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Download Recruitment and Selection PDF

Recruitment and Selection

Do you have difficulty recruiting staff?

If so do you know why?

The two most reported problems with recruitment are:

  1. Lack of specialist skills
  2. Lack of experience

However, there are many more including:

  1. Salary
  2. Location
  3. Job content
  4. Lack of progression opportunities
  5. Region
  6. Industry
  7. Lack of qualifications

What can be done to tackle recruitment difficulties?

  1. Appoint those with potential
  2. Review pay and benefits
  3. Redefine roles, responsibilities and grading structure
  4. Appoint internally and provide training
  5. Offer flexible working hours
  6. Create realistic job descriptions
  7. Recruit overseas workers
  8. Pay existing employees a bonus for introducing friends and family to the organisation, who then can be appointed
  9. Offshore part of your business
  10. Adjust the organisation of existing work

None of these options come without their own problems, but the bottom line is there is no easy answer. However, it is important that you are able to identify the specific recruitment issues facing your organisation and can then put a plan in place to address them.

You need to ask yourself the following questions:

  1. Is there a role?
  2. What is the role?
  3. What attributes, qualities, skills and qualifications does the person for this role require?
  4. What is the salary?
  5. Is that competitive?
  6. How and where do we advertise?
  7. What is our recruitment process?

Equally important is the selection process. There are many selection methods currently being used, to assist with the increasingly difficult job of selecting candidates.

Some of which are:

  1. Biographical interviews
  2. Competency based interviews
  3. Panel/structured interviews
  4. Testing
    • Personality questionnaires
    • Aptitude
    • General ability
    • Literacy numeracy
  5. References
  6. Assessment centres
  7. Telephone interviews

What do you have in place to aid your recruitment and selection processes?

If you consider the time and cost involved in filling a vacancy, and the associated costs of labour turnover, it becomes obvious how vital this can be to your organisation. Consider this:

  1. It can take on average anything up to 5 weeks to fill a vacancy for a manual worker
  2. It can take on average anything up to 17.5 weeks to fill a vacancy for a Senior Manager/Director

These timescales do not include the time required to induct employees and get them competent and up to speed. This could be a terrifying prospect!

According to the CIPD Recruitment, Retention and Turnover Survey for 2004:

  1. The average cost (per employee,) of recruitment including advertising, using an agency or search fees is £3,950
  2. The average cost (per employee,) of labour turnover including, training, induction, selection process or redundancy fees is £4,625

What can we do to help?

  1. Review/Write recruitment and selection processes and procedures
  2. Put in place an equal opportunities policy, to cover managing diversity
  3. Carry out interviews
  4. Coach/mentor managers on interview skills and techniques
  5. Carry out all forms of testing, personality profiling etc
  6. Organise and run assessment centres
  7. Write advertisements that comply with employment law and legislation
  8. Create a succession planning strategy
  9. Carry out a risk assessment identifying key employees and formulate a strategy to mitigate this
  10. Review and analyse market/industry/regional trends, enabling benchmarking
  11. Review pay and benefits
  12. Put in place a competency framework, incorporating job evaluation, which can be linked to a grading structure
  13. Create new job descriptions, based around the competency framework
  14. Provide interim management on all areas of business and Human Resources

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Download Performance Management PDF

Performance Management

Did you know that underperforming staff cost businesses up to millions a year?

What does Performance Management look like and cost in your business?

Do you have a Performance Management system?

Have you reviewed your Performance Management system to see if it is effective?

Do you blame Line Managers for being ineffective?

Whatever the answer you must consider the knock on effects of poor performance:

  1. The impact on colleagues
  2. The impact on customers
  3. The impact on reputation in such a competitive marketplace
  4. All resulting in an impact on the bottom line

What should you do about it?

There are no specific laws that relate purely to the management of performance. However, we can put in a process to facilitate the shift to a strategic approach to the management of performance. This will empower managers and employees to see performance as integrated and a real feature of work life.

