Would your business benefit from its own retained HR service?

Our HR Focus retained HR support service gives you your very own retained HR support service with access to advisory support, whenever and wherever you need it.

For a small monthly charge, which is based on your number of employees, you can have access to advice and support with your HR problems, as and when they arise.

HR Focus will provide you with a quality HR service in your business at a fraction of the cost of an in-house HR manager, yet you can retain the ability to fully budget for your HR expenditure. 

Some features of HR Focus:

• Unlimited phone & email support
• Includes a complete HR health check for your business 
• Includes HR letter templates and advice on HR documentation, policies and procedures 
• Receive updates about new HR legislation, as and when they happen
• Available to you at any time during office hours 
• Includes some HR consultancy support every year
• Choose to add access to our cloud based HR software to help you manage  your employees. 

Some benefits of HR Focus:

• Answers to your HR queries as they arise
• Forecast possible obstacles to your proposed course of action 
• A quality HR service in your business at a fraction of the cost of an in-house HR manager
• A low monthly fee that depends the number of employees means that you retain the ability to fully budget for your HR expenditure 
• An initial 12 month contract, followed by a 1 month notice period
• Benefit from a 10% discount in the daily rate for any additional HR consultancy
• Benefit from the addition of our cloud-based HR software that has been designed to give you easy: 

Holiday booking: Automate holiday booking with a simple to use online approval process.
Control of sickness absence: You are able to record and track employee sickness to manage absenteeism.
Employee records: Keep all employee information in one central location.
Document management: Keep all employee related documents in one central location.
Performance management: Manage employee reviews and objectives to improve performance.
Get rid of your HR admin and focus on growing your business

But what do our clients say?:

"Gavin is perfect for a small business like ours. He brings some very senior experience to our business on super flexible terms which offer fantastic value."

"Gavin has a very pragmatic approach to solving HR problems and I have always found him to be professional; adaptable, and extremely reliable."

"He’s always on the end of the phone to advise and guide, which is invaluable in getting things done quickly"

"I have absolutely no hesitation in giving the strongest recommendation of his services. He is a key part of my team."

"I have already recommended Gavin Wetton HR to other businesses and am happy to continue to do so.”

For more information on HR Focus, our pricing structure, or to arrange a free HR software trial for your business with no obligation, please call us on 01954 201468 or contact us at info@gavinwettonhr.co.uk.

Trusted Advisory by ONLINECOACH can change your sustainability and quality for years

Trusted Advisory

ONLINECOACH is your strategic companion in all critical decisions and/or sophisticated planning's.

Our focus lays on decision makers, who are under daily pressure and responsible for the results.

The unique approach of ONLINECOACH is, to confront stakeholders or business-owners in their role with modern and high-value competences, supplementing their scope.

Strategic Senior Consulting means Trusted Advisory, keeping your organisation on target of maximum success.

Trusted Advisory focuses on the stakeholder, motivated to transfer knowledge and to coach for maximum success in all business segments.

In individual meetings and workshops we transfer external knowledge and relevant business experience to our clients. Furthermore we give an external view in order to provide new ideas for faced problems and to develop hidden potentials.

Personal Diagnostics

To accompany entrepreneurs in human resources development is the claim of ONLINECOACH. We integrate well experienced experts from practice and long-proven tools and methods.

E.g. we are accredited as mastertrainer in INSIGHTS MDI Personal Diagnostics for all procedures in Leadership Check, creating Jobprofiles by Benchmark, managing conflicts in speed management, coordinating Assessments in order to find the best staff and a lot more.

The way, an organization has established its operational future, decides the derived HR policy.

We will develop this HR-strategy together with our client, so that a complete concept of implementation for professional human resource management will result.

Knowledge Management

Handling relevant Knowledge carefully, results in actualising, selection and safeguarding your treasure, meaning the Knowledge, our client hold in his organization structure.

