“On-Boarding” is an integral part of hiring.  It plays a huge role in the orientation and retention of new talent.  Consider:

• 20% of turnover occurs in the first 90 days. And it takes about the same time for a new hire to be initially successful on a position.
• Half of all senior outside hires fail within 18 months.

Reasons: for early departures:

• Job content – responsibilities differ from expectations.
• Interpersonal conflict.
• Lack of training and thorough indoctrination. Examples of half-baked manager guidance take the form of: “jump right in there”, “it’s a test by fire”, “Ah, you’ll figure it out”, “Get out there and get “em”, and similar.
• Feeling not part of the team. It takes more than just initial introductions to “internalize” and make a new resource a productive player on the company team.

Your business can hire (and pay) an “on-boarding specialist”.  But that is a transferring a critical process to another business and will likely destroy the internal ownership necessary to make a solid on-boarding process a success.  If you do the hiring, you should develop and own the process.  There is a plentiful supply of resources, advice, and software out there to help build your own on-boarding process and most importantly make that new talent ecstatic about the decision to choose your business over the competitors.  Hey, word travels at light speed,  at the speed of texting – social media!

Pro-active on boarding includes:

• Orientation to the company and its legal, policy and value norms.
• Clarification of job responsibilities.
• Understanding of the company’s workplace culture.
• Introduce / explain connections inside and possibly outside the company, connections critical to success on the job.

And remember the importance of the employee’s workspace the first day.  It needs to look like the office, cube, or space of an efficient, experienced professional.  The “newbie” should be given an orientation of the space and equipment.

Notwithstanding model details, the overall model or plan needs to span a minimum of 90 days, better yet the first year.  On-boarding plans would vary in complexity, depending on the employee’s level in the organization.

Process models will not assure success.  It is the immediate manager who needs to own and drive the process and include and leverage other organization managers and departments to ensure a successful first year.

“Onboarding starts with satisfying the most basic of Maslow’s psychological needs: belonging” — Jay Alan Samit, dynamic entrepreneur and intrepreneur,   http://jaysamit.com/about/

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(Assumes a list of candidates has been managed to a reasonable number for final vetting)

If you are vetting a truly high-potential candidate, chances are you are not the only company on the list, and, chances are you may only have one shot.

And consider that recruiting and selection share some common factors that are keys to landing the candidate. Factors like “Face of the Company”, “Speed”, “3’s should not be selecting 1’s and 2’s” (abbv.  3’s> 1’s &2’s).  Other factors include “Differentiation”, “The Plan”, “Competency Interviewing”, “On-boarding” and “Who’s on the team”.

“Who” is on the evaluation team is critical.  Each manager or professional who interface with candidates IS the FACE of the Company.  Make sure the team can represent the company … the object is to have the candidate thinking, “I would love to work for him/her”!  So consider if your performance system is 1 = Excellent and 5=, well not so good, then you want only 1 and 2 performers interfacing with candidates.  The process is to evaluate candidates, and I would suggest 3 performers can’t evaluate level 1 and 2 talents.   Ultimately the objective is to so differentiate your business that candidates will eliminate your competitors as employers.

“Competency based interviewing” has taken some shots lately.  I yet view it as a great evaluation tool.  The value in using this form of evaluation, along with others, is that it is a way to discover strengths and weakness in candidate behaviors.

To clarify, for our purpose here there are two kinds of competencies.  Functional Competencies (skills – technical knowledge used in engineering, IT, HR, Finance, etc.) and Effectiveness Competencies – which are behaviors.

Functional Competencies are skills that are related to and lie within specific functional areas such as engineering, materials and logistics, human resources, supply chain management, finance and so on.  A functional competency in engineering would be hydraulics, in human resources – compensation, in finance – understanding financial statements and so on.  Some Functional Competencies are common to all functional areas – Microsoft Word and Excel would be examples as would project management.

