How to Have the Best Human Resource Working For You

Finding valuable human resource is tough. Keeping them in your organization, even more so!

Make no mistake, as a business owner, good or valuable human resource is one of your most important assets. If you have capable and highly-motivated people working for you – if you can have great people working for you – your organization will prosper. If not, it will suffer.

Understandably then, your human resources department or people responsible with managing the human resource in your organization are some of the most important people in your organization. Their work goes beyond simple payroll processing.

In fact, one of the biggest tasks anyone responsible with human resource has is to hire the best possible people, maybe train them, and make sure that they stay in your organization in order to work towards developing your company’s strategy, and achieving its goals with you.

Having the best-possible human resource working for you is hence a two-part process: hiring the ‘right’ people, and keeping them in your organization.

Here are a few tips through which small businesses can accomplish this:

 

1. Develop a strong and thorough hiring process.

Building a team of great people working for you begins from how you hire them. If you have a good hiring process, it will allow you build a team of capable people working towards the achievement of your organizational goals. I recommend reading this outstanding and extremely thorough article on TeamTreeHouse Blog on how to hire the best people. It lists down every single thing that any recruiter needs to know before hiring for their organization in 10 steps, and is more thorough and detailed than I could ever be. A must-read!

 

2. Offer more than just monetary compensation.

Monetary compensation, or money, is an important part of the package that you put forth for a potential candidate, and it could very well be the single-most important thing between getting the man of your choice, or losing out on good human resource. However my advice would be to go beyond simple monetary compensation. Offer something extra, something special: Offer the chance to work in a small but rapidly-growing organization. Offer a chance to become a future leader or superstar and make a name. Offer the chance to work with some of the best people. Offer learning and capacity-building opportunities to the employee. Make sure that the job description places importance on what the person will learn and how he/she will be able to grow with the job. Make it about their career instead of the job.

If you offer potential candidates the opportunity to learn and grow, this will ensure that only people interested in doing so – and candidates interested in more than just money – come forth. THESE are the people you want working for you!

 

3. Look for certain qualities in the people that you’ll want to hire to work for you.

Alan Hall, a contributor on Forbes who covers investment, entrepreneurial growth and philanthropy, recently did this excellent piece on ‘The 7 C’s to look for in great employees’ – an article which is based on his book of the same name. Hall has defined 7 different categories which should be used as criteria to find and hire the best-possible human resource, or in other words a candidate with the best skills, experience and ability for a job. His 7 C’s are:

  • Competent: does the candidate have the skills, experience and education to complete the tasks you want done?
  • Capable: will the candidate deliver results, put in extra effort when required, will take more responsibility, and does he have potential for growth?
  • Compatible: is the candidate someone who will be able to get along with people inside the organization (employees, superiors) as well as current and potential clients?
  • Commitment: does the candidate seem committed to his/her job, and will he stick around for the long-term?
  • Character: what about the candidate’s values, morals and ethics?
  • Culture: will the candidate be a good fit for the organization’s culture?
  • Compensation: is the candidate satisfied with the compensation he has been offered, or will it affect his performance negatively?

 

4. Empower your HR department to keep valuable human resource in your organization.

Recognize and acknowledge the fact that the human resources department is actually a vital cog in any organization’s machinery – be it a small business or a large multinational. An HR department actually performs many different core functions, all essential to ensuring that your workforce performs at optimal levels. These include (but are not limited to) functions such as:

  • the training and development of employees;
  • determining employee satisfaction, morale and motivation levels and keeping them above optimal levels at all times;
  • monitoring and improving employee performance;
  • making sure that the workforce embraces the organization’s principles and projects a positive corporate image, and perhaps most importantly in the context of this write-up…
  • keep capable and valuable people in your organization!

In a nutshell, if your HR department functions well, your workforce functions well! Understand and recognize its importance, and empower this department so that it can do its job effectively, so that your valuable human resource sticks with you through thick and thin!

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