The target is reached, possessing an integrated Knowledge Management, if our client comply with relevant quality-aspects of your Knowledge-Organisation, as well complying with ISO Norm 9001/2014 – valid on 09/2015.

Relevant knowledge saves time and money, it helps to optimize our clients value chain more effective and efficient, enabling extensively his benefit.

Director
Trusted Advisor
Kristian Hamacher

Kaiserin Elisabeth-Str. 23/12
2340 Mödling - Austria

office@onlinecoach.at
www.onlinecoach.at

HR Has a Thinking Gap When It Comes to Hiring

If you want a better job or want to hire better people you need to read this article by Harvard Professor Todd Rose in Fast Company – How Job Descriptions Undermine the Hiring Process. Rose is the author of the new best seller, The End of Average. He specializes in the study of individual performance and is the co-founder and president of the nonprofit Center for Individual Opportunity. At the Harvard Graduate School of Education Rose teaches educational neuroscience.

Rose’s contention is that skills-based job descriptions do more harm than good. They don’t predict ability, motivation or performance since the context of the job is not considered. Rose defines context as the underlying circumstances of the job including the critical performance objectives, the culture of the company, the resources available and the hiring manager’s leadership style.

For example, Rose would consider something like, “Must have a CPA and 10 years of international reporting experience and be willing to travel 50% of the time or more,” as neither sufficient nor essential. Something like, “Lead the implementation of our worldwide reporting system on an SAP platform,” would be more appropriate. The idea is that if someone is both motivated and competent to do this work, the person has all of the skills and experiences necessary. Rose contends that by using skills-laden job descriptions companies create artificial barriers-to-entry preventing the best people from even being considered.    

About a year ago Professor Rose contacted me to discuss this idea and wondered how I developed Performance-based Hiring. He wanted to incorporate some of the hiring concepts in The End of Average. The premise of his book is to demonstrate that society is accelerating its shift to more customized products and services and away from the outdated one-size-fits-all mentality of the 20th century. The shift is evident in fields as diverse as product design, education and medical care. However, as Rose points out, other than those companies now using approaches similar to Performance-based Hiring, HR is still using prehistoric concepts to hire people in the modern age. 

In his book and in his article Rose provides an overview of how Performance-based Hiring can be a game changer for hiring stronger people. Here’s the instant summary:                            

1. Rather than describe the person you want, describe the job you want done. When opening a new requisition define what the person must achieve in terms of performance in order to be considered successful. One example cited in the book is how Callum Negus-Fancey, the CEO of Let’s Go Holding in the U.K. (a brand marketing form) hired an HR leader by defining success as, “implement an HR system from scratch that could meet the needs of a bunch of highly creative out-of-control marketing types.” In the book you’ll discover how and why he hired a pharmacist for the job.
2. Convert behaviors, skills and competencies into outcomes. During our first conversation Todd asked me how I convert universal competences like good communication skills into a performance objective. I suggested that any competency can be defined by determining how it’s used in the context of the job. For a customer service rep good communication skills means listening to the customer’s needs and figuring out a course of action. For an engineer it’s working with product marketing and explaining how design specs need to be modified to meet customer requirements. If you don’t have this context, assessing a person’s communication skills is based on the interviewer’s perceptions and biases. That’s how bad hiring decisions are made.
3. Focus on thinking skills and comparable performance, not identical experience. As part of the interview it’s important to get an example of a comparable accomplishment for each performance objective. To handle any gaps I also ask candidates how they’d address work they haven’t done before to understand the person’s problem-solving, thinking and planning skills. I refer to this as the Anchor and Visualization questioning pattern. This is also a great technique to evaluate leadership and potential.

At the end of our conversation Todd asked me if I thought the current shortage of talent is attributed to a national skills gaps. “No,” I responded, “we have a thinking gap, and we’ll continue to have one as long as people are force-fitted into ill-defined jobs.” Todd agreed. His research proves it.

