Do Your New Recruits Fall Into Any of These Categories?

  

For hiring managers, interviewing candidates is an ongoing process. All through their journey, they come across a new face every day! A new individual with some unique traits and characteristics every day! It gives them a new experience daily!

Most commonly, there are a few categories in which every individual falls! However, some traits may vary, but on a broader picture, they somehow come under 4 categories.

Here are the listed categories that’ll help you make better decisions during the hiring process as well as it’ll help candidates to demonstrate their job-suitability that can help them achieve their targets and growth. 

Category #1 : 360 Degree Assessment Personalities:

Majority of your workforce belongs to this category. These individuals possess basic skills and undergo detailed assessment of their overall personality. This involves more in-depth behavioral and technical assessment rounds, and proper background checks. Such upgrade recruiting process is undertaken to ensure that no mistakes are made. The reasons why they are behind the top-performers include lack of motivation, cultural-fit issues, different working style, lack of team skills, etc. But, if they work on these aspects, they can surpass the top-performers!

Category #2: Resume-based Personalities:

These individuals are half way through just by their resumes! They possess the basic skills, qualifications, decent experience, good academic background, and a soothing personality. Hiring them is not a mistake, but a LIABILITY! You need to monitor and supervise them all the time to get that average performance out of them. Another matter of concern with this type is that they pollute the vicinity, demotivating other individuals as well. They can become the stars if treated well and given right situations and opportunities.

Category #3: Never Hire Personalities:

These are but obviously the ones that you should never hire. These are the actual under-performers and you will soon realize that you have made a fundamentally wrong decision by hiring them. It may happen because of certain reasons- they are not aware what exactly their responsibility is, recruiters didn’t paid attention to their resume or conduct a background check, or you misinterpreted the flamboyancy of the candidate.

Category #4:Star-performer Personalities:

These are the must hire ones, who regardless of any challenge or hurdle, bring out the best results. They are generally the leader types and suit well to the challenging leadership positions. This is the highly motivated and focused breed, like to jump on projects that are most difficult, gel along well with company culture and people.

These are the 4 types from which you need to fetch out the best ones! However, everyone wants the category 4 individuals to attain their business goals, it is important to have each category in your talent pool to make the best mix. You can transform category 1’s to category 4’s through your style of managing workforce and making under-performers the star-performers!

TeamWise is sophisticated Payroll & HR Management Software that performs comprehensive HR functions over the single interface. With the user-friendly GUI, you can seamlessly perform all routine tasks. The major features include Leave and Attendance Management, Payroll Management, Talent Management, Performance Management, Time Tracking, Grievance Handling, Recruitment Management, etc

How Workplace Culture Can Make or Break Your Employer Brand!

The one word that’s been trending in the corporate world and for all good reasons is “workplace culture”. Latest corporate researches uncover the fact that culture, employee retention and engagement are the top most challenges faced by business leaders.

 

But why?

 

Answer is quite simple! With global economy picking up fast, power is getting shifted from job creators to job seekers. Talented candidates get the power to select from multiple options available. So to be in the good books of these candidates, companies need to strengthen their employment brand and assure them that they are a great place to work at. Thus, now simply the job seekers are more interested in knowing what culture a company has, how happy employees and what steps they take to keep employees engaged instead of focusing on what the job description is.

 

Every company from a start-up to big conglomerate, are scratching heads to find out ways to prevent top talent from leaving. They are getting culture-driven and even realizing that focusing on this aspect gives significant payoffs!

Now the office spaces are becoming the vital part of making a great workplace culture. Mention of office space reminds me of the movie “Office Space” where the employees of an IT firm were disgruntled and repeatedly maltreated by the management. The real picture was quite true a decade back, but now businesses have started to believe that office culture and how management treats the employees, has a direct impact on overall company performance and productivity. To make a positive impact on these performance indicators, companies are increasingly taking the initiative to get more flexible, offer entertainment and lively office interiors for employees to help them release their stress and work more productively.

 

But, what culture actually means?

Is it the entire fun n frolic at the workplace?

Certainly not! It’s not always the fun activities going all around; it is also what happens at the floors when no one’s watching. It is set of behaviors, employee mind sets, values and how they feel about being a part of the company. Culture can also be demonstrated when everybody is on their desks and busy in their tasks. The very vibe of that place speaks loudly of its culture. The time at which employees get in and get out also explain the culture to a great extent.

The question is…How to achieve such culture at the workplace?

