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 Business News | January 2008 
Finding (and Keeping) the Employees You Want
 Paul B. Brown - NYTimes
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| | (Alex Eben Meyer) | | |
In a tight labor market like this one, hiring good employees is only half the battle. You also need to make sure they stay.
That thought should be uppermost in your mind, even before you start looking to bring someone on board. Entrepreneur magazine offers some tips in an article by Chris Penttila.
Among them:
1. Start by attracting a better class of candidates. Reward current employees for recommending good applicants.
2. Be painfully clear about what the job entails. In other words, don’t paint a rosy picture if the new hire is going to encounter a bunch of thorns.
3. Make sure there is a personality as well as a skill fit.
4. Work hard to integrate them into the company. Setting 30-day, 60-day and 90-day goals is a good way to make new workers feel they are accomplishing something (providing they actually hit the marks.)
BAD NEWS BEARER
Most managers are bad at delivering a poor performance review to someone who is underperforming.
Pink magazine offers three suggestions about how to do it.
Rehearse: “Preparing your speech might prevent you from backing out,” Angela Boey writes.
Countering counterattacks: Think about how the employee could interpret what you have to say. “Hurt feelings can lead to defensiveness.”
Help: Offer training and other resources if you believe the employee can be saved. But set a definite timeline for seeing improvement and then review the person’s performance again.
TO LEARN MORE
Workforce.com is the Web site for the magazine of the same name that deals with all kinds of employment issues. You can gain access to the articles free by filling out a short but extremely annoying registration form. (Warning: If you leave out any of the material asked for, you will have to start the sign-up process from scratch.)
GOOD CALL
The site is heavy on advertisements for AT&T products. You can skip them. It is also filled with case studies where no matter what the problem is the answer is “buy/use AT&T products.” You can ignore them.
But once you get past all the commercials at www.att.com/OnwardSmallBiz you can find courses like Internet recruiting that you can sign up for, and articles on various topics like starting your business, by experts. The contents are fairly basic but it is accurate, helpful on the specific topics addressed, and free.
“According to modern myth, the typical entrepreneur is a 20-something man who is geeky, emotionally immature and one sleepless night away from fame and fortune,” Margaret Heffernan writes in More. “Pretty much everything about the stereotype is wrong.”
Ms. Heffernan, who has started and run three companies, notes that according to the Center for Women’s Business Research, companies owned by women are growing almost twice as fast as all companies.
“They employ more than 12.8 million people and spend about $550 billion on salaries and benefits and also generate $1.9 trillion in sales,” she said.
Her conclusion is that it has never been a better time for a woman to start a business, and that those started by older entrepreneurs have a great likelihood of success.
As for skeptics who point out that although women own 9.2 million companies, but only 3 percent of them have revenue of more than $1 million, Ms. Heffernan writes “but that overlooks the fact that only 5 percent of all businesses have revenue over $1 million.”
IN GOOD COMPANY
If you have ever wondered where small business fits into the big economic picture, Financial Planning magazine offers these statistics, courtesy of the Small Business Administration:
• Companies with fewer than 500 employees represent “99.7 percent of all employer firms.”
• They employ about half of all nongovernmental workers.
• They generate about half “of the U.S. private, nonfarm domestic product.”
• 53 percent are home-based.
• 3 percent are franchises.
Paul B. Brown writes the “What’s Offline” column that runs every Saturday in The New York Times and is the co-author of Dream Home Diaries that appears elsewhere on this site. paulbbrown(at)nytimes.com. |
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