Selection

What are the benefits?
Workforce planning:

• Enables you to accurately forecast your future staffing needs
• Determines the skills you need to keep your business competitive
• Identifies where and how to find the necessary human resources when needed
• Helps you successfully align your strategic business planning with effective HR programmes and activities
• Identifies potential within the business through succession planning
• Supports leadership training
• Assists with retention planning
• Enables you to easily fill key positions
• Ensures that your employees are doing the work best suited to their skills, in line with your business objectives

Have you ever found yourself in the situation where you have too many employees with not enough work to do, or too few employees to complete a customer order or deliver a service? Pod Consulting can show you how workforce planning can eliminate these occurrences.

Effective workforce planning ensures you have the right number of employees with the right skills at the right time.

What are the benefits?
Job analysis:

• Ensures that all functions performed by your employees are aligned to the business objectives
• Ensures that all employee functions contribute to the overall performance of the business
• Helps each employee understand their value and contribution to the success of the business
• Creates job descriptions and person specifications that are accurate and which measure relevant key performance indicators

All too often employers advertise a position without determining whether the role is actually needed or whether all functions of the role are required. Job analysis is the process of determining the actual requirements of a job – the duties and responsibilities and the personal requirements of the person needed to perform the functions.

The systematic analysis of jobs helps businesses to create meaningful job descriptions and person specifications. As well as giving a realistic overview of the role to potential employees, the process can also assist in restructuring or redesigning jobs to reflect organisational and economic changes.

Job analysis focuses on the business expectations of a role and ensures that the positions in the business can effectively fulfill those expectations.

What are the benefits?
Job design:

• Promotes employee motivation and increased job satisfaction
• Lowers absenteeism rates
• Decreases turnover and increases retention
• Leads to higher quality performance
• Reduces stress in the work environment

To get the best out of your employees, it’s important that they feel their positions are meaningful to the business, that they have responsibility for their work and that they receive feedback to help them determine the effectiveness of their performance. If employers can achieve this, the gains for both employees and the business are immense.

The design of a job should ensure that business objectives can be achieved by the job holder, while at the same time taking the job holder’s needs and capabilities into consideration.

What are the benefits?
Job descriptions and person specifications:

• Ensure that you, as business owner, fully understand what each employee is doing to achieve business objectives
• Assist when creating induction processes
• Aid training needs analysis in determining what skills and training is appropriate for each position
• Identify gaps in employee performance and enable these to be addressed strategically
• Ensure that employees have a clear understanding of what is expected of them
• Create measures in job descriptions which provide indicators to assess employee performance

A job description is a written description of a job, while a person specification outlines the personal requirements of a job, i.e. experience, qualifications and personal qualities.

Unfortunately, many businesses fail to provide job descriptions or person specifications for their employees – or the job descriptions are so far removed from what their employees actually do that they’re practically void of any usefulness.

Businesses must provide these documents for each position. Along with an employment contract, this is a legal requirement. While these documents are not set in stone, and every employer and job holder needs to allow for some flexibility, they do provide a basis from which to attract and select a suitable candidate. They can also provide key performance indicators (KPIs), which determine how well an employee is performing. They can be used during appraisal processes to determine whether an employee needs more support to achieve their job functions, training or a new challenge.

What are the benefits?
Computer skills testing:

• Accurately gauges a candidate’s computer skills
• Ensures an understanding of each candidate or employee’s level of expertise in relation to the job they’re required to perform
• Assists in identifying appropriate training for employees

We offer a comprehensive range of skills tests for Microsoft and Macintosh. Tests can be administered online or in supervised situations.

Results are clearly displayed in the feedback report, making it easy to tell if the candidate meets your specific criteria.

Common computer skills tests requested include:

• Microsoft Access, Excel, Office, PowerPoint and Word
• Adobe Photoshop
• Data entry and word processing skills

What are the benefits?
Structured interviews:

• Ensure that your interview process is up to twice as effective as non-structured interviews
• Help make the interview process more objective and fair
• Support you from a legal standpoint where candidates feel they were unfairly treated
• Ensure that through competency-based interview questions the focus of the interview is on the actual requirements of the position
• Prevent poor recruitment hires and related costs, including:
  • re-advertising
  • needing to recruit again if the employee leaves
  • time lost on training them
  • downtime and loss of productivity

How prepared are you when interviewing candidates for a role? Do you follow a structured interview format? Do you use competency-based questions that address the requirements of the role that you’re seeking to fill?

All too often employers interview candidates with little or no advance preparation and then wonder why the new employee doesn’t work out. Often, we make subjective decisions on candidates based on our mood that day, our first impressions, or how much we like or dislike the look of someone. We need to be more objective – we need to employ people who can do the job, as well as considering whether they’ll mix well with our current team and fit in to our organisational culture.

Structured interviews are twice as effective as unstructured interviews at helping employers predict a candidate’s performance once in a role – reason enough to standardise the interview process within your business.