It is solely in the hands of the leaders. Their leadership demonstrates the culture. If you have a great bunch of true leaders, then it goes without saying that you have a great culture. If any discrepancy is there, work more on the leaders as leadership is the only driver of workplace culture.

With more tools available to engage employees, you can get on to the nerve of the matters that may affect the culture or put negative impact on employees. You need to understand that people are not motivated by perks or a good compensation only, it’s the passion, interest and zeal that brings them to work. So keep your employees happy and motivated!

How To Create A Lasting Onboarding Experience For Your New Hires ?

 

Traditional onboarding is often a stereotyped experience for majority of new hires because it is focused on extremely dry and monotonous processes, like filling a lot of forms, attending company induction, going through heap of new rules and regulations, etc. Almost every organization follows a similar process forcing new employees to experience ‘not so good’ first few days.

Surveys reveal that organizations who don’t concentrate or put efforts in making this process better, are more likely to face lower retention rates and significantly declined employee motivation and satisfaction.

Follow these simple yet effective measures to make the process a long-lasting memory for your new hires.

Don’t leave everything for the joining day

Make sure that all the necessary paperwork (which doesn’t include employee’s presence) is completed before the employee’s joining date. In this way, his/her first few days won’t be occupied in just filling out forms. Welcome your new employee with a welcome kit having all information regarding his/her role, company policies, common rules and regulations, etc. Also make sure that the team he/she is joining already recognizes the new hire by his/her name. This will give them a sense of friendliness and will help them in gelling with the team more easily.

Embrace technology to collect & reuse new employee information

No one likes to complete same forms again and again or provide the same information over and over again in different forms. Same goes with your employees; they too feel irritated when you give them a bunch of forms to fill and every form starts with, Name, Address, etc. Leveraging the power of technology and using online forms requiring candidates to fill information only once as well as automated workflows will help you remove the hassles and headaches caused during the on-boarding process. It will help employers / HR managers pull out some general information about the new employee and spare them the horror of filling never-ending forms right on their first day of joining.

Assign a mentor for work-related help and a colleague to guide them around

When a new employee joins an organization, he/she is not in any way different than a school child on his/her first day at a new school. Everything needs to be figured out, like where’s the classroom or the cafeteria, etc. Your new hire is also in the same confused state. Thus, assign one of his teammates to show him around and get introduced to every concerned person. Also, make sure you have a mentor assigned for him to help him get introduced to his work and how things are getting done at his new workplace.

Use gamification to make his/her first few days full of fun

Several organizations have started opting for gamification strategy to make their new hires comfortable as soon as they can. This includes several games that are played in the organization or within the team so that new employee can easily bond with the company culture and his/her colleagues. This is a far better way to have your new employees get comfortable, than providing them with monotonous presentations, lectures, reading materials, etc.

Taken as a whole, these simple tips will help your new hires connect with the organization’s culture more quickly and easily. Moreover, they will have a lasting experience with extensive satisfaction and motivation to work for the organization in a much better way.

Coupling Today’s HR With New Age Corporate Strategies

Those days are long gone when HR function could be handled by a single person. The typical “HR Lady” is being replaced by a complete staff of professionals having diverse roles & responsibilities. Today’s HR is seen as the catch for handling all aspects of employee relations and organizational culture. Furthermore, their role continues to evolve on a daily basis in the current employment environment.

Every business has its own strategies and visions in place but they somehow lag behind in bringing all things together at the same place and pace. Aligning organizational goals includes connecting to all employees individually, delivering to customers, operational excellence processes, measuring outcomes and rewarding the worthy personnel. This job requires certain talent that only an HR could possess and implement in a stipulated manner. 

“HRs are the makers and keepers of an organization’s culture; and they are the one who run the show”.

Here are some excerpts from what the industry experts believe HR teams must have:

• The HR team should contain people who possess business knowledge so that they can take decisions according to the business perspective. The team will then be more comfortable in talking about strategies and will understand the business operations in a better way.
• HR pros should be analytical and technology-driven so that they can suggest new ways of handling the workforce.
• HR has the responsibility of an overall organizational development thus they should be well-versed with the organizational capabilities, its design and strategic talent. 

