Who is Robert Watson and how can he help your business?

If you have not yet taken advantage of the excellent information shared with you for free by Robert Watson – now is the time.

Robert is a highly experienced management consultant and executive coach who has literally travelled the world examining the management systems of some of the most successful companies in the world.

Robert has the knack of taking high level business best practice and turning it into practical, simple systems and actions that businesses can apply everyday for better results.

Knowing that Robert has helped many businesses achieve tremendous business improvements by focussing on the quality of the people they bring into the business, HRwisdom has managed to get Robert to share some of his business secrets in the area of recruitment & selection.

These special insights are available to you now for free as our way of saying thank you for being part of the HRwisdom community.

Robert Watson – First Free Resource

To begin, every business can benefit from having well-prepared questions to learn more about your job candidates. We asked Robert to come up with his Top 10 Interview Questions to help you find the right person for the right role. Not only will you get the well thought-out questions, you’ll also get the exact type of answer you would expect from the type of person you want contributing to your organisation. Click here for Robert’s Top 10 Interview Questions.

Robert Watson – Second Free Resource

Most businesses spend thousands of dollars every year on print and online advertisements to find job candidates. In this special online video presentation, Robert walks you through the Four Mistakes In Job Ads. This one presentation has the potential to save your business thousands of dollars and vastly improve the quality of candidates you bring into your selection process. Side Note: When a major Australian business site recently published the link to Robert’s video it actually crashed the video server due to the sheer demand. So, do make sure you see the presentation while it is still online. Click here for Four Mistakes In Job Ads.

Robert Watson – Third Free Resource

At HRwisdom we have over a thousand different businesses, large and small, in our community. One of the most popular topics has been how to manage Gen Y employees. We asked Robert for some comments and simple tips that could be applied at any type of business, large or small. This short article gives you some excellent ideas to use when managing Gen Y staff.

As mentioned earlier, Robert has the knack of taking high level business best practice and turning it into practical, simple systems and actions that businesses can apply every day for better results.

Robert works as a freelance management consultant and executive coach. If you’d like to contact Robert, you can reach him on his private email address at: rgw2005@optusnet.com.au

Kind regards,

HRwisdom Support

Here are a few quick questions to ask yourself as a business manager or an HR professional:

• In your professional career so far, how many job ads have you run in newspapers and/or online?
• On average, how much does each sort of job advertisement cost?
• Over your whole career, how much have you spent on job ads?
• What’s been your return on investment for all those job ads?
• Have your ads ever attracted poor quality candidates or even none at all?

If you’re like most business managers and HR professionals (yes, even us here at HRwisdom), at some point you’ll have run at least one job ad that generated zero interest from job candidates.
 
Chances are you’ll probably also have paid for at least one job ad that only attracted dud candidates for your vacancy.

Avoid The Four Big Mistakes When Writing Job ads

In today’s HRwisdom blog post, we’ll help you avoid making the four big mistakes in writing job ads.

We’ll do this by sharing with you a simple model used by professional consumer products advertisers to sell their products and services all over the world.

What is the model and how can it help you attract and hire better quality employees?

You may have heard of the advertising model known as the AIDA model:

A = Attention
I = Interest
D = Desire
A = Action

An acronym based on a few short words may sound silly but with the economy improving and the return of the global skills shortage starting to loom on the economic horizon, it makes good sense to follow the model to dramatically increase your recruitment hit rate – not to mention your return on investment.

Learn From Real Life Recruitment Examples

To explain exactly how to use apply the AIDA model in your recruitment process, we’re going to walk you through some real life examples via a special online video presentation right here on the website.

Not only will the video explain the four big mistakes made when writing job ads but you’ll also get to see examples of ads that work well and those that don’t work so well. You’ll see examples of photographic ads, text ads, and even a two-line job ad.

HR Video Presentation

To get started, just click on the following link to watch the video presentation.

Click here: Writing Job Advertisements

As always, we’re keen to hear your thoughts – just leave a comment below here.

Remember to visit the HRwisdom home page to access more great free resources to help you find, keep, and manage your employees.