_______________________

Lou Adler (@LouA) is the CEO of The Adler Group, a consulting and training firm helping companies implement Performance-based Hiring. He's also a regular columnist for Inc. Magazine, SHRM and BusinessInsider. His new Performance-based Hiring mini-course is now available on Lynda.com. His latest book, The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired (Workbench, 2013), provides hands-on advice for job-seekers, hiring managers and recruiters on how to find the best job and hire the best people. 

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When should you hire an HR Head for your Startup?

This post was triggered by a conversation with the Founder of a startup that has been reasonably successful in proving their concept and is now gearing up for scaling up. And as it usually is, finding and hiring a lot more people than they currently have on their rolls is one of the ‘to do’ lists for the Founders.

Having heard from others how challenging it is to get people for a startup, they are thinking of hiring someone appropriate to handle their HR – an HR Head.

My suggestion to them was - do not hire the head of HR at this stage, but outsource it to an ‘HR services provider’ (not a recruitment agency… but some agency like Plug HR which offers managed HR services).

The reasons for my suggestions are as follows:

First 50 employees are critical

The first 50 employees that you hire will define the personality of your organisation, which will gradually become its culture. By personality, I do not mean physical appearances in a person, but things like their passion, commitment, ‘niceness’, communications skills, etc.

At the starting up stage, you are unlikely to be able to hire an HR head who has the maturity to understand the nuances of the personalities that you need to seek in initial employees. In fact, the Founders themselves may not have the experience or understanding of what personality to define for their brand. And therefore, what they need is someone with solid experience who can guide them, which is unlikely to come from the level of seniority that they can afford at the current stage.

Startups may not be able to hire the most appropriate level of experience

You are most likely to attract an HR head, whose current experience is not sufficient for him/her to become an HR head in a larger organisation. I.e. In your effort to get someone to head your HR function, you will end up promoting someone to his or her level of incompetency. And neither is that good for the person and nor will that provide you the resources to hire right.

Hiring the first 50 employees is more than managing the process of finding, recruiting and on-boarding more people efficiently. And for this, you need someone with the experience of building teams across organisation and across different stages.

Startups evolve and roles change

One of the mistakes I have seen startups do is to hire someone senior for their current needs, and as the business evolves or pivots, the organisation’s needs change and some of the senior hires may not be relevant for the revised direction. E.g. if a startup was initially targeting large enterprise clients based on their initial success, and if they subsequently change the model to target the SME segment, a head of sales who was brought in to target large enterprise clients may neither be excited nor competent to handle sales to SMEs. The skill sets, competencies, experiences and, most importantly, interest areas could be totally different.

Now, if the startup has hired the head of sales, they would be stuck with a round peg in a square hole. And as we tend to do in India, instead of disengaging, we would ‘adjust’ the person in some role and try to make the relationship work. Some people may evolve to the new requirements, but this ‘learning’ could have ben avoided had you hired only after the variables in the business were well defined. Likewise, hiring ‘doers’ and hiring ‘managers’ require different skills. In the initial phase of the business, your company is more likely to hire managers, some of who will gradually progress to be heads of their respective functions. An HR person who is excited about hiring this high-quality talent may not be as excited about hiring the next 500 people over the next 2-3 years, who are most likely to be doers.

Therefore, my suggestion to startups is for the Founders to take on the ownership of critical functions as much as possible. They should seek advise from mentors and create an advisory board of relevant people to guide them. Wherever possible, outsource non-core functions so that they can hire someone, once they have decided on the longer-term road map. Also, hiring later also gives them the resources and respectability to hire someone more experienced than they can get at the earlier stages.

Of course, as in every aspect of business, there are no rules. Many companies have hired heads of different functions at the beginning of the journey, and they have jointly built formidable organisations over a period of time. But usually, these companies are headed by Founders who are super good sales persons and passionate individuals, able to get a buy-in into their dream by individuals who can bring in the maturity and experience. And that’s rare.

For more articles, please visit my blog - The Hub for Startups.

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