This process is not a stand alone process. It must be integrated with the business, operational plans and budgets. If you have a vision for your future, you must remember that your people are key to helping you realise that dream and vision!

What can we do to help?

  1. Review current performance management systems
  2. Create an effective, tailored performance management system, covering appraisal systems, job descriptions, objective setting and competency frameworks
  3. Coach Managers on how to implement, and carry out appraisal interviews and objective setting
  4. Create a grading structure to help people understand career progression paths, and prevent issues relating to unequal pay claims
  5. Coach Managers on when to use the disciplinary process when tackling performance related issues

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Download Retention/Turnover PDF

Retention/Turnover

The CIPD retention and turnover survey for 2006 reported the overall employee turnover rate for the UK is 18.3%.

This varies considerably from Industry to Industry and region to region.

  1. Highest levels can be found in the private sector 22.9%
  2. Lowest levels are found in the public sector 13.3%

Do you know your turnover rate or how your organisation fairs?

What problems does retention and turnover cause within your organisation?

There is no set level of employee turnover, that indicates when it becomes damaging to an organisation. It is determined by many things including, the labour market and skills availability.

However, there is no getting away from the costs, which can include:

  1. Problems with productivity
  2. Quality issues
  3. Affects on customer service
  4. Stress on other employees who have to fill the shortfall
  5. Cost of recruitment
  6. Cost of training
  7. Cost of inducting
  8. Cost relating to the reputation of your organisation

Turnover is not all bad, it can be a benefit to organisations and creates the opportunity for new ideas to be put forward and brings new motivation and morale into the business. Alternatively it can mean that you lose an employee that was a poor performer and you have the opportunity to assess your requirements and replace them with a more effective member of staff, into the same or a new role.

Why do people leave Organisations?

  1. Pulled by the prospect of a better job
  2. Pushed by the dissatisfaction of the current
  3. Pulled and pushed simultaneously
  4. For domestic reasons out of your control

Most employees want stability and it is clear that push factors or dissatisfaction is the major reason for turnover. Therefore it is vital that you have a system in place to find out what causes the dissatisfaction in your organisation.

Some of the reasons may be as follows:

  1. Pay and benefits?
  2. Working hours/shift pattern?
  3. Management style?
  4. Lack of career development opportunities?
  5. Insecurity?
  6. Poor communication?

The list could go on and on! But whatever the reason there is always a correlation between turnover and the bottom line.

What can we do to help?

  1. Write Recruitment & Selection policies & procedures and coach managers in there use
  2. Review and/or implement an improved induction process
  3. Calculate your turnover rate
  4. Calculate the cost of the turnover to your organisation
  5. Put in place an exit strategy, to include exit interviews/questionnaires and succession planning
  6. Review or create a performance management system that would enable dissatisfaction to be identified and rectified earlier
  7. Create and conduct employee perception/attitude surveys to identify potential or underlying problems
  8. Create a risk management strategy - to ensure the organisation is not exposed
  9. Provide Interim Management on all aspects of business and HR management

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Download Absence Management PDF

Absence Management

In a recent survey CBI/AXA, it was determined that the cost of staff absence to business equates to £13.2 billion.

  1. 164 million days lost through absence per year
  2. 13% of these days are considered ‘sickies’
  3. £531 is the annual average cost of absence per employee
  4. 8.8 days separate the best and worst performing organisations

If you think this is bad, consider:

  1. Do you know the cost of absence to your organisation?
  2. Do you have a process for managing and recording absence?
  3. Do you know how to tackle persistent offenders?
  4. Do you pay company sick pay?

Sick leave is not an alternative to holiday, nor should staff feel that they have an entitlement to sick pay. There are other effects to your organisation excluding the direct cost of the employee, some of which include:

  1. Impact on productivity
  2. Impact on morale and motivation
  3. Impact on customers and reputation
  4. Impact on the bottom line

Where HR Managers take responsibility for Absence Management 2 fewer days a year are lost, than if Line Managers have responsibility, for this process. In an increasingly difficult and competitive market place you have to look at what can give you the edge, we can help you make the most of your people, and in turn make the most of your business.