Kind regards,

HRwisdom Support

ps. Don’t forget to share you thoughts and ideas below…

The recent debacle at Toyota which has seen the company lose a reported $155 million per week has been widely reported. With continuing product recalls around the world, the losses are estimated to have caused an astonishing $30 billion loss in Toyota’s valuation on the stock market.

At HRwisdom we always focus on ideas and practices that can actively improve or protect a business. Today, we refer you to an excellent analysis of how poor HR policies and staff management practices potentially led to the $30 billion loss at Toyota.

The Eight Bad Staff Management Practices

In his excellent analysis, John Sullivan lists the eight bad staff management practices that contributed to Toyota’s massive downfall.

1. Rewards and recognition — The purpose of any corporate reward process is to encourage and incentivise the right behaviors and to discourage the negative ones. It’s important for the reward process to incentivise the gathering of information about problems. It’s equally important to reward employees who are successful in getting executives to take immediate action on negative information. Key questions — Were rapid growth (sales have nearly doubled recently) and “lean” cost-cutting recognized and rewarded so heavily that no one was willing to put the brakes on growth in order to focus on safety? Were the rewards for demonstrating error-free results so high that obvious errors were swept under the table?
2. Training — The purpose of training is to make sure that employees have the right skills and capabilities to identify and handle all situations they may encounter. Toyota is famous for its four-step cycle — plan/do/check/act — but clearly the training among managers now needs to focus more on the last two. In addition, in an environment where safety is paramount, everyone should have been trained on the symptoms of “groupthink” and how to avoid the excess discounting or ignoring of negative external safety information. Key question — If Toyota’s training was more effective, would the managers involved have been more successful in convincing executives to act on the negative information received?
3. Hiring — The purpose of great hiring is to bring on board top-performing individuals with the high level of skills and capabilities that are required to handle the most complex problems. Poorly designed recruiting and assessment elements can result in the hiring of individuals who sweep problems under the rug and who are not willing to stand up to management. Key questions — Did Toyota have a poorly designed hiring process that allowed it to hire individuals who were not experienced in the required constructive confrontation technique? Were their hires poor learners that did not change as a result of company training?
4. The performance management process — The purpose of a performance management process is to periodically monitor or appraise performance, in order to identify problem behaviors before they get out of hand. If the performance measurement system included performance factors to measure responsiveness to negative information, Toyota wouldn’t be in turmoil today. Key questions — Was the performance appraisal and performance monitoring process so poorly designed that they did not identify and report groupthink type errors? Did Toyota’s famous high level of trust of its employees go too far without reasonable metrics, checks, and balances? Did HR develop sophisticated metrics that produced alerts to warn senior managers before minor problems got out of control?
5. The corporate culture — The role of a corporate culture is to informally drive employee behaviors so that it closely adheres to the company’s core values. Because these errors occurred under difficult driving conditions, it’s hard to blame the production group, which has a well-known reputation for Six Sigma quality in its construction. The negative reports came to functions like government, risk analysis, corporate and customer satisfaction. As a result, it is the culture within the corporate offices that need to be more closely monitored rather than assuming that the culture was aligned. It appears that the corporate culture created leaders so concerned with “saving face” and so adverse to negative publicity, that they for years postponed making the announcement of a massive recall. Key questions — Did HR’s failure to measure or monitor the corporate culture contribute to its misalignment? Was the corporate culture (the Toyota Way) so biased toward positive information that employees learned not to make waves, in spite of their professional responsibility to be heard on safety issues?
6. Leadership development and succession planning — The purpose of leadership development and succession planning processes are to ensure that a sufficient number of leaders with the right skills and decision-making ability are placed into key leadership positions. It is likely that the leadership development and the promotion process both failed to create and promote leaders who were capable of confronting problems and making difficult decisions. Key question — Was the leadership process at Toyota so outdated that it produced the wrong kind of leaders with outdated competencies, who could not successfully operate in the rapidly changing automotive industry?
7. Employee Retention — The purpose of a retention program is to identify and keep top performers and individuals with mission-critical skills. Key question — Did the retention program ignore people that brought up problems and as a result, did these whistleblowers often leave out of frustration?
8. Risk assessment — Most HR departments don’t even have a risk assessment team whose purpose is to both identify and calculate risks caused by weak employee processes. Clearly HR should have worked with corporate risk management at Toyota in order to ensure that employees were capable of calculating the long-term actual costs of ignoring product failure information. Key question — Should HR work with risk-assessment experts and build the capability of identifying and quantifying the revenue impacts of major HR errors, including a high hiring failure rate, a high turnover rate among top performers, and the cost of keeping a bad manager or employee?

