
With the individuals
who do visit your shop, you can again clear a lot of the unqualified
applicants by first having them read the job description for the
position they are applying. Your job description does not need
to be a two or three page document, but can easily be a half dozen
bullet points which in one sentence each, explain the various
tasks. One point may be to greet customers by way of telephone
or walk in. At this point in the job description you do not need
to go into the explanation of how to greet customers or answer the
phone; this is material that can be detailed in your class and in
a policy and procedure manual.
A second point of the job description
may be to discuss with the customer what they are looking to get
from the job they are asking your shop to do. This again will require
further explanation, but what we are wanting to do is make sure
the front counter person talks with the customer about what they
are doing. If the counter person asks questions, experience has
shown that the interaction with the customer provides you with additional
information so that you are creating what the customer wants, as
compared to being what they have asked for.
This interaction has
also shown to increase sales, as a trained counter person can ask
if the customer has sized up the job correctly. After all, how many
times have you had a customer walk in to pick up a print job and
upon looking at the material say, "This is not what I wanted?"
And the return statement
of, "But that is what you asked for", does little to
earn a long term customer for you.
Your other job description
points may include handling of the cash or invoices, and for some
shops may even include the applicant having the skills to operate
certain pieces of equipment.
In giving the job description
to the applicant first, you are demonstrating several things. The
first is that your shop has a structured way of doing things.
Secondly, you have expectations of the applicant which can be
stated in writing. And lastly, you are working to eliminate an
unnecessary waste of the applicants time, and your time, by providing
extra detail of what you are looking for.
After the applicant
has reviewed this form, have them sign it to indicate they understand
the job and accept the responsibilities that go with it. Then,
have them complete the application form. Hopefully, in an effort
to give a better impression of your shop, you are using an application
which you have printed in your shop as compared to one which you
have purchased.
Of course, applications should
have room for individuals to provide you with detailed information
about their past work experiences, as well as allowing you to ask
some in-depth questions. Questions such as, "Why do you want to work for our business?", "What
skills do you bring that we may utilize to better serve our customers?",
or "What would your last employer want to tell us about you?" allow
you to get a strong impression of the type of individual you are
about to interview.
These questions can work much
better than those standard forms which ask about outside activities,
and military service. Of course, as you go about creating your own
application you will want to check it out with your attorney, or
at least make sure you have seen the same question on one of the "standard
forms".
With regard to the interview,
this is the occasion when many of the best intentions go awry. One
of the reasons for this problem is that in most cases it is the
owner of the business who is doing the interviewing. And if your
business has grown during the past 10 years, when the occasion has
arisen that you need additional counter help, you have probably
just diminished the amount of time you are personally spending making
outside calls.
What happens is that the owner
of the business gets overly anxious to get back to making outside
calls and "paints" a slightly exaggerated picture of the business. At the same time,
the applicant may have a tendency to take everything you say with
a grain of salt when they are told you are the owner.
What can
work better for you is to allow two of your best employees to
conduct the interview. It may be two from the front counter, or
one from the front and one from the production end. Whatever the
combination, the interview gains several advantages for you.
The first is the picture your
employees paint of your business is more believable by the applicant.
The second, is the applicant is more apt to provide truthful answers
as compared their telling you what you want to hear. The third,
and most important advantage occurs because you are utilizing two
of your best employees. And that is, they will work harder to hire
someone who is more like them.
They want to work with someone
they enjoy being around, and by their conducting the interview they
are most apt to find that individual. There is also a residual effect
in that your current employees will want to show you they are
capable of doing the task you asked them to do.
And with that, they
will work harder to make sure the new employee fits into your
business. Finding a new employee that you will be glad you hired
takes more than just a better application, or learning to ask better
questions. It requires everything from working with your current
employees, to the newspaper ad, job application, and the interview
process. And by utilizing each of these, hiring the next employee
will not be a game of hide and seek.
