At its best, an internship agreement offers huge benefits for both your small business and the intern you hire. If you’re a local company or a start-up firm in need of some extra hands, there are plenty of young workers out there who know they need some real world experience if they hope to land a stable position after they graduate. At this point, they may not have a deep background in the field or any specific skills, but they’re eager to learn, they want to make a good impression, and they’re willing to accept lower compensation in return for some practical immersion in a workplace setting.

The intern relationship can be win-win for everyone. But only if you handle this delicate arrangement properly. If you approach internships with the wrong expectations, you might end up with headaches, or worse.

Selecting the Best Interns

If you’ve decided an intern is right for you, contact local schools and colleges and see what programs they have available that can connect students with employers. Let the school help with the screening process, but make sure you complete your own due diligence as well. Review resumes carefully and conduct thoughtful interviews just as you would with a full time applicant. (Do NOT ask for passwords or social media profile access). During the interview stage, it’s okay to be a little gruff with potential interns or overstate the challenges of the position, almost to the point of driving them away, since this can test their level of determination without causing any harm. 

Your Internship: Paid or Unpaid?

To avoid any potential risk of misunderstandings, and to protect your reputation and yourself, both legally and ethically, pay your interns. You don’t have to break your hiring budget, but even a small stipend sends the message that you value your employees and you take your business seriously.  

If you can’t afford even a stipend or minimum wage, make this clear upfront, and recognize that you may have difficulty retaining interns who are drawn away by other offers or more pressing responsibilities. On both sides of the relationship, payment adds dignity and a sense of obligation, and it can lend weight to your instructions and expectations.  

The Care and Feeding of Interns

Be very clear about what you expect your intern to do. If you overtask him or her, be prepared to clean up a mess later, which can be costly and time consuming. At the same time, taking a calculated risk and challenging an intern can have a huge payoff if she succeeds and gains confidence.

Above all, remember that interns are young and have limited experience with the working world. So it’s up to you to keep every aspect of the relationship healthy and positive.  Don’t expect your intern to call the shots or recognize when something is off base. And no matter how enthusiastic and obedient he may seem, be careful not to take advantage of this and become exploitative.  Just because you have eager interns lining up at the door doesn’t mean you have free rein to become disrespectful, hyper-critical or overly demanding. Take responsibility for the intern’s destiny as well as your own, and make sure she’s getting what she needs from the experience, just as you are.

For more help finding interns, keeping them, and making the most of an internship agreement, contact the staffing experts at Merritt and arrange a consultation.

The summer sun is slanting through the plastic blinds of the office and the grey cubicles are bathed in a happy light. Casual Friday hems are moving north of the knee. Beautiful weekends seem to result in a rash of mysterious sick days on Monday. And on some especially lovely afternoons, the office is a ghost town by 4:59.

What’s going on? Summer in the workplace, that’s what. A beautiful season for life, fun, family, friends and fresh air. But not such a beautiful season for bottom lines.

When the summer starts rolling in and you have a business to run, your valuable human capital starts to seem a little less valuable. Daydreams set in, lunch hours get longer, and vacation schedules don’t always coordinate with company needs. So what can you do to keep your team engaged and focused between now and September? Try these helpful tips.

Keep Employees Focused During the Summer Months

1. Pick your battles. Don’t try to win every single warm weather-related conflict. If you really feel that sandals represent a serious dress code violation and undermine productivity, take action. But be realistic and be willing to let some things slide.  At the same time, when you’ve chosen to crack down on a certain issue, stand firm.

2. Control vacation schedules. Make sure you have a protocol in place for requesting time off and make sure your employees understand and follow it. Don’t let the stress of managing overlapping vacations get the best of you, and don’t let it compromise your commitment to your clients and customers.

3. Anticipate trouble ahead of time. If you know that a popular baseball game will happen next Friday and you suspect that many employees intend to leave early, put a plan in place to make sure the work gets done. Announce your plan to your employees well before the afternoon of the big game.

4. Make use of your mobile resources. The magic of modern technology allows us to stay in touch with employees when they’re on the go. So don’t just ignore that phone or Blackberry. Pick it up and reach out. Everyone in the office—including you—can get more done when communication and file sharing happen from anywhere.