Effectiveness Competences (EC’s) are OBSERVABLE behaviors such as adaptability/flexibility, honesty, professional presence, hard work, integrity, communications, leadership, business acumen, influence, analytical capability, judgment, and so on.  When you work with a peer, boss, or any employee for a short period of time you can easily observe their behavior.  You will know if they have professional presence, if they work hard, if they are analytical, if they are adaptable and an effective communicator.  EC questions are often used as a basis for interviews as they reveal important behaviors. There are many sources of lists of competencies, as well as sample behavioral interview questions on the Internet.

EC’s are critical career makers (or breakers) as they are observable by any level of co-worker, open doors (professional presence), impact co-workers careers and daily work environment (compassion, talent management, leadership, team work), are a factor in  the ability to learn (listening) as well as have others learn from you (patience, understanding), display your energy and enthusiasm for your work and your company…  in a few words, EC’s make or break more careers than technical knowledge (functional competencies). They are excellent forecast factors of a professional’s future capability in higher-level positions.

On-boarding is critical, but we’ll save that for a later posting.

This posting on this topic could run on forever.  If you want to improve your hiring and selection process, take a look at why people turn down job offers.  You can easily obtain a list and know what avoid, what to focus on, and how to improve your process.  And if you pay attention to the dates of the articles, you will find that business has been repeating the same mistakes for a very long time.

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One year after I retired I was missing my professional work in Human Resources (HR).  I did not want another full-time job, wanted to work when I wanted to, and wanted to do what I enjoyed.  And, I was missing the professional relationships I enjoyed throughout my 34 years of corporate work.

Consulting was the answer.  It fulfilled all of what I was looking for and, I could choose and concentrate on the “parts” of HR I liked and leave the rest behind. What I liked was teaching others — managing talent, leadership, workplace culture, coaching, and analytics, and travel, particularly international travel. So I opened my own one-person teaching consulting firm and enjoyed the work for more than 7 years. It was a profitable venture.

It was a lot of work to set up. In short,

• Create an identity and logo for the firm,
• Create the legal entity; a LLC was appropriate for the firm,
• Setup up a website; design business cards,
• Register the firm with the local, state and federal agencies for tax purposes,
• Create a financial records and reporting system,
• Create a flexible consulting agreement model
• Establish a dedicated bank account,
• Create the seminar summaries, materials, slides, business cases, evaluations, and group exercises used in the seminars.

Preparation for each seminar required about 15-20 hours to include necessary research.  I did no marketing aside from using social media to let businesses know I was out there and ready to go.  As it turned out most of the work was international in nature with customers paying professional fees, travel and accommodations.  The customers handled the local logistics for the seminars.

Why did I close my firm after 7 years?  As the years progressed it required more and more time to prepare materials as not being active in the industry (retired) required more and more research.  So when it approached the point of more work than I wanted to do in retirement, I closed the firm.

I would recommend it to anyone who has the initiative, fortitude, creativity and drive to start and run your own business!!!  Very rewarding!!!

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In the coming posts we’ll address the ever popular subject of Talent Management, that is, Capturing Talent and the many facets of Retention.  And the two share some common elements which you will find in the discussion.  As hard as one might want to draw a line between the two there are factors that overlap.  And as you read the discussion on this topic you might want to keep in the front of your mind that failure to attract and retain talent and critical resources can always be tracked to a management failure of some sort.  Process is important.  And, when the process fails it is usually on management’s shoulders.

In the end, the company needs to significantly differentiate itself, so much so that it eliminates other competing companies from the mind of the candidate.  No easy task considering the opportunities to screw up the recruiting and retention process.

As future posts discuss this topic, if you are looking for reasons why key resources quit the company, just consider why they stay and then consider the opposite.  For example, departures can be caused by lack of opportunity, poor communications, lack of challenge on the position, less than professional supervision, lack of career discussion and planning, lack of development and training and so on.  These factors cause departures, as well, are keys to retention. Get them right and retention probably won’t be a significant issue.  I used this graphic in seminars to capture some of the key factors:

They will be discussed in upcoming posts.

