From our experience, most business owners do not put enough attention on manning up their Human Resources department with competent people who know the importance of HR products. It can be said that the HR department makes the business. By this we mean, it is the HR department who hire new employees, ensure they get properly trained on their jobs, make sure that all legal requirements are met, and that the company's staff are on the job doing what they should be doing. When this is being done competently and efficiently, the business will expand at a sound rate. While the HR department has a lot of different duties that when performed efficiently will expand a business, we'd like to focus on the recruitment aspect of the job, since after all, that is our profession. 

There is one thing above all other things that we want to stress when recruiting for your business. Focus on ability. A general ability to get anything done whenever needed is far more desirable than experience and passing static tests. Now, you may disagree about the experience part, but let's look at a few scenarios. Say you have someone who has been working as a legal secretary for the last 10 years or more. She knows the business and has been quite successful doing it all this time, but during the same time she developed an interest in something else, say Sales. She was helping out with some voluntary fund raising for a charity that she supported and discovered that doing sales was a lot of fun and she got a big kick out of it. Realizing this newfound interest and ability, she realized that she would be doing a lot better in life if she pursued this as a new career. Aha, you say, looking over her resume, in search for new sales people, she doesn't have any professional experience in sales, just a little fund raising on the side. I can't hire her. Well, is that a wise decision or not? Well, it depends. 

Here is the viewpoint that we are advocating. If the person is generally competent and can get things done and has shown initiative and responsibility in previous jobs, chances are that with a little training on the specifics of the job, she will be successful in a new career. When it comes to tests, this is our advice. Create a dynamic test that will show how the person does a specific task. For example, tell the person to go type a business letter to a customer about something. Show him the computer and the printer and tell him start. Time how long it takes and look at the result. This will tell you a great deal about their competence. Tailor the test to the type of job you want to fill of course.

The other factor that we consider just as important as ability, is the job seeker's purpose. What does he want to do? You will have much greater success with an individual who is working on something that he is very interested in and wants to do, than someone who is doing it just for the money. Doing it just for the money is the lowest motivation there is. You need to have the person's interest engaged in the job he is performing. Otherwise he will put out lesser quality work and will generally be trouble for the business. Reading a resume can tell you what the person's interest is, but not necessarily. This is something that you must ask him, What is it that you want to do? Your best recruitment results come from really getting to know the job seeker and find out what makes him happy. Sometimes a resume doesn't communicate it clearly, it may be necessary to prod and read between the lines to find out what you want. Take a recent example. 

One employer called us for help with hiring a new office manager. His current office manager was leaving after just a few months of being there. His mistake was hiring her to begin with because in the employment interview she stated that what she really wanted to do was writing. She had experience as an office manager, but it wasn't her purpose. So even though she could do the job, it was sufficiently far away from her purposes, that she couldn't stay on the job. Her interest wasn't there. These are guidelines that we follow ruthlessly and they have been learned from a lot of experience with recruitment. Use them and be more successful.

Mya Borgman