Challenges Faced By The HR Role In Growing Markets

Unlike in mature markets like that of US and Europe, HR role faces many sorts of challenges with respect to growing markets (as in Asian countries). Mature markets are focused more on upgrading themselves to a higher level of technology or automating new processes. Whereas in other markets, in spite of having organizations that are growing really fast; there is a lack of required infrastructure, the consistent processes and the teams. Some of the challenges encountered by growing markets are mentioned below - 

• Availability of talent in the local marketplace
• Need to pay higher salaries as the price of scarce resources is way higher
• Binding talent with the organization
• Managing and measuring in-job performance
• Complex employment law provisions
• Difficulty in justifying technological investment

Other facts like facilities and infrastructure that definitely impacts overall productivity. Using smart analytics tools can help HR pros to overcome these challenges. It can help in identifying issues according to a specific country and develop customized approaches to resolve them. With the adoption of a Workforce Management System, HR pros can create a high performing workforce; keeping in mind the intangible things that form an organization – employee engagement and workplace culture.

Managing Employee Life Cycle Through The Finest HRMS Solution - TeamWise

 A lot of balls juggle at the same time when it comes to HR activities or managing your organizational workforce. To keep your business’s head above water, HR need to create transparency in communication, handle remunerations, manage time and labor for optimized performance, administer company benefits and track employee skills to predict and manage future needs.


Current era marks as the new additions in HRMS, unlike before when it was meant only for hiring and payment. Thus to drive your business strategy in the right direction, utilizing a great HRMS solution is a must. Generally, HR time is mostly taken up by administrative works, leaving minimum time for analysis, planning and improvement. TeamWise is all set to balance this dissimilarity and will equip your HR Team to work smart.


“Take care of your employees and leave all HR activities to TeamWise – Your One Stop Solution for effective Human Resource Management.”

With TeamWise You Can:

Perform hassle-free recruitment.

Automate and accelerate all on-boarding activities to ensure a perfect start for an employee to the corporate journey. Our recruitment solution helps in ensuring complete transparency and control throughout the hiring process right from initiating resource request to joining of the employee. This not only quickens up the administrative processes, but at the same time makes the candidate evaluation process easier.


Analyze individual’s performance.
It enables you to identify and analyze employee performance through reports based on monthly performance tracking defining their contribution towards the organization. This further helps the employers to take crucial decisions best suited for fulfilling organizational goals and make future arrangements.


Track employee in-out timings.

A fully automated system for recording and managing employee attendance which can be seamlessly integrated with any time tracking devices such as Card swipe systems, Biometric readings, etc. The employee in and out timings are properly monitored to analyze the employee productive hours which eventually helps in generating the remunerations according to that.


Manage leaves and leave requests.

Our leave management system helps employees send leave requests and get approvals without any hassles. On the other hand, employers are provided with the ability of tracking the applied leaves and get the necessary reports as and when required.


Have a smart compensation management system.

With the payroll system provided in our HRMS, it is extremely easy to manage employee payrolls and other financial accounts without any errors. The hectic job of calculating various taxes can be easily performed in a single click with utmost accuracy and 100% precision keeping the attendance calculation in account.

 Identify and retain top talent

This system provides you the enterprise-wide visibility of your workforce so you can easily identify successive employees for key future positions. It simplifies this complex task by reviewing monthly performances and ensures success and growth of your organization. The top talent identified, then can be retained by providing training for their overall development thereby nurturing company’s benefits.


Handle employee grievances.

The grievance handling system makes sure that employees’ problems are handled before they are escalated and employees develop a sense of trust in the organization and its policies. The process includes assigning of complaints and monitoring its status until it is completely resolved.


Have employees give and take feedbacks.

Feedback system is extremely important in making your employees realize their performance and growth. This system sets a platform to give and receive feedbacks from subordinates, managers and supervisors on a regular basis based on the individual’s performance.

Carry out the overall workforce management with auditable records.

The dashboard provides a bird-eye view of the overall insight of workforce potential. It enables HR managers and senior executives to analyze HRM practices, employee statistics, organizational success, reports and any upcoming tasks. Along with this, employers can identify their competitive advantages and the areas where special attention is required.

Experience the ultimate TeamWise Advantage

TeamWise caters the HR executives with the most powerful system that will help them in improving recruitment and selection costs, reducing administrative burden, deliver organizational benefits with improved profitability, enhance the quality of day-to-day management, create a best-fit workplace environment and most importantly build a better workforce culture.

What Kills HR Productivity??

As the roles of HR keep evolving in the organizational set-up, a clear fact is that HR is made to be directly related to strategic business planning and initiatives. 