Final Thoughts from John Sullivan

Toyota’s problems are not the result of a single individual making an isolated mistake, but rather due to a companywide series of mistakes that are all related to each other. So many corporate functions were involved, including customer service, government relations, vendor management and PR, that one cannot help but attribute the crash of Toyota to systemic management failure. Unfortunately, in this case, the famous Japanese saying is true. “The nail that stands out” was not encouraged to be different, but instead it was “pounded down” to conform.

The key lesson that others should learn from Toyota’s mistakes is that HR needs to periodically test or audit each of the processes that could allow this type of billion-dollar error to occur.

For more staff management advice and HR ideas you can join our mailing list or get your HR templates and Employee Retention information now.

Kind regards,

HRwisdom Support

At HRwisdom, we regularly recommend to our free subscribers that they actively plan ahead to improve employee retention and today’s blog post is some further food for thought. By actively planning ahead you’ll not only decrease staff turnover, you also:

• Recruit better quality people who actually do what they say they will do.
• Expand your pipeline of good employee candidates.
• Improve employee morale.
• Boost management confidence.
• Increase in business efficiency and profitability.
• Raise your reputation in the marketplace.

So today we draw your attention to some interesting thoughts from Kevin Wheeler’s online comments (part 3) where he discusses the need to expand the labor pool.

Remember, for instantly downloadable employee retention support, click on the following toolkit code: retention employee.

Kevin Wheeler: We Need to Expand the Labor Pool

Many available people are older or retired and have skills that have become obsolete or are not needed right now. However, these people could be retrained for some of the open positions if we took a different attitude. Unfortunately most of us, or most of our employers anyway, would rather spend money on search fees, agency fees, administrative overhead, and advertising rather than on intensively training people with decent basic skills. Granted, we cannot train people for every job because many of them do require experience, or time in the saddle, as they say, in order to be successful. However, I think we could significantly lessen the labor shortage if we were willing to be a bit wider in our job expectations and definitions.

This is why I constantly argue for integrated staffing and development because I believe their functions are inextricably intertwined. It is very difficult to do one without doing the other. If we are to look at recruiting as a process, we are going to have to incorporate development into our staffing thinking and staffing into our training thinking.

Access Code: Retention Employee

Whether this is done through merging departments or whether it is done simply through good collaboration doesn’t really matter. What is critical is that there is a dialogue between the two functions. If you work in a small company where there are no separate training and recruiting functions, then this becomes even easier for you to do.

You need to always think whether an open position is better trained for or hired for. Is it a job that would be impossible to train someone for in a reasonable period of time, or is it a job that someone could be trained to do fairly quickly?

When management and recruiters both develop a broader understanding of the issues and step up to the fact that in many cases skilled people are just not available at a reasonable cost, then developing people becomes sensible and cost effective.

There are no labor shortages or surpluses — there are just shortages of imagination and an unwillingness to accept responsibility for filling our own needs.

- Kevin Wheeler -

Toolkit Code: Retention Employee

As always, HRwisdom has world class support instantly available to you to help you retain employees. To retain good employees, click on the following access code: retention employee.

Kind regards,

HRwisdom Support

As a follow-up to our recent HRwisdom blog post (Compliance Changes Required For Fair Work Act) we wanted to remind all HRwisdom members that we have been busy updating the HRwisdom Library documents to comply with the new Fair Work employment laws, particularly those that took effect from 1 July 2009. During this process, we have also taken the opportunity to fine tune many of the documents to improve their look, feel and content.

Please also note another recent HRwisdom blog posting (HR Links and HR Web Sites) we shared a useful list of HR links for HR web sites and sites for human resources staff and employers in general.