What can we do to help?

  1. Formulate an absence management strategy, including a review of any current sick pay arrangements
  2. Analyse market and industry trends, statistics and costs
  3. Coach/Mentor Managers to implement and tackle persistent offenders, and prevent future situations
  4. Put in place return to work interview process
  5. Provide Management information and support

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Download Organisational Development/Change Management PDF

Organisational Development/Change Management

Many things create the need for organisational change, such as:

  1. Challenge of growth
  2. Competitive pressures
  3. Customer pressures
  4. Technological change
  5. Government legislation
  6. Changes in strategy
  7. Need to learn new skills and or behaviours

Research suggests organisations go through major changes every three years, but must continually make smaller changes.

This throws up many challenges for organisations and managers alike. Many change initiatives fail, recent CIPD research suggested that less than 60% of reorganisations met their stated objectives, which are usually focused on bottom line improvement.

What are the effects of this?

  1. Loss of key employees
  2. Loss of stakeholder credibility
  3. Loss of market position
  4. Removal of senior management
  5. Impact on the bottom line

The key issues that organisations face is as follows:

  1. Lack of leadership
  2. Lack of effective project management skills
  3. Insufficient, relevant training
  4. Poor communication
  5. Failure to consider individual change initiatives
  6. Resistance to change
    • Resistance to content
    • Resistance to process

Managers need to be able to diagnose resistance and incorporate the findings into and change management plan or strategy.

What can we do to help?

  1. Identify leadership styles and place the right people in the right roles
    • Coercive
    • Directive
    • Consultative
    • Collaborative
  2. Provide leadership coaching
  3. Provide project management skills and coaching for managers
  4. Provide change management skills and coaching for managers
  5. Create and carry out employee engagement & perception surveys, to assist in the formulation of a strategy to overcome resistance to change
  6. Provide Director Development programmes
  7. Create a communication strategy, to create a sense of involvement, engagement and buy in to the necessary changes
  8. Ensure any change management strategy links all changes coherently and does not take on initiatives in isolation
  9. Provide teambuilding workshops
  10. Choose a team, craft the vision and path, and capture the learning to enable sustainability in future changes the organisation becomes involved in

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Download Employment Legislation PDF

Employment Legislation

Concerned about breaking the law?

Legislation - Oops Management!

Are you up to date on employment legislation?

From 1st October 2006, the Employment Equality (Age) regulations make it unlawful to discriminate against workers, employees, trainees and job applicants because of their age.

With these regulations comes the necessity for new policies and procedures. The key areas this legislation will impact upon are as follows:

  1. Equality Policy
  2. Recruitment Policy and Procedures
  3. Training and Promotion
  4. Redundancy Procedures
  5. Pay, Benefits and Pensions
  6. Retirement and the right to request to work beyond 65

As with sex and race claims, age discrimination claims will be uncapped. Considering the highest payout for a sex discrimination claim to date is £1.2 million, the time has come to have a risk assessment on your current policies and procedures. This will ensure that you will be able to comply with the new legislation and will be able to mitigate the risk to your business.

Food for thought.

Consultancy company Water for fish conducted an audit of 75 recruitment adverts in a national Sunday newspaper. It found 27% of the adverts would potentially be open to legal action come October 1st 2006!!

Every Cloud Has A Silver Lining.

The new legislation has brought to light some interesting points:

  1. The working population is getting older
  2. There are currently 20 million people aged 50 or over in the UK
  3. By 2030 this is expected to increase by 37% to 27 million
  4. There is a pension shortfall facing many employees
  5. There is increased life expectancy

Although there is no requirement under the new legislation for employers to allow people to work past the age of 65, how do you anticipate dealing with skills shortages both now an in the longer term.

How can you make the most of these skills and the ageing workforce?

