Recruitment

A recent study confirmed that recruiting a new employee has the highest impact of all HR instruments to the bottom line of a company. If you think about it for a moment it is logic. If you hire someone who may become an excellent employee or a future bad performer this is going to impact on the bottom line of your company.

The problem still is that critical talent is in short supply even in our current circumstances with high unemployment. The costs of a hiring mistake are high especially for managerial staff.

So how does a company get it right? The answer is commitment. The tools are out there – using them to achieve excellent recruiting just takes time and focus.

It may seem impossible to squeeze more time out of the day for recruiting. Then again, a bad hire drains away more time than any one of us would like to admit. It takes a few weeks to hire even a wrong person. What follows is loss of productivity, lost credibility of management and a wasted investment getting an employee on board.

Finally there is the investment in another search. All the while the actual work is still on hold. Whatever the results, the employee was hired to achieve results who are often no closer to completion than they were when he was hired.

Viewed from this perspective organisations can’t afford not to invest the additional time and focus for recruiting excellence.

In recruitment the following rule applies: the best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour.

Because of the nature of the recruitment effort there is a great deal of error involved in trying to predict a candidate’s future performance. It is impossible to be certain that a candidate will excel in this company at this time with these challenges. The best a company can do is to reduce the unknowns by hiring as closely as possible to the actual situation. Ideally the company should hire someone doing the exact same job in an excellent manner at another company. The further a company moves away from this situation the further it gets away from the likelihood of a good hire. Why is that the case? The answer is that the best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour. There may be someone in the stack of CVs who could be a great sales manager. He says he can do the job. The hiring team believe he can do a great job. Should they hire him? No. They should go out and find the person who already is a great sales manager. Because what someone has already done is a better predictor of future performance than verbal skills and interview behaviour ever could be.

Of course hiring the sure thing means missing out on the unexplored talent. The company will miss discovering a star. But it will also miss hiring a complete disaster. It hurts to reject people who might have been great. But it is devastating to hire someone who cannot perform.  

Contract

Contract

In my work as HR Consultant I meet a lot of companies as I solve staff issues for them. Very often when giving them advice on particular issues, like disciplinary issues it is wise for me to have a look at their contract of employment, just to make sure they are covered from all angles.

The answer I get time and again is that there is no need to look at our contract, it is fine and we have been using it for years. Still I insist on seeing the contract. Often there is a problem. Important clauses are missing or incorrectly worded. Sometimes it is just one piece of paper which states this is a contract of employment.

When I point out that it isn’t a valid contract, the answer is mostly: “Oh, but I really trusted the guy who gave it to us”. Yes, he probably is a nice guy, but he isn’t a specialist on employment legislation. He might have copied and pasted the contract from another nice guy and this is how you end up with something which will cause serious trouble when you don’t need it.

Once I saw a contract copied straight from the internet, it looked good at first sight but on inspection it turned out that it was a US Contract of Employment! This contract wouldn’t go down well before an Irish Rights Commissioner.

It used to be in Ireland that you didn’t need a contract of employment. It was all between employer and employee and whatever they had agreed, as long as it wasn’t too far off, was valid. This all changed when the EU Directive on Terms of Employment (Information) came into play and became Irish law in May, 1994. We have to face the fact that this piece of legislation is in play now for more than 18 years. Technically you don’t need a contract as a Statement of Terms and Conditions of Employment covers you, but most companies use contracts, as contracts have the benefit that both parties sign it.

As a minimum the following items should be addressed in a Contract of Employment: -

·         Full names of both employer and employee

·         The address of the employer

·         The place of work or a statement that the employee is required to work at various places

·         The title of the job or the nature of the work

·         The date of the commencement of the contract of employment

·         In case of a temporary contract of employment, the expected duration or in a fixed term contract the date on which the contract expires

·         The rate or method of calculation of the employer’s remuneration and details as to what intervals the payment of remuneration will be made

·         Any terms or conditions relating to hours of work including overtime

·         Any terms or conditions relating to paid leave

·         Any terms or conditions relating to sick leave or for payment due to incapacity as a result of injury

·         Details of pensions or pension schemes

·         The period of notice which the employee and employer is required to give

·         Reference must be made to any collective agreements which directly affect the terms and conditions of employment 

·         Employers are obliged to notify employees of any changes to their terms and conditions of employment as soon as possible but no later than a month thereafter

Furthermore an employer is required to hand over the company disciplinary and grievance procedure which need to be compliant with the Code of Practice of Disciplinary and Grievance Procedures. Most companies make this part of the contract of employment.

I presume you will dash off now to have a look at your contract, if you have any questions give a call at 065 7071933.