Below are some more details on the recently updated employment templates, employment letters, HR policies, HR forms, and other such human resources documents.
 
HR POLICIES
 
Anti-Discrimination & EEO Policy
This Policy has been updated to: fine tune the document; comply with the Fair Work Act; and include additional references to associated documents.
 
EEO for Women in the Workplace Policy
This document has been updated to: clarify purpose, commencement and application of the policy; include additional references to associated documents; and revise the commentary to ensure consistency with suggestions made by the Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency (EOWA).
 
Emergency Evacuation Policy
The Emergency Evacuation Policy has had a format change for enhanced user-friendliness and the commentary has been revised.
 
Employee Input Policy
The Employee Input Policy has been updated: to note it’s not to be used for EEO or harassment complaints; to refine its wording; and to add reference to associated documents.
 
First Aid Policy
The commentary to the First Aid Policy now includes references to associated documents, and the Policy has been updated to clarify that it does not form part of the employee’s contract of employment.
 
Induction Policy
This document and its commentary have been updated to: clarify the commencement date and application of the Policy; revise content with respect to mentoring of new employees; comply with the Fair Work Act; and include additional references to associated documents.
 
No-Smoking Policy
The layout of the No-Smoking Policy and commentary has been updated and is now a clearer and more useful tool in assisting employers to implement a no-smoking policy in their workplace. The Policy has also been updated to comply with the Fair Work Act and now includes additional references to associated documents.
 
Performance and Misconduct Policy
The Performance and Misconduct Policy and commentary have been updated to comprehensively explain the concept of the management of performance and conduct. The updated Policy takes into account the introduction of the Small Business Fair Dismissal Code, and any applicable exclusions under the Fair Work Act.
 
Probation Employment Policy
The Probationary Employment Policy has been updated to revise the commentary, contents and terminology for consistency with the Fair Work Act; and to include references to associated documents.
 
Timesheet Policy
This document has been updated to: include additional references to associated documents; revise the commentary, in particular to ensure that the record-keeping requirements are explained in a way that is consistent with the provisions contained under the Fair Work Regulations 2009 (Cth); amend the content of the Policy to make clear its objective; and amend the format of the policy to include user-friendly headings and provisions relating to its commencement and application.
 
EMPLOYMENT AGREEMENTS
 
Deed of Release
This document will help you to create a simple Deed of Release, whereby a payment of money is made to an employee to conclude the employment relationship, in exchange for the employee agreeing to settle or not to bring a claim, against the business.
 
CORRESPONDENCE
 
Letter — Advising of Future Redundancies
This document has been updated to: include additional references to associated documents; revise the commentary, in particular with respect to the meaning of genuine redundancy under the Fair Work Act; and to reflect considerations of redeployment prior to an employer’s definite decision to terminate employment due to redundancy.
 
Letter Enclosing Deed of Release 
This document and its commentary have been updated to comply with the Fair Work Act and include references to associated documents.
 
Letter to Employee Regarding Voluntary Redundancy
This document has been updated to: include additional references to associated documents; revise the commentary, in particular with respect to the meaning of genuine redundancy under the Fair Work Act; and revise terminology.
 
Letter to Employee — Termination Due to Redundancy
This document has been updated to: include additional references to associated documents; revise the commentary, in particular with respect to the meaning of genuine redundancy under the Fair Work Act; and revise content to reflect considerations of redeployment prior to definite decision to terminate employment due to redundancy.
 
Notice of Meeting
This correspondence document has been updated as follows: to clarify that if the employee chooses to bring a support person (such as a union representative) into the meeting, the support person may not answer on the employee’s behalf or disrupt the meeting; amendment of the correspondence to cater for national and non-national system employers; revision of the commentary; and inclusion of references to associated documents.
 
Probation Terminated Letter
This document has had the following updates: changes to the content in line with the Fair Work Act; removal and addition of checklist content; revision of the commentary; and inclusion of references to associated documents.
 
Redundancy Letter to Centrelink
This letter and its commentary have been updated to comply with new redundancy notification requirements which apply to national and non-national systems employers under the Fair Work Act.
 