  1. The treatment of your workforce from recruitment, promotion, training, redundancy retirement is important
  2. Utilise HR techniques, such as succession planning, organised career development and career planning
  3. Use the older members of your workforce in different ways, as coaches and mentors and continue the cycle of knowledge

There are stereotypes regarding the ageing workforce that make this prospect scary, for example:

  1. "Older people have more days sick"
  2. Fact: The opposite is true

There are many similar stereotypes that will play a part in an organisations view on retaining their ageing workforce, but as with anything in business you collate your facts and put in processes to assess the risks for yourself. Or you bring in professionals to help you to do this. This is not just a short term reactive problem this is a strategic long term challenge and solution.

What can we do to help?

  1. Risk assessment of current policies & procedures, compliance on relevant legislation
  2. Diagnostic business health check
  3. Write compliant policies and procedures
  4. Coach Managers on handling grievances and disciplinaries
  5. Put in place a strategy to roll out and communicate new policies procedures and legislative changes

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Download Motivating the People PDF

Motivating the People

"The organisation which treats people like assets, requiring maintenance, love and investment, can behave quite differently from the organisation which looks upon them as costs, to be reduced wherever and whenever possible."

Charles Handy, The Age of Unreason

We can help you motivate your workforce by offering a package of courses across the following areas:

  1. Empowering and Delegating
  2. Targeting for Achievement
  3. Targets for all organisational, departmental, team and individual plans
  4. Appraising and Developing Everyone
    • Key factors
    • Benefits
  5. Implementing Training and Development
  6. Minimum standards for everyone
    • Identification of training needs
    • Techniques
  7. Communicating the Message
    • Communications policy
    • Briefing process
    • Getting the most from meetings
  8. Implementing Recruitment and Induction
    • Competency framework
    • Job descriptions
    • Advertising and application forms
    • Short listing and interviewing
    • Clear induction

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Download Employment Rights PDF

Employment Rights

Most people are entitled to the statutory rights listed below:

  1. Not to be discriminated against (including the right not to be dismissed on the grounds of race, sex, marriage, disability, sexual orientation or religion - also during October 2006 there is protection based on the grounds of age)
  2. The right to be accompanied at disciplinary and grievance hearings
  3. Equal pay with members of the opposite sex with regard to doing like work or work of equal value
  4. To be paid at least the Minimum wage
  5. Employment protection - unfair dismissal, constructive dismissal and T.U.P.E. (Transfer of Undertakings Protection of Employment)
  6. Maternity benefits/rights
  7. Paternity leave and benefits
  8. Adoption leave and benefits
  9. Parental leave
  10. Time off for dependents
  11. To apply for flexible working arrangements
  12. Redundancy pay
  13. Statutory sick pay
  14. Employee well-being (health & safety and a general duty of care of the employer)
  15. Annual leave and working time limits
  16. To a written statement of the terms and conditions of employment
  17. Part-time workers to be treated no less favourably than comparable full-timers
  18. Employees on fixed term contracts to be treated no less favourably than comparable permanent employees

In many cases qualifying conditions must be fulfilled before a right may be claimed. Some rights apply to all employees as soon as they start work; others depend on factors such as length of service, continuity of employment and/or activities in addition to the job such as trade union involvement. For some rights various groups of people may be excluded. Most rights apply to employees but some apply to wider groups of workers.

Are you confused yet?

Can you afford to be?

For breach of many of the rights listed above, an Employment Tribunal can award up to £58,400 which is calculated with reference to loss of future earnings (including benefits), age and length of service. The award can be increased by up to 50% if the employer fails to follow the statutory grievance and disciplinary procedures.

For cases relating to sex, race and age, the Employment Tribunal can award an unlimited amount.

As a warning to all employers, a recent tribunal awarded £250,000 compensation in a sex discrimination case.

Even for breach of contract, a Tribunal can award up to £25,000.

It must be borne in mind that the onus is largely on the employer to prove that they have followed the relevant procedures and provide evidence to demonstrate the actions they have taken to mitigate the situation that has been alleged.

What can we do to help?

