Tag: recruiting talent

The Characteristics Of A Strong Team

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If you want your business to be a success, you are going to have to ensure that you have strong teams running it, and a strong team as a whole too. That is not something that necessarily comes easily, but it is the kind of thing which you are going to want to focus on so that you can ensure you are producing the best work possible at all times. But what is a strong team, really, and what does it look like? In this article, we are going to elucidate on this by taking a look at some of the common characteristics of a strong team, so that you can hope to build and develop these in your own company.

Unification

A good team has to be strongly unified in some way or another. The most common and powerful way to do this is to try and find a common purpose or goal that everyone can work towards. Depending on the nature of the business, that might be the business’ overall goal or it could be something as simple as improving profits so that everyone can benefit. Whatever it is, ensure that everyone is happy to work towards it, and you will find that this helps greatly. You can achieve good unification through other means like peer mentoring for instance: visit steve’s website here for more on that process and how it might help your teams to become stronger and more unified.

Varied Talent

Being unified doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone is the same, however. In fact, you want and need there to be a good amount of variation if you are going to get your team to operate in the best way possible. The most important kind of variation is that you want your individual members of the team to each have their own role, which will depend on what their individual skills and talents are, whatever those might be. If you are putting everyone in the right place in this sense, you are going to find that you get a lot more out of them, and that your team therefore functions better as a whole. This variation is something that is always going to work very well.

Drive

Everyone in the team needs to have drive, and so much so that they need to drive each other onwards too. If you can make sure of that, then you are going to find that you are much more likely to achieve what you hope to achieve as a team, and that you can hope your team to operate in the best possible way. Drive can be achieved with a strong communal impetus, or by ensuring that each individual is happy with their work and knows the value of it. Both of these might prove important at different times, in truth, so be sure to focus on both of them if you want your team to operate as best as possible.

Ensuring You Retain Your Top Talent

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Top talent is hard to come by. While low-skilled or introductory workers are appreciated and can be trained in your ways, potentially even rising the ranks to the very top of your business, it can also be worthwhile to hire the very cream of the crop from time to time, as even regular consulting from individuals like this will have its limits.

No matter if you’re looking for new managers, or a new head of department, it’s important to note only learn how to appeal to them, but also to retain them. After all, headhunters are paid hefty sums of money in the corporate world to seek out talent to bring onside, largely for the same reasons you found them in the first place, only now they have been fully invested in on your behalf.

So, how do you convince someone to stay, but not as a bribe, rather as a forgone and natural conclusion? Perhaps following this effort can help all of our staff members feel satisfied in our roles. With that being said, please consider the following advice:

Worthwhile Incentives

No matter how worthwhile life is at our firm, you can bet that if the offer of a much greater sum of money is given to our best professionals, they will have little choice but to move. They have their families to think about, after all, and while it can seem as though the quality of life of an employee is very high thanks to a high salary, their living conditions and requisite bills will also go up. But more than that, it’s important to offer a more comprehensive and satisfying work experience, with incentives that make sense, and aren’t used as simple bribes. Click here to see the best thinking on this topic by far.

Responsibility

It’s true that your higher-ups will be more involved in your firm to begin with, but some firms do struggle to actually use top talent where they can, in the best possible way. Structuring responsibility in this vital context can be very important, then, because we need top talent to feel as though they have influence, and ability, and that their voice is valued. Otherwise, they are liable to become bored and leave. Think of how someone at the peak of their career would wish to operate. They wish to exercise their skills and improve. For that reason, opening a more collaborative environment between qualified individuals is an essential component of any excellent business path.

Innovation & High Standards

While you needn’t be the most innovative firm to attract top talent, it’s important to ensure that you keep up with the cutting edge of research, and that you push for the highest standards you can. We must always seek to improve. If top talent cannot be at the forefront of the industry, they will certainly feel satisfied helping build a firm to be better, and to reach higher and higher without losing sight of its primary vision. 

With this advice, we hope you can retain your top talent effectively.

