Will Your First Hire Be a High Performance Hire?
Planning is the key to successfully hiring your company’s first employee.

By Ken Mayer

New and growing businesses will face many challenges as the millennium unfolds.

Certainly one of the biggest is finding and keeping knowledgeable and motivated workers, particularly when you are hiring for the first time. Although many business owners discount the need to establish a planned approach to hiring and managing their first employee, before you launch your recruiting effort there are several key planning steps you should consider.

Plan First
In order to ensure consistently high-quality hires that meet your needs, it is critical that you clearly define and describe the position or positions you need to fill. Although nearly every employer groans at the thought of “job descriptions” and well-documented employee plans, successful employers know this step is essential.

Here are some pre-hire planning basics:

• Complete a position analysis for the position to be filled, including a review of all the significant position functions and the position’s role in achieving the organization’s goals.
• Identify the minimum criteria for the position (e.g., years of experience, education level, communication skills, etc.).
• Identify the performance goals for the position and how you will measure them.
• Define the key behavioral traits that you require, and that can be used in an assessment process to predict the candidates’ overall fit with the position.
• Design the best approach and format for interviewing, screening and comparing candidates. Be sure you review the legal limitations involved in interviewing and screening.
• Determine whether to use additional screening tests based on the selection criteria, and/or the technical competency requirements for the position.
• Select an approach for recruiting qualified candidates. Identify the best resources to generate a pool of qualified candidates.

Create the most objective process possible. You will find that the effort you put into the planning steps will reap rewards in the quality of employees you hire, and their willingness to stay with your company.

Pay and Benefits
Balancing the need to control payroll and benefit costs with the need to stay competitive in the employment market is not easy. Before you start the hiring process, establish the base pay range for the position, define how raises will be earned, and decide on any bonus plans that will apply. Also, determine the types and level of benefits you will offer, including health, dental, 401(k), disability, vacation, sick days and holidays. Comparative information is often available through inexpensive surveys of benefits provided by other businesses in your area, or you can get assistance from a benefits specialist.

Orientation and Training
You and your new employees will also benefit from an effective orientation and training program. Many first-time employers overlook the importance of welcoming and acclimating the new employee. The benefits to a well-planned orientation include improved morale, enhanced reputation as an employer, reduced turnover and a better-performing workforce. The most successful employers include assessments both before and after orientation or training, combined with tracking on-the-job behavioral changes in knowledge, skill and performance levels. You can directly link these elements to productivity, efficiency and effectiveness measures.

Employee Relations
Whether you have one or 1,000 employees, it is important to pay attention to basic employee relations indicators. If reviewed regularly, these indicators can be a source of valuable information and provide early warning signals of trouble before it becomes unmanageable. Benchmarks include:

•    Turnover – Monitor employees leaving your firm and the reasons.

•    Absenteeism – Track both absence and tardiness.

•    Complaints – Grievances, complaints and problems are important to quantify.

•    Employee Satisfaction – Informal, as well as formal, employee climate/opinion surveys can help monitor employee satisfaction. The feedback serves as a powerful tool for enlisting employee input on needed improvements.

Customer Connection
Regardless of your company’s type or size, whether for profit or non-profit, each employee must consider your customers first. Your employees must work together to monitor customer satisfaction and link it to employee performance and organizational measures of efficiency and effectiveness. Aligning customer, employee and organizational needs is critical to your ongoing success. If these three are misaligned, your business will experience difficulty in achieving its goals. Customer satisfaction is an outcome of employee satisfaction, which is an outcome of an organization that clearly understands and commits itself to the needs of all three parties.

Evaluate Your Employee Carefully
Determining what and how you’ll measure employee and organizational performance is critical. Carefully crafted measures coupled with ongoing feedback can identify performance successes and problems, provide insight into trends and conditions affecting employee performance, and help determine short- and long-term training and development plans. Exactly which measures are important will vary—the need for meaningful data will not.

Retention Is Key
Today’s workplace is changing dramatically, and companies are continually challenged to attract and retain high-quality employees. This effort is magnified by replacement costs ranging from 1.5 to 2.5 times an employee’s salary. Therefore, retention is critical from both a cost and a morale standpoint — high turnover and low morale are directly related. Employers who hire, orient, train and manage new employees based on a carefully conceived plan will develop employees who are more satisfied with their jobs and who are more likely to stay with the organization. But as the employer, you must take the initiative, take the time, put in the effort, and make a significant investment in your first employee.

Ken Mayer is vice president of consulting services for The Mayer Group, Inc., an Overland Park firm specializing in management advisory and coaching services, organizational performance improvement and human resource management. He can be reached at (913) 327-1900.