  1. Provide a Personnel Risk Assessment on all of your policies, procedures, contracts, manuals and compliance with legislation
  2. Mentoring and training on
    • Grievance and disciplinary procedures
    • Recruitment and selection procedures
    • Performance management processes
  3. Provide you with customised employment contracts, policies and procedures
  4. Provide you with a customised staff handbook
  5. Provide management information on all areas that affect the business
  6. Provide an interim HR service to cover all day to day activities and special projects such as grievance and disciplinary, recruitment, selection, redundancy etc
  7. Management training and development
  8. Review HR software requirements and project manage new HR software implementation
  9. Develop HR systems and processes to minimise risk to the business
  10. Review benefits to ensure adherence to the law and cost effectiveness
  11. Develop and implement staff opinion surveys to identify issues and opportunities
  12. Provide telephone and face to face guidance relating to all HR issues Grievance and disciplinary procedures

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Download Assessment Centres PDF

Assessment Centres

What is the most effective method that can be used to recruit and select future employees successfully?

The answer is that no one method alone is robust, reliable or valid enough to ensure that the recruitment and selection process will be as effective as required.

Let’s face it - the costs of advertising, head hunters and agencies are high and as a result, organisations need to ensure their recruitment process will give value for money and a return on investment.

There is increasing evidence that organisations are turning to an assessment centre approach to solve their recruitment issues. A key strength of assessment centres is that they allow a broader range of selection methods to be combined and used during the recruitment process and this is proving to add value to organisations, by enabling them to get it right first time and gather more data on candidates and ensure expectations are set appropriately on both sides.

The range of selection methods include:

  1. Psychometric tests
  2. Competency based interviews
  3. Work related activities/Case Studies
  4. Group activities/Observation
  5. Presentation

Assessment Centres and Psychometrics

Psychometric testing is a recruitment and selection tool, use of which is on the increase. According to Personnel Today Magazine,

“It has been estimated that some 70% of U.K. organisations test their workforce either for personality or ability before making a job offer or conferring a promotion.”

There is often confusion around psychometrics and therefore a brief explanation could help!

Psychometrics equates to the testing of mental ability, such as IQ, but also includes the use of tests to measure interests, attitudes and personality. Psychometric testing falls into 3 categories:

  1. Ability
  2. Aptitude
  3. Personality

Whereas ability and aptitude can be easily explained, personality is much harder to define. Goodstein & Lanyon 1975 describe it as, “the enduring characteristics of the person that are significant for interpersonal behaviour” and those that make an individual unique.

There are literally thousands of psychometric tests available from numerical, verbal reasoning, to typing, proof reading and personality profiling. All of which are designed to measure different things. Testing alone is of little or no value, there must be a clear strategy and vision for its use and ultimately clear goals and objectives should be determined and met, through the collaborative use of this alongside the other methods listed above.

What an Assessment Centre must reflect

An assessment centre should reflect the reality of a job and the culture of the organisation. Often applicant’s expectations are high and disappointment can be demoralising, demotivating and very costly. It is important to remember that although employers are looking to select the right employees, in turn applicants are looking to select the right organisation.

Research shows that candidates that attend assessment centres, which genuinely reflect the job and the organisation, are impressed by the company regardless of whether they are personally successful in their application. Making your organisation attractive to potential candidates in such a difficult economic climate is not without its problems, but this process can assist and also create excellent PR which is priceless.

An assessment centre should reflect:

  1. The ethos and culture of an organisation
  2. The skills required/competencies identified
  3. Level of skill in interview and selection techniques of Line Managers
  4. HR Strategy
  5. Best methods and sources for talent attraction

So what can we do to help?

It would be our job to help evaluate the culture of your organisation, to establish how you can harness the individuals within the cultural competence to best meet the needs of the business and to facilitate the overall corporate strategy.

  1. Ascertain the culture & ethos of the organisation
  2. Create competency framework/job descriptions/person specifications
  3. Write any external advertisements/communications to ensure compliance with equal opportunities and age discrimination legislation
  4. Explore the most appropriate attraction methods, relevant to your industry, sector, service, role
  5. Design and run a tailored assessment centre with all the materials including the provision of appropriate psychometric testing
  6. Liaise closely with HR and or Line Managers/Directors to ensure buy in, long term success and future sustainability

A final thought.

