Five Steps to Fire-Proof Your Hiring Process.

Hiring and retaining good employees remains one of the premier concerns of the corporate world. Today is a seller's market. Downsizing, rightsizing and reengineering has released a flood of well-qualified and well-trained workers to the marketplace. One of the major problems for the hiring company is that these workers have also been well-trained in the art of interviewing--in many cases, much better trained than the people interviewing them. In fact, 86 percent of those hired by interview alone will not work out for the company. So, what is the corporation to do? How do they attract the kinds of people with the skill sets they need to succeed in the ever increasingly competitive market-place? And, once found, what does a company need to do to keep these people happy and productive?

Five elements are key to successfully locating, hiring and retaining good employees. I call this POSITIVE [SM] Management: People, Organization and Strategy Integrated Together in Vital Enterprise. Years of working in one of the largest corporations in the world, and subsequent years of consulting to businesses large and small, has convinced me that few companies do a good job in all of these areas.

People

All companies have people and some sort of a personnel department or person to handle the nitty gritty of employment-- benefits, policies, payroll, EEO, OSHA, etc. Unfortunately, many of these departments are relegated to the role of paper pushers rather than people developers. Instead of using these highly trained people as aides in the hiring process, many managers see them only as roadblocks. In a time of tight profits, many corporations find Human Resources departments extraneous and outsource them, instead of really looking at the organization and pruning where pruning should take place.

Organization

All companies have some system of organization as well, from the traditional hierarchical format, to the newer matrix or "flat" management concepts. Typically, however, managers are viewed more highly the larger the organization they have. Managers on an upward push, therefore, try to build fiefdoms within the corporation to hold on tightly to their domains. This typical bloat is what led to the waves of downsizing, rightsizing and reengineering.

Strategy