Redundancy Letter to Union
This document has been updated to: include additional references to associated documents and revise the content and commentary in accordance with the Fair Work Act, for example, with respect to the meaning of a genuine redundancy.
Summary Dismissal Letter
This document and its commentary have been updated to comply with the Fair Work Act and include additional references to associated documents.
 
Warning Letter
This letter has been updated to refine the wording and include references to associated documents.
 
CHECKLISTS
 
Performance Management Checklist
This document has been updated to: include additional references to associated documents; revise the commentary; and revise the steps in conducting the interview and the ongoing processes.
 
Property Return Checklist
This document and its commentary have been updated to provide a more streamlined checklist for the return of employer property upon the termination of an employee’s employment. The document has also been updated to comply with the Fair Work Act and include additional references to associated documents.
 
Redundancy Checklist
This document has been updated to: include additional references to associated documents; revise the commentary, in particular with respect to the meaning of genuine redundancy under the Fair Work Act; re-categorise and re-format the Checklist under convenient sub-headings so that the checklist reflects the sequence of tasks to be completed in the process of redundancy; revise the content to ensure employer considers options of redeployment prior to making the decision to terminate employee(s) due to redundancy; revise the content to include consideration of objective selection criteria when choosing which employee will be terminated as a result of a redundancy; and amend the Checklist to remind user to comply with consultation in accordance with any applicable award, contract or workplace policy.
 
Resignation Checklist
This document and its commentary have been updated to: include additional matters that may be attended to by an employer on the resignation by an employee; comply with the Fair Work Act; and include additional references to associated documents.
 
Termination Checklist
This document has had the following updates: format and style change; changes to the content in line with the Fair Work Act; removal and addition of Checklist content; revision of the commentary; and inclusion of references to associated documents.
 
We will keep you updated as we add more documents and resources to the HRwisdom Library.

Kind regards,

HRwisdom Support

At HRwisdom, we are always striving to keep our members up to date and informed of both legislative changes and clever ways to manage their staff.

We have compiled a useful list of HR links for HR web sites and sites for human resources staff and employers in general.

Amongst others, we have included such HR web sites as:

• ACT Human Rights Commission
• Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS)
• Australian Fair Pay Commission
• Australian Human Rights Commission (formerly known as HREOC)
• Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations
• Department of Immigration and Citizenship
• Fair Work Ombudsman
• Fair Work Online
• Northern Territory Anti-Discrimination Commission
• NSW Industrial Relations Commission
• NSW WorkCover Authority
• Queensland Anti-Discrimination Commission
• Queensland Department of Employment and Industrial Relations
• Queensland WorkCover Authority
• Safe Work Australia
• South Australian Equal Opportunity Commission
• South Australian Industrial Relations Tribunals
• South Australian WorkCover Authority
• Tasmanian Industrial Commission
• Tasmanian Office of the Anti-Discrimination Commissioner
• Tasmanian WorkCover Authority
• Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission
• Victorian Industrial Relations
• Victorian WorkSafe Authority
• Western Australian Equal Opportunity Commission
• Western Australian Industrial Relations Commission
• Western Australian WorkCover Authority

You can find the HR web sites at: HR Web Sites.

Kind regards,

HRwisdom Support

How to predict future performance of job candidates.

If you read some of HRwisdom member HR horror stories, you probably laughed and squirmed at the same time.

This takes us to the questions of how to prevent such horror stories and how to predict future performance of job candidates?

In today’s HRwisdom blog post, we share with you a new online tool that uses 17 assessment questions to reveal the following about a person:

• Greatest interests, preferences and motivations
• Counter-productive behavioural tendencies
• Best career options
• Suitability (%) for any specified job/vacancy
• How most effectively to improve their performance
• How well they will perform in a team
• Management and leadership potential
• Degree of compatibility with an employer’s values, culture, working environment, management personnel, and team dynamics
• Overall honesty, consistency and reliability of their responses to the questions

The job candidate assessment tool has an impressive 95% accuracy in predicting performance, based on extensive validation studies over 30 years in 18 different languages and 20 countries.