When considering this, the cost of an assessment centre needs to be compared to the costs of a recruitment error. This cost is quoted by the CIPD to be between £5,000 - £50,000 depending on seniority and the potential for business errors.

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Download Assessment Centres PDF

Human Capital Management Review

What is human capital management?

Human capital management or (HCM) is concerned with obtaining, analysing and reporting on data that informs the direction of value-added people management, strategic investment and operational decisions at corporate level and at the level of front line management. The defining characteristics of human capital management are the use of measurements to guide an approach to managing people that regards them as assets and emphasizes that competitive advantage is achieved by strategic investments in those assets through employee engagement and retention, talent management and learning and development programmes.

What should be incorporated in a human capital management review?

There are many things but some have been listed below:

  1. Cultural Assessment
    • Absenteeism
    • Employee turnover
    • Retention
    • Employee engagement
    • Leadership ability
  2. Performance Management
    • Competency frameworks
    • Job descriptions
    • Training & development analysis
    • Succession planning/talent management
    • Pay & benefits
    • Fairness & equality
  3. Director Development
  4. Recruitment & Selection
    • Cost effectiveness due to lost revenue
    • Analysis of attraction techniques
    • Analysis of selection techniques
    • Ratio of applicants per vacancy
    • Ratio of acceptances on job offers
    • Legal compliance
  5. Human Resources Function Risk Assessment
    • Review of policies & procedures
    • Compliance with law & legislation
    • Key man insurance
    • Corporate liability protection
  6. Cost/Benefit & Business Case Analysis for Improvements

This movement from conventional Human Resources Management (HRM) to HCM has become of great importance to those organisations that want to get and stay ahead of their competitors. It is vitally important to those organisations that consider themselves to be best practice organisations or those striving to get there.

Human capital is a component part of the ‘intellectual capital’ of a company, which is linked to the difference between market value and book value of a company. ‘Recent estimates suggest that 50 to 90 per cent of the value created by a firm comes, not from management of traditional physical assets, but from the management of intellectual capital’ (ICAEW, 1999).

What do you need to succeed in adapting to a best practice HCM approach?

The HCM approach needs Board commitment to succeed and this is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve without them being able to understand the value that HCM can bring to an organisation. In essence we are talking about the best return on Human potential. Harnessing the potential of your employees is not a new concept; it has been advocated and developed by business models such as IIP and EFQM. More recently however, we have even seen legislative changes such as the Information and Consultation Directive, encouraging business to involve and engage employees, with a great deal of emphasis being placed on the opportunity it can create to open dialogue, improve communication and trust, and encourage the principles of harnessing the biggest asset organisations have; their people. In the increasingly difficult economic climate gaining a competitive edge is challenging. The evidence that HCM can assist with this is gathering momentum - even government considered making it a legal requirement to produce an Operating and Financial Review with HCM data being a significant component of the report.

What would HCM data look like?

HCM data should talk about value, not about costs, it should concentrate on outputs and not inputs. One shouldn’t measure staff turnover in terms of recruitment and training costs, but in lost revenue opportunity through the loss of experienced proficient people. Acting on this information will have a direct impact on customer service levels and confidence in your organisation.

It is important to compare inputs against outputs. Recruitment, induction and training costs and lost days due to time devoted to all of these, have to be measured against the productivity, efficiency and performance of those recruited and trained and what their contribution is adding to the business as a whole. All too often Human Resources activities are perceived as costly and the function is perceived as a service and not an income generator, but the HCM concept is set to change that mindset.

In summary.

The HCM approach is a mindset that is founded on the belief that measuring the right people activities within your organisation will bring attention to those areas that you can exploit to gain competitive advantage. Those areas can be existing strengths that can be built on or areas of potential weakness that need to be addressed. Applying an HCM approach to the overall business and corporate strategy is not compulsory but should be ignored at your peril, as there is growing evidence that this approach is working for organisations and their outputs are improving significantly.

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