Best practices for skill-based hiring, on-boarding, managing, and team building to help employees perform their best in every part of the employee life-cycle.
Everyone knows, your people are your business. By integrating best practices for the whole employee life-cycle, from hiring, to on-boarding, to sustaining team performance, you are investing in the core of what makes you successful.
Hiring
Skill-based hiring is based on the premise that the best predictor of future performance is past performance. It is the most popular and effective of hiring methods used by 80% of employers. Rather than hiring for a certain educational pedigree or on the basis of whether you get along with someone (i.e. if you want to have a beer with them), skill-based hiring is a method for identifying what you need a new hire to do with what candidates have shown they can do or show a willingness to learn.
As a KornFerry certified instructor, I offer coaching and team training in the methods for identifying and evaluating candidates on skills they will need to succeed in the job, including competency modeling, writing skill-based job descriptions, interviewing preparation, and evaluating candidates.
I offer coaching for managers and others managing a hiring process. Engagements are highly individualized to help you and those responsible for building your team identify and clarify what it will take to be a productive member of your team. Then I help you use tools to attract, interview, and evaluate who has the skills and capacity to thrive in this job. Contact me to discuss your needs.
On-Boarding
On-boarding is where you and the candidate both begin to fulfill the promises you make during the hiring process. Most employees set up patterns that determine whether they will succeed or fail within the first three months of employment.
There is a lot a manager can do to help their new hire adapt to the challenges of their new job. By investing their time in the first few weeks, asking the right questions, co-creating a learning plan, and engaging in essential conversations, you can set your employee up for success. I offer team training and individual coaching for managers working with new team members, complete with sample agendas that help you initiate the right learning at the right time. By week six, you should have an employee who is starting to be productive, to return value, and moving toward becoming an integral part of your team.
Supporting and Inspiring Your Team
Most of your time will be spent supporting and hiring team members and working to get them productive. When the manager realizes that the better their team performs, they better they perform as a manager, they become much more interested in supporting and inspiring their team.
There are two reasons that employees don’t perform well. Either they can or they won’t. If they can’t, the need training. If they won’t, they need motivation. The manager needs to diagnose each team member and find out the best combination between motivating and training their team to be their best.
I offer two team trainings to help managers diagnose and find the best way to approach training and managing their team.
- Supercharge Your One-on-Ones: Done right, one-on-one meetings between a manager and direct report are the best and most efficient way to improve productivity on a team. This presentation guides managers in conducting intentional meetings to accomplish the four most important goals of a manger: gather information, problem solve, support, and make decisions. I offer tips to make it highly effective (for example, the direct report makes the agenda), and productive (how to help them problem solve and when to step in with a strategic solution). I help them avoid micromanaging and instead, how to develop employees who are increasingly effective in solving their own problems.
- Motivate Your Team Workshop: Once a manager is having one-on-ones, they will know who needs motivation. This workshop breaks down what motivates different people, and how to assess your team to find the motivation that will work with each one. Participants learn the main motivators of behavior, how to spot where your team members are on the motivation spectrum, and how to approach each team member to move them to higher levels of motivation.
For Individual Job Seekers
I offer job search coaching including: resume and LinkedIn profile review, understanding Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), how to optimize your resume for particular jobs to increase your chance of getting through to a person, learning to use AI to enhance your resume, interviewing preparation, coaching for salary and benefit negotiations, and coaching through the first 90 days of the on-boarding process to ensure success. Wherever you are in your job search process, contact me for an individual consultation to help you make the most of your next opportunity.