The online candidate assessment system uses a unique ranking system which, in just 30 minutes, identifies nearly 200 factors incorporating personality attributes, interpersonal preferences, values, task preferences, interests, work environment preferences, and motivations.

But it’s not just about the person.  People simply ‘are what they are’ until you put them in a situation and place expectations on them.  Then it’s about performance in a role.

Comparing a person’s resulting recruitment assessment profile with a databank of over 600 career options is like allowing a person to test-drive 600 careers in 30 minutes. Obviously that has great potential for employee development but that’s for another discussion.

Comparing a person’s assessment profile with the validated success criteria of the job they are in – or the vacancy they are being considered for – is like benchmarking them against thousands of people who have already proven to be successful in that job, and immediately knowing how closely this person resembles the successful people in the characteristics that matter most. This is then expressed as a percentage match.

The recruitment assessment tool provides 15 different reports are available online in printable pdf immediately on completion of the assessment.

The candidate assessment tool is administered and delivered online with no software to purchase, install or maintain and no paperwork to juggle.

Thankfully, there are no expert interpretation skills required either. The comprehensive graphical and narrative reports assist you with:

• Recruitment Methods
• Employee Selection
• Executive Coaching
• Selection Leadership Development
• Performance Management Management Development
• Employee Retention Conflict Resolution
• Employee Development Succession Planning
• Culture Change Outplacement
• Team Building Career Guidance

Examples of some of the available reports are provided below:

• Group Screening – Traits and Definitions
• Interview Guide
• How to Attract this Applicant
• How to Manage, Develop and Retain
• Career Options Development for Position
• Career Development Development by Trait
• Career Comparison Team
• Job Suitability and Success Analysis Team Main Graph

Used in combination, these reports help you make good hiring decisions and determine future performance.

Hopefully, with this candidate screening tool, you’ll be able to avoid your share of HR horror stories.

Kind regards,

HRwisdom Support

HRwisdom is pleased to announce the release of the HRwisdom Employee Retention Kit which helps employers make their way through the process of recruiting and keeping good employees.

HRwisdom has commissioned this special employee retention program from an international-recognised employee management expert, Les McKeown.

Specifically, HRwisdom asked Les for a complete system which would help people who want to:

• Recruit better quality people who actually do what they say they will do.
• Expand your pipeline of good employee candidates.
• Improve employee morale.
• Boost management confidence.
• Increase in business efficiency and profitability.
• Raise your reputation in the marketplace.

Les has done this and together we have created a powerful program to help you achieve the goals listed above.

What you’ll get and discover along the way

• Build the most appropriate employee attraction and retention system for your business.
• Learn how to sell your plan internally and get managers, peers and employees to buy-in.
• How to become an Employer of Choice and differentiate your organisation from competing employers.
• Learn why what you say and do before you hire is as important as what you say and do after you hire.
• How to manage and retain Baby Boomers, Generation X’ers, and Generation Y’ers.
• Learn about the best financial and non-financial rewards.
• Discover what a pay and remuneration plan must achieve and how to do it.
• Discover how to best utilise work-life-balance to attract and keep good staff.
• How to manage under-performers to improve employee retention.
• How to manage staff in the new industrial relations environment.
• How to design and implement the right mentoring and coaching programs.
• How to manage departing employees to improve employee retention.

Discover the special strategies and techniques for better employee retention

The HRwisdom Employee Retention Kit is about equipping you with all the special strategies, techniques, and solutions as an effective business owner/manager to solve tough employee-related challenges.

Throughout the guide you’ll be exposed to advanced people-management tools and concepts that will open your eyes to new opportunities and new ways that the external Human Resource consultants use to dramatically improve the performance and profitability of their clients.

We’ll provide you with an all you can eat information buffet in the form of downloadable materials, audio files and videos that highlight the latest workforce-management strategies and tools applied to real situations.

What’s included in the Employee Retention Kit?

HRwisdom Employee Attraction & Retention Manual

You will receive a comprehensive 246 page digital manual filled with great information on how to find, keep, and manage your workforce. Written by an international expert who has helped companies find and keep staff all over the world and who has been specially-commissioned to produce information for Australia’s unique situation, this comprehensive manual alone is worthy of being a program in its own right as you will now have a blueprint for success ready to apply to your business.