Aspects Of Your Business That Will Change As You Expand

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When you first set up a small business, you tend to get stuck in a certain set of ways that you find effective in getting your startup off the ground and your business up and running. However, it’s extremely important to acknowledge that certain aspects of your business and its plan are going to have to change as your business begins to experience success and expand. If you stick with old habits, your company can suffer. Instead, you need to constantly assess what your company requires of you for constant progression and cater to its needs. This will help you to continue experiencing success, rather than peaking early on and then plummeting back down to the ground. Here are just a couple of different areas that you should reassess when your business starts taking off!

Marketing

You will have to engage with marketing from the moment you launch your first product. It is the process that helps the consumer market to be aware of your product and that also helps to encourage the consumer market to spend their disposable income with you rather than with competitors or anyone else. However, as you grow, you’re going to have to take a look at 3 growth hacks for content marketers. The more interest you raise, the more you have to keep on the ball with boosting the perception of what you have to offer. This will create a snowball effect that makes your brand a better known name. Interest gathers interest!

Staffing

First time small business owners tend to take on the majority of the work associated with their start up on their own. They generally take responsibility over almost every single aspect of their company’s set up and launch – whether this entails coming up with a unique and innovative product concept, choosing an appropriate name for their brand, creating an appealing brand aesthetic, or taking out copyright to protect all of this intellectual property. When they require work that they don’t quite understand to be completed, they may then decide to outsource some aspects of your work to freelance individuals or agencies. They will use these other individuals’ skills to manufacture their products, package products, conduct market research, design and set a website up, or various other tasks. If this sounds familiar to you, you’ll find that this could work well for a little while. But when your business really starts to take off and you start to become a renowned or recognizable brand, you are going to receive more exposure, generate more sales, and ultimately struggle if you attempt to continue to carry out all of your work alone. This is generally when you should start seriously considering taking on full or part time permanent staff members. If you fail to do so, you are highly likely to find yourself in one of two situations. The first situation is that you will become overwhelmed with the seemingly endless list of administrative tasks required to keep your company afloat. This will take up a huge bulk of your time and when you’re focusing on keeping your company afloat, you won’t be focussing on moving it forward. This will result in you falling behind when it comes to more progressive areas of your business, such as developing new ranges of products and marketing campaigns. The consumer market will quickly become tired of your current range and take their business elsewhere. The second option is that you will manage to focus on the more progressive aspects of your business, but you will then inevitably fall behind with administrative tasks. You’ll begin to have difficulty replying to customer enquiries or concerns, which could lose you sales and result in a tarnished reputation. You may also fall behind on actually packaging and delivering customer products – again, resulting in lost sales (as customers are likely to cancel their outstanding orders). As you can see, you will begin to have to take on staff and effective staffing is another aspect of your business that will need to change as you experience increased amounts of success

These are just two different areas that will inevitably need to change as your business starts to grow and expand. Change can be extremely positive, so it’s important to embrace it and work it to your company’s benefit!

Steps to Take When Recruiting Employees

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As a small business owner, you can’t take on all of the work that your business requires to flourish alone. You’ll wear yourself out and become overwhelmed, which will ultimately impact the quality of your work anyway! You’re going to have to take on staff to keep your business up and running as demand for your products and services grows. But how should you go about finding the cream of the crop when it comes to finding staff? Here are just a few different steps that you can take in order to find yourself high-quality employees.

Outsource the Process

If you don’t have all too much time on your hands, you may want to consider outsourcing the recruitment process. This will save you a whole lot of time and effort and a professional recruiter who is trained and experienced in sifting through applications and spotting great employees is much more likely to find the employees you’re looking for faster than you will alone.

Check Qualifications

If you are looking to fill a specialist job role, you should request that any candidates include their qualifications on their resume. Anyone who has impressive qualifications shouldn’t have a problem with this. In fact, they’ll probably be more than willing to show off their achievements! Now, there are a few different qualifications that you should look out for in particular. You could seek individuals who have academic qualifications relating to the area that the job role specializes in. Alternatively, you could also consider non-academic qualifications. If someone has undertaken an apprenticeship or more hands on course pertaining to an area you’re hiring in, this will be equally desirable, as not only will they have the relevant education, but they will have experience too!

