Wouldn’t that be a nice world? Call the recruiter, place an ad in Monster.Com or Craigslist and a steady stream of well-qualified, experienced and fully trained potential hires show up. No need for extensive training or job development just a bit of product orientation, show them where the lunch room is and they are off.
Oh, and every time one needed to fill a post that pool was there, just waiting to be chosen.
It would be nice but not only is it unlikely and impractical it is actually dangerous to a company to pretend something like that even exists.
While “unlikely and impractical” may seem obvious it might be hard to conceive how this could be “dangerous” but it is.
The risk lies in several factors:
1. An over-dependency on external resources
2. Fostering neglect towards ongoing employee development and training
3. It creates blind spots in the hiring process
Over dependency – If you can’t create and build competence from within then you will always be at the mercy of your staff and potential hires. Being at the command of an “irreplaceable” employee or having all of a company’s knowledge “owned” by a handful of staff is not only unhealthy it is a very high-risk scenario. It is a MUST that a company owns its knowledge and knows it can build and train competent staff.
An attitude of neglect – if one operates from the basis of only seeking to hire experienced and trained personnel then one often allows the training of staff to suffer from slack and neglect. While having decent individuals to start with is still important don’t fall victim to the false idea that one’s survival depends upon hiring only experienced and proven personnel. Seek out and hire good people but also KNOW that you can train them to be great.
Blind spots – searching only for past experience and previous knowledge creates a very large blind spot. While these elements are a factor, more importantly so in technical zones, quite often they are only a minor element in making the right hire. Knowledge changes very rapidly and entirely new careers appear overnight while others become obsolete just as rapidly. In addition, it is a reality that skills and success in one company or position can become lost in translation to a new one. Thinking to only hire “the best” and the “most experienced” can blind one to the right choice in front of you.
Ultimately one must have the means of building competency and ability from within a company or face the suffering and worry of constantly having to find and hang onto competent personnel.
How does one accomplish this?
Here are some of the key steps:
- Searching out and gathering the company knowledge
- Its accumulation and organization
- Authoring that knowledge – an ongoing process
- Creating a means to distribute and TRACK its distribution to employees
- Confirmation that the knowledge was received and understood
- Some form of practice or drilling to build competence and familiarity
- Examination for retention
- Resultant statistic tracking for data quality control (Did it work?)
- Feedback or surveys to bolster staff acceptance
- Retraining on actions or data that is consistently being misapplied
- On the fly modifications to existing data
- Release of updated or new information, policies or methods
- The capability to recycle or reissue data as staffing changes
Without doubt this can be a lot of work. It is no wonder that lacking a good system and the support to get it done that the steps normally fail long before even Step 6!
Yet without these points in place one will always be the effect of having to find only good hires – a dead end and trouble strewn road.
Best to tackle the task and reap the rewards - smooth operations, stability and an amazing calmness that comes from knowing that you can build competent crew.
Luckily Real Ability took all these steps, and more, into consideration in building a strong software system that can make this task a reality.
Thomas Soracco
Real Ability Software and Management Systems
www.realability.com
Technorati Tags: Hiring best practices, recruiting, employee training