HRwisdom Employee Attraction & Retention Workbook

You will receive a comprehensive and user-friendly 41 page digital employee retention workbook to help you bring the learnings of the manual to life. This step by step workbook will guide you right through to create and implement your own specific employee attraction and retention strategy.

HRwisdom Retention Planner

An excellent, practical tool, the HRwisdom staff retention planner will help you and your organisation plan at the indvidual level so you can keep the right people in the organisation. This handy digital tool will assist you in helping your managers see clearly where their employee retention risks are, and what to do about it. The planner comes in Microsoft Excel format and is accompanied by a comprehensive set of explanatory notes which are written (as always) in normal, jargon-free language.

Golf Swing Module

One of the core analogies used in the main digital workbook is the ’seamlessness’ of effective retention – nothing should feel forced or imposed. In this additional support module, we go in to even more detail on how to ensure your employee retention activites are seamless with the rest of your employee development activities – and how not to fall victim to ‘intiative-itis.’

Employees Retention Masterclass

This Employee Retention Masterclass has been taught for nine years and is the test bed and laboratory for much of Les’ cutting-edge thinking. By communicating with the thousands of managers who have taken the MasterClass, he is in constant touch with real-world retention challenges and solutions. This 51-page Masterclass digital workbook is the ‘current state of thinking’ in employee retention.

Learn More or Get Started Now

Read more or order and download the HRwisdom Employee Retention Kit instantly now.

Final Words

If you’re ready to take the next step to resolve your staff retention headaches and want access to world-class information then make sure you get straight into your HRwisdom Employee Retention Kit.

We look forward to the opportunity to help you achieve your employee retention goals in the very near future.

HRwisdom Support

ps. You can order and download the HRwisdom Employee Retention Kit instantly now by clicking here: Employee Retention Kit.

Click to browse the HRwisdom Library

A quick thank you to the HRwisdom community members for their recent contribution to the HRwisdom blog on HR Horror Stories.

There was a variety of HR horror stories shared and all made us laugh (and cringe).

All the postings were excellent and we thank the members for their contribution.

We decided to award Worst HR Horror Story to the first posting which sound truly horrid. The contributor of this post has now received their free HRwisdom Library access.

By way of thanks to all those who contributed, HRwisdom shared two very useful staff management resources:

1. An interview with an international expert on employee management and retention.

2. Top 10 Interview Questions & Answers to help them avoid some of the future HR horror stories.

Thanks again to all HRwisdom community members for their ongoing support and contribution.

Kind regards,

HRwisdom Support

Click to browse the HRwisdom Library

Click to browse the HRwisdom Library

In a previous blog post, HRwisdom shared some HR horror stories about difficult employees, underperforming employees, and other staff management challenges.

HRwisdom recently asked one of its contributors, Robert Watson, what were his Top 10 Interview Questions to help him find the right person for the right role?

Robert Watson is a highly experienced management consultant and executive coach. Robert has literally travelled the world examining the recruitment and selection systems of some of the most successful companies in the world.

Here, we will take a look at Robert’s preferred interview questions for recruiting staff and some of his thinking behind the selection.

Before We Get Started . . .

The following are resources which may help you build the right team by selecting the right people for the right roles.

Click for more information:

• HRwisdom Library (see ‘Hiring a New Employee’ sub-section)
• Predict future performance of job candidates with this online candidate assessment tool (free report available)
• Job applicant tracking system to streamline your recruitment process
• HRwisdom ‘No Frills’ Staff Recruitment Pack
• Interview Questions (recommended by one of our subscribers – this is not an HRwisdom product)

Top 10 Interview Questions To Hire Good Staff

HRwisdom recently asked one of its contributors, Robert Watson, what were his Top 10 Interview Questions to help him hire good staff or, more specifically, the right person for the right role?

In the following notes taken directly from our discussion, we will take a look at Robert’s preferred interview questions for hiring good staff and some of his thinking behind the selection. 

What is the thinking behind these questions?