Understand Overseas Qualifications

We are more than familiar with how qualifications work in our own countries – we know what the different courses on offer will endow students with and what different grades mean. However, finding out what overseas qualifications say about the holder can be a little more difficult. It is worth conducting research into this area though, as you don’t want to miss out on a great staff member through sheer laziness.

Offer Candidates Something Back

The best employees are going to be aware of their worth and will expect a few perks to come hand in hand with their position. If you are offering the lowest wage possible and no employee benefits, you can expect that the best employees are going to turn down your offer and walk into more preferable positions elsewhere. So offer them an incentive to choose your company over the rest! This could be better pay, more holiday, bigger potential bonuses, or any other positive offer.

Sure, recruiting new members of staff can be a relatively intimidating and daunting process, especially if you haven’t been through it before. But not to worry. As you can see from above, there are options that can simplify the process and land you with great employees in next to no time!

Taking On New Team Members: How To Find The Best Talent

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The truth is that in theory, hiring new team members always seems like a simple process. However, the fact is that realistically it is far from simple. It’s not just a case of posting an ad on a few job boards, cherry picking candidates and asking a few interview questions, it’s far more complex than that. As many of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs will tell you, hiring the right team will give your company the best chance of success. When a business fails, usually it is not simply down to who is at the helm, but who is on the team steering the ship, as it were. So what goes wrong?

According to business experts, far too often business owners hire team members to fulfill their short-term goals, instead of thinking further afield regarding their long-term goals. When it comes to the hiring process, you need to be thinking about your long-term business plan and how much growth you want to achieve. What this means is that if you only take on team members with the short-term in mind, you will need to constantly repeat the hiring process as your company grows and develops because your needs will change. Doing this is costly and time-consuming, and wholly unnecessary.

Of course, that doesn’t have to be the case. If you are mindful about who you are hiring and strive to take on the very best talent and choose people who you know will benefit your business in both the long and short-term, you shouldn’t have to deal with this problem.

Want to know how you can find the very best talent for your business? Read on for all the best tips and advice.

Make a plan

The first step to hiring new team members should be making a plan. As a business owner you are naturally eager to surround yourself with the best talent, but what you don’t want to do is rush the hiring process. That’s why making a plan is such an important step and one that should not be skipped. Don’t hire team members based on anything other than your business’s long-term needs and goals. By putting a plan in place, you can use your long-term strategy and business budget to ensure that you make the right staffing choices.

An example of this is that influencer marketing is big right now – everyone is talking about it and how essential it is for businesses. This may make new business owners feel like they need to hire an influencer strategist immediately, but this would be a mistake. You won’t be able to afford a strategist straight away – it will take time to build up the budget to be able to afford the strategist and the process of working with influencers.

By having a plan in place that acts as a roadmap in regards to the team members you need and when you need them, you can ensure that you are not hiring unnecessarily.

Be specific

Before you start listing your job openings online on networks such as LinkedIn, it’s important that you know exactly what you want and need. You need to create a specific job description – you need to know what you need. You don’t want your job description to read exactly like every other one on the site.

A generic advert means a generic number of responses. If you want to source all the most unique talent, you need to create a more unique job advert. Tailor your job advert perfectly to suit your needs as a business owner. Be clear about what you’re looking for and what you require. The more comprehensive the job description is, the better. You want to attract the right kind of people, so being specific is key.

In the personality traits section, ensure that you add some relevant information. What kinds of person do you require? Be clear about this – if you need a specific personality type you need to state this. Remember, it’s essential that you look for diversity – diversity in the workplace is vital for success, which is why you want to ensure that you are hiring a diverse team of people.

Put skill ahead of experience

Often, experience is something that business owners put ahead of skill, but it shouldn’t be. Just because someone has more experience that doesn’t mean that they have the best skills. So as a business owner, take the approach that skill comes before experience – just because a candidate is fresh out of university that doesn’t mean that they aren’t the best person for the job, and it’s crucial that you remember that.

Say, for instance, you’re interviewing two candidates; one with five years experience and the other fresh out of university. While the experienced candidate might have more industry knowledge, the graduate may have a range of skills that the more experienced candidate may not have. Courses change all the time, methods are updated, so often younger and more newly qualified people can be the better choice.

There you have it, a guide to how you can find the very best talent for your business when it comes to hiring.