A recent survey on what consumes maximum HR professionals’ time versus what must consume it revealed that the major threat to HR productivity is managing employees that includes solving their queries, resolving issues, maintaining discipline, and employee recognition. About 71% HR professionals admitted that their maximum time is utilized in handling these employee issues and queries. 

Other areas that eat up their time include recruitment and company compliance matters.  

Seasoned HR professionals have a more strategic role to play in the company rather than investing it in routine tasks. Their scope is beyond manual employee documentation or payroll processing or taking regular employee trainings. Moreover, these professionals also want to be in the roles of overseeing and managing workplace culture and involving in strategic workforce planning and other related activities. 

Though it is believed that HR people are well-trained, maximum HR respondents revealed that they take trainings at regular intervals as well as try updating themselves with weekly HR updates.

Thus, the findings have clearly emphasized the need to analyze the gap between the functions HRs are involved in and what are the ones they actually need to be instrumental in.  

These mundane HR tasks can be regarded as the productivity killers for seasoned HR professionals as they consume their maximum time and deter them from focusing towards more strategic roles. However, using all-automated HRIS software can scale down these functions and free the department from tedious manual tasks. 

The major functions include employee management, recruitment, managing timesheets, updating employee information, Leave And Attendance Management, performance management, etc. TeamWise can be an answer to all those HR professionals who are looking forward to improve their performance and enhance role within the organization. By getting adaptive to the technology and shifting routine tasks to the system can help witness a new age HR that is more strategic and has more power!

Is Your Talent Falling Prey To Biased Opinions?

HR professionals are keeping quite busy in compiling talent pool in their organizations! 

Companies are always looking out to identify, nurture, engage and retain employees who have the capability and potential to add real value to the organization, and thus HR teams always have their antennae out to identify those individuals. 

But, what you need to beware of is the single handed opinion of the line managers…

Your process of finding the best one may fall prey to a single biased opinion and that may lead to losing out on a potential candidate. Usually, HR’s have the tendency to take employee feedback from their immediate heads or seniors or line managers. These feedbacks, at times, could be a reflection of the inter-personal relation between the single individual and the manager. This could be quite different from the original one. 

For instance, if you take an individuals’ rating from his current manager, you can get a complete idea of what level of performer he/she is. In many cases, this could be true, but if you take his/her colleagues, team members and clients’ ratings as well, you never know you could have got a completely different rating! 

Thus, to overcome this bias, what you can do is trying using a well-planned talent-identification process where you can involve other colleagues, team members and customers to take an individual’s overall feedback. This should not be taken as an offensive practice, but can be used to identify the blind spots (if any) while judging an individual’s abilities. 

Therefore, HR people must try focusing on using the right data and analytics while making decisions as biased or partial opinions may make you miss out on some hidden internal talent. Talent Management System can be a solution, where employees can showcase their contribution, while their supervisors can rate them on the basis of what they have accomplished and not according to their personal opinions.

Are Purple Squirrels Always Recognized When Recruited or Can Be Recognized Later??

Every HR professional must be thrilled with the term “Purple Squirrel”. Quite a familiar term among HR industry, but to all those who don’t know: 

“Purple Squirrel is a candidate who has the perfect combination of qualification, work experience and skill set for any particular job position.”

 

This breed is one of the rarest one and every recruiter aspires to recruit these individuals with extreme talent and innovative capabilities. If recognized in time and given proper space, they can directly impact an organization’s growth and success instantly. 

However, they have those pioneering capabilities; they are mavericks and tough to manage and are definitely not good team players. They can only be well integrated if the team understands their intentions and is prepared to take on their unconventional ways. Despite of these facts, they are like the trophies for recruiters and can be the game changers for any business. 

 Growing recession has further increased the interest of recruiters in these candidates. It is obvious that business leaders want to put these pioneers in senior positions to get the ultimate solutions to business challenges. But, they need to understand that conventional ways of recruitment are not suited to find such talented individuals. 

Many perceive this purple squirrel concept as an unrealistic expectation and can be a reason for unfilled job positions. However, this is not completely true, but the traits can be even found through internal hiring or monitoring a candidate’s performance who has been giving outstanding results. They can be easily tracked through their high-impact work in the organization. Here only what the organizations need is an efficient Talent Management System that can monitor individual employee’s performance and bring it in notice of the management.

You may never know that you have a purple squirrel within your existing workforce, if you don’t have proper performance indicators that can detect the hitherto unrecognized talent.