Pod Consulting identifies the competencies required for each role and prepares interview questions for the appropriate level of candidate being interviewed. In addition, Pod Consulting prepares interview guidelines for each candidate to lead you, as the interviewer, through the interview process. The guides contain positive and negative behaviour indicators that assist you in evaluating the candidates.

What are the benefits?
Psychometric assessment:

• Enhances the objectivity of the selection process
• Standardises the process, thereby putting candidates on an equal footing
• Provides unbiased, reliable and relevant information concerning the likelihood of job success and job satisfaction
• Improves the chances of appointing productive, high-performing staff
• Reduces selection errors, staff turnover, training costs, lost opportunities and stress to individuals
• Gives structured and measurable insights into an individual’s likely behaviours and ability levels, their probable strengths and areas where further training or initial job support can be offered. This means training can be deployed more effectively

Extensive research has demonstrated that psychometric assessments are among the best predictors of job performance. By incorporating psychometric assessments into a selection procedure, businesses can enhance the likelihood of employing high-performing staff and reduce selection errors.

Personality assessments can highlight a candidate’s preferred interpersonal style, thinking style and coping style. They can emphasise a candidate’s preference in terms of how they like to manage or be managed.

They also determine how individuals are likely to operate in a team situation.
Ability assessments consider a candidate’s general reasoning capability (numerical, verbal or abstract) and their ability to critically analyse a situation (numerical, verbal), which are major factors influencing a candidate’s ability to perform their role.

Different assessments are used depending on the level and function of the role that the candidate is being considered for. For example, a sales representative may undertake an assessment that focuses on their sales style and what motivates them; a factory processor may be assessed on their ability to follow instructions; a general manager may be assessed on their ability to critically analyse written or financial reports, how they might manage a business strategically and their ability to form relationships.

Every business has different positions, a different culture and different requirements of their employees. Pod Consulting assesses every position and makes an appropriate recommendation for psychometric assessment based on the specific role.

Psychometric interpretations are verbally presented to employers and are accompanied by a written report. Employers have the opportunity to ask questions regarding a candidate’s ability to perform to specific competency requirements of a role. Verbal feedback is also given to every candidate.

What are the benefits?
Assessment centre exercises:

• Provide practical simulations that mirror job content – this method is one of the best predictors of job performance
• Allow you to evaluate likely job performance by assessing candidate behaviour in a simulated situation

We use simulation exercises during the recruitment and selection process that span a range of industries and roles, from entry level through to senior executive. All of the exercises that we use have been validated to confirm their job relevance.

Exercises may include an in-tray exercise for an administrator or an interview simulation of ‘meeting the media’ for a manager.

What are the benefits?
Competency-based references:

• Enable you to check that the information provided by candidates during interviews is supported by their previous employers
• Are specific to each position and focus on the competencies needed to perform a role
• Help to qualify the person giving a reference. It’s difficult for a referee who doesn’t adequately know a candidate’s experience and job performance to effectively answer the competency-based questions.

Often, when running unstructured interviews, employers don’t seek references of preferred candidates because they ‘like what they see’ – or if they do conduct reference checks, they ask generic questions which give no indication of how the candidate will perform on the job.

Not performing structured references of your preferred candidate may result in a poor hire. The candidate may have performed wonderfully during interview, but the reality is that they may have performed badly in their previous or current position. What the candidate says in an interview needs to be validated.

Competency-based reference questions relate specifically to the competencies that the candidate would be expected to perform. If the role requires competencies such as attention to detail, teamwork, strategic thinking or networking, these are the competencies that should be addressed when undertaking references.

Pod Consulting creates competency-based reference questions for each position that you’re recruiting for at the appropriate level.

If required, Pod Consulting will undertake reference checking on your behalf to ensure that referees are probed sufficiently to obtain a clear picture of the candidate’s performance.

What are the benefits?
Remuneration and reward programmes:

• Ensure that you offer remuneration packages that are competitive
• Provide employees with an equitable structure that supports fairness
• Encourage employees to perform well continuously
• Result in you attracting and retaining good employees
• Reduce unnecessary staff turnover

Deciding what to pay employees should not be a stab in the dark. Devising an effective remuneration strategy for your business will help to ensure that your employees are being paid fairly for their contribution to your strategic business goals.

What are the benefits?
Induction plans:

• Lower turnover
• Improve employee morale and motivation
• Reduce recruitment costs
• Minimise training costs
• Make learning the job easier for the new employee
• Reduce anxiety for the new employee
• Increase productivity

Every business, large or small, should have a well-planned induction programme. The more time that’s spent helping a new employee adjust to their new work environment, culture and role, the more likely it is that they’ll become an effective, contributing team member.

While an induction process is usually a mix of generic (about the company expectations) and specific (what the employee is expected to do in their role), the length and nature of it depends on the complexity of the job and the background of the new employee. Pod Consulting creates induction plans to enable your business to quickly utilise the skills and experience of your new employees, while helping them to fit in to your business, the team, the culture and role.