The 5 Hiring Best Practices For Every Small Business

You probably don't need a reminder, but it's already the 4th quarter of 2006. The year is more than 75 percent up. So have you accomplished 75 percent of your important productivity, sales and revenue goals?

If you have, congratulations. If not, what are you doing to make this your best year ever?

Whether you still have the motivation to meet your potential this year or you've given up and are waiting until 2007 to take the necessary steps, this article contains the quickest and easiest way to improve the productivity, sales and profitability of your organization.

Stop Waiting Until All Else Fails:

I'm sure you've tried just about everything this year to increase the profitability of your company from updating technology to modifying marketing to reorganizing your systems. All in attempts to improve the motivation, teamwork and productivity of your people.

Chances are, none of these costly endeavors have been as successful as you'd like. The main reason is you still have the same ineffective people operating the new technology, servicing your clients and running your systems.

Your competitors that have become the most respected, productive and profitable businesses in your market have realized a very important fact. Productive systems do not make you profitable… productive people do.

Hopefully you'll be able to realize this before every other attempt to increase your productivity and sales has failed, drained your revenues and left you felling helpless. To meet your important goals, don't wait any longer and replace your unreliable, unmotivated, unproductive team members with TOP Performers.

The 5 Hiring Best Practices:

To grow your business and meet your important goals, you're going to need TOP Performing employees in every position. Not just someone above average that meets your expectations half or most of the time, but someone that will become five to eight times more productive than average employees. Studies have shown, that's what the TOP Performers in a position are.

To fill your team with the most productive employees, here are the five hiring best practices:

1. "Active" Recruiting Strategy Don't wait for TOP Performers to find you because they wont; unless you are already one of your market's leaders. Classified ads, general web boards and employment agencies are all "passive" recruiting strategies and will give you "passive" job seekers. To attract the best employees in your industry, you're going to need to actively recruit.

2. Legal Job Descriptions If you haven't developed job descriptions for every position in your company, you're setting yourself up for a lawsuit. No, they aren't required by law, but they are usually your second line of defense in a trial (first is a file on every employee). In hiring, they will also help you present to candidates exactly what is required to get a job in your company.

3. Productivity Standards with "Job Success Patterns" Whereas job descriptions are the basics, "Job Success Patterns" are the specifics. In these you present to candidates what is required to keep their job once hired; or your productivity standards. More specifically, what makes your current TOP Performers so successful in regards to their skills, internal motivators and natural behaviors and then making these the minimum requirements for employment.

4. Lead, Behavioral Based Interview Questions If you ask the same questions your competitors are asking, you'll get the same answers they are getting too. Mainly because most organizations ask the same 10 interview questions that your candidates have learned how to answer in books, courses and through agencies. Lead, behavioral based interview questions start with "Describe a time…," and "Give an example of…" and end with something job related.

5. Pre-Employment Culture, Team & "Job Match" Assessments Since "luck" is not one of the five hiring best practices, you need to do all you can to remove instinct and emotion from your hiring decisions. As much as you may hate to admit it, your instincts have been wrong in the past and they will be wrong in the future. Most of the fortune 500 and virtually every market leading organization (no matter the size) uses assessments because studies have shown they can increase your hiring success rate of TOP Performers by up to 500 percent.

The number one most costly issue for small business owners today is “low productivity” followed closely by “selecting employees.” This article presents the five hiring best practices used by most of the Fortune 500. By incorporating these practices into their own hiring process, small business owners will eliminate the two most costly business issues.

Grant D. Robinson is the President of People Values and the Author of the Market Leadership System. To improve your "Hiring Success Rate" of TOP Performing Employees, watch a free, 5-minute, on-line video at: http://www.peoplevalues.com

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