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You can’t pick your boss (usually)… some keys to success:

• Make him/her your partner through accomplishment and professional behavior
• Be comprehensive, data driven, flexible, creative, a planner, find solutions.
• Keep your accomplishments in front of your boss.  Written monthly or quarterly summaries will work…. also invaluable for the boss’s use and performance reviews and a database for updating CV’s
• Sponsor time to talk about your career.
• Be the bright spot in your boss’s work life, there are many who are not

If you have a miserable boss:

• Find the value in your work
• Make yourself valuable to other departments – build your reputation across the organization, through professional organizations, and peers in other organizations
• If you decide to make a change… consider… “am I running from, or to”  “To” is good!

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In future postings the blog addresses “Talent Management” that is vetting talent, landing it retaining it, and moving it. And, this information is for candidates and employers, as the processes and criteria employers use in the area of Talent Management are similar to the criteria candidates can use to evaluate employers.

Talent Management remains a favorite subject. This blogger has years of experience.  For years, mountains of money are spent annually by business and industry to teach, acquire tools, and techniques to address the ongoing challenge of Talent Management.  How much headway is being made?  Search the web on the subjects of locating, hiring and retaining talent.  This blogger did as it was one of my responsibilities to manage it.  Little has changed, you can find the same factors positively and negatively discussed today by leading  business authors, universities, consultants, and business organizations and statistics supporting the facts as to how difficult and complex it is to make headway managing talent.

First a related story:  The job was to hire a President and Country Manager for China.  The candidate list was vetted, and a final candidate (hugely qualified) selected to go through final round robin interviews with key functional executives. The process was well-defined – each executive team member had separate key questions, candidate CV, a schedule, position description, and a one-page summary of previous interview results, all provided days in advance.  When the candidate arrived in the office of the final executive on the schedule he was confused.  He said that he thought he was interviewing for the position of President / Country Manager, however the financial organization talked to him about an executive position available in the international financial organization. Go figure!  The company hired the candidate, great hire, great results in Asia over the years, as, President and Country Manager for China.

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Knowing the position of your salary offer in the salary range will tell you the company’s evaluation of your ability to handle the position on your starting date.  If you receive an offer of $3000, in this example the minimum / entry-level of the salary range, and you believe you are coming on board with significant experience, knowledge, and skills to perform position duties beyond entry-level ability, then What you need to know to negotiate a higher salary

When you receive a position offer, it is important to know where your new salary is in the salary range for that position.  For example, your new offer is $4000 / month.  And the company’s salary range for your new position is $3000 to $5000 / month; your offer is at the midpoint of the salary range.  Midpoints of salary ranges are the market competitive pay point for you position.  So your offer assumes that you are fully capable of performing the position requirements with minimal training.  If your offer was $3000, the company assumes you have entry-level ability and you require significant training to perform the full range of the work.

Why is all this important?

knowing the offer’s point in the salary range will give you some leverage to negotiate a higher salary.

This applies to your current salary with your present company.  You salary’s position in the salary range is indicative of the company’s evaluation of your ability to do the job, based on your skills, knowledge AND performance of job duties and responsibilities.

Creating a compensation structure is an involved, technical, and analytical process.  It is not uncommon for companies to utilize consulting firms and/or consulting firm research to develop and maintain compensation structures relative to the market for their specific industries.

Here is an example of a salary structure used across multiple functions. The salary ranges shown are annual salaries.

Generally, the following is the process companies or their consultants use to establish a structure:

Step 1: Determine the organization’s compensation philosophy, for example the midpoint of the salary range is the market competitive pay point.

Step 2: Conduct a job analysis to define position duties and responsibilities

Step 3: Group positions into job families

Step 4: Rank positions within job families.

Step 5: Conduct market research to determine the position’s competitive pay point (midpoint of the salary range)

Step 6: Create job grades

Step 7: Create a salary range based on research.  For example:

The formulas for a 30 percent range using the midpoint as the base are:

Maximum = Midpoint x 1.15                           Minimum = Midpoint x 0.85

Based on competitive data, ranges can vary in the percentages companies use to define Minimums and Maximums.

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