“Over the years, I must have seen thousand of recruitment questions that people have designed.  But the overwhelming majority of those are very simple questions where the candidate can answer simply yes or no, and then of course we complain about younger candidates who can’t string a sentence together. 

Each of the questions that I’ve selected here require the candidate to actually put an answer together and, probably, a paragraph answer. They’re not just simply one-sentence answers.  You’re trying to get some discussion going and when they start discussing these things, what you’re looking for in all of these questions is what’s underlying or what’s the attitude that the person has.

The attitude is something that’s internal to the candidate.  So if they have the right attitude then you don’t have to spend a lot of time training them to try and correct their attitude.  So I guess it’s fairly obvious to me and hopefully it’s convincing to you that the sort of candidate that you really want in your business is someone who already brings with them the attitudes which match what you want out of your employees.”

How do these questions fit into the overall structure of the interview?

“Most candidates coming along are going to be nervous so you need to start out with a question that is non-threatening and allows them to talk a little bit about them in their territory.

So a typical question like the “Tell us about the current job that you have and the products that you make, and the company”, and just allow them to talk for two to three minutes. 

The answers that they give may reveal some of their attitudes towards management or customers or suppliers.  Those attitudes might be positive attitudes or they might be negative attitudes.  But by and large that opening question is just designed to put them at ease.

Then you’ll move in to the technical questions where you ask them about specific software of specific machinery or specific experience that they’ve had.  You may have asked the sales person, for instance, to bring along examples of sales presentations they’ve done or graphs showing improved sales or something like that.  So you spend as much time as you like on the technical side.

The top ten questions that I’ve put here are ones which reveal more about the underlying attitude that the person has in their behavior. 

Pick out some of those that you think are particularly relevant to the role that you want this person to fulfill and add those into the interview.

You can design up your own questions if you like.  If you do that, you will need to make sure that the answers that people give you are not yes and no answers.  They will need to be answers where people speak for a while.”

Robert’s Top 10 Interview Questions

1. Tell us about the previous job that you had, and how you fitted in with the business
2. How did you know how well the business was going?
3. Describe a time when you worked on a team. What were some of the difficulties that this team had?
4. We all make mistakes. Tell us about a time when you made a mistake – what did you do about it and what did you learn from that?
5. Tell us about some training you’ve done recently.
6. Have you ever lost your job and, if so, what did you learn from that experience?
7. Tell us about a time you had to break a safety rule. What were the circumstances, and the consequences and what would you do differently next time?
8. Customers can be very demanding. Tell us about a time when you went the extra mile to satisfy a customer.
9. Tell us about a time when a customer’s deadline couldn’t be met. How did you break the news to the customer?
10. Why do you want to work in our business?

Are these Top 10 Questions Enough?

“These top ten questions are very effective. However, you’ll probably realise that an interview can’t be made up of just these top ten questions. 

So, don’t forget that in a typical interview, what you’ll need is a couple of opening questions that relax the candidate and the most obvious opening question is “Tell us about your current job.”  That’s always a good one.

You will also need to ask your technical questions because for most jobs, you want to know if they do have the experience or the particular qualification that you’re after and then these top ten questions, you need to handpick the ones of those that are relevant to the job vacancy that you have and use questions like those.

If you go and design up your own question, always test them out on someone, perhaps an existing employee and see what sort of answers they will give.  If they give you a paragraph-type answer then you’ll know that’s a fairly good question.  If they give you a one-word answer, you’ll know that your question needs to redesigned.”

If you’d like Robert’s contact details, just email: support@HRwisdom.com.au

Next Step . . .

The following are resources which may help you build the right team by selecting the right people for the right roles.

• Predict future performance of job candidates with this online candidate assessment tool (free report available)
• HRwisdom Library (see ‘Hiring a New Employee’ sub-section)
• Job applicant tracking system to streamline your recruitment process
• HRwisdom ‘No Frills’ Staff Recruitment Pack
• Interview Questions (recommended by one of our subscribers – this is not an HRwisdom product)

HRwisdom Support

ps. As always, we’d love to hear your comments. Just click below to share your thoughts on recruiting good staff.

Click to browse the HRwisdom Library