5. Recognize that in the long run, employees who feel respected and trusted will work harder, care more, and demonstrate greater loyalty than those who feel oppressed or treated like children. Rein in the urge to become a dictator, and give your employees enough time to balance work and life. If you do this, they’ll pay you back by being better adjusted, better able to make commitments on their own terms, and more likely to think about work when they aren’t physically in the office.
For more help with staffing, retention and talent management, talk to the experts at Merritt. We can help you keep your company goals on track no matter the season.

In an earlier era, both large and small companies could effectively control workplace brand management with a few simple steps. As long as your employees didn’t publicly embarrass you and your website looked positive and legitimate, it wasn’t hard to attract the interest of a pool of talented candidates. And once you gathered a stack of applications, basic negotiating skills would suffice when it came to making salary offers based on budget resources and candidate experience.

In recent years, things have changed. The availability of online information has allowed candidates to become far more savvy about which companies they pursue and which job offers they accept. To stay ahead in the race for talent, make sure you maintain strong control over your workplace brand. And make sure your recruiting efforts stay positive, tightly-targeted, and appealing to your core candidate audience. Here are a few considerations to keep in mind as you shape your brand and protect your reputation.

Understand How Information Travels

The most talented candidates don’t have to settle, even during a bleak economy. Just because you reach out to them via your targeted posting doesn’t mean they’ll apply, and just because you make an offer doesn’t mean they’ll accept. Confident, savvy candidates look before they leap. This means they’ll run an online search of your company’s name and they’ll read at least the first three or four results they find before they make contact. Once they’re more invested in the application process, they may also search for the names of your managers and top executives.

Sites like JobVent, JobBite and GlassDoor often appear in these searches. These are forums where current and former employees can post anonymous reviews of a company’s workplace culture. Reviews on these sites can have a strong impact on the decision making process of a talented candidate, so you need to know they’re out there and you should probably know what they have to say.

Control Your Brand at the Source

Both prospective and current employees can easily keep track of online gossip and issues related to your company’s reputation. And once a few negative remarks appear in the public sphere, it can be very hard to limit their effects. Bad press can rapidly be reposted to multiple sites, and not all of these outlets can be contacted or influenced. So make sure you control your brand at the source. Regardless of what’s being said online, is your company a fair and honest employer or isn’t it? Are your compensation decisions appropriate and aboveboard? Do you treat your employees with respect? Do you cultivate their skills and invest in their careers? Do you work hard to protect their job security? Do you extend respect to your customers, your partners, and the larger community?

If you don’t care about these things, be careful. Your reputation is at stake and you’re more exposed than you may realize. If you intend to compete for top talent, you’ll need to generate some positive press to compensate for the negative, or you’ll need to make some core decisions and re-evaluate your approach to the recruitment process.

For help navigating the complex landscape of workplace brand management, contact the staffing experts at Merritt and arrange a consultation.

The Facebook generation, also called the Millennials or Generation Y, represent the youngest members of the adult workforce. Whether we position them between the ages of 18 and 25 or between “recent high school grad” and “less than five years on the job”, these are the newbies. They grew up in a digital age, they don’t remember a world before email, and they were born closer to the millennial transition then the rest of us (though the true millennials won’t graduate for a few more years.)

Sometimes younger workers demonstrate common characteristics regardless of their era, and like all young employees, millennials are known for their energy, naiveté, and optimism. But there are a few trends that seem to set this crop of young workers apart from the rest. Recognizing these patterns can help managers better understand what drives millenials, which can help companies effectively coach, develop, and retain them.

The Facebook Generation: Where Do Millennials Work?

Millennial workers are comparatively well educated, and most of them are aware of this and proud of it. According to the Pew Research Center, 69 percent of them already have or are working toward college degrees. But like all generations of young workers, their jobs don’t often require degrees. While they’re still in school or just after they graduate, a large number of millennials hold non-degree positions in retail, hospitality and food service. So they know what it’s like to work hard in low-paying manual positions, often because they’re still doing it.

Facebook Generation: Ambitious (In Ways We Sometimes Weren’t)

Millennial workers list technology, education and finance among their top ten preferred fields. But they’re drawn to fun and flexibility, which means they don’t always enjoy the rigidity of traditional corporate workplaces. Many millennials navigate this by taking their skills in an entrepreneurial direction after they graduate from college. A disproportionately high number of them steer clear of Fortune Five Hundred employers and place their focus on starting small businesses. They want to own their own enterprises and are often unafraid of the requisite risk.

Millennials: The First Generation to Truly Mix Their Personal and Professional Lives

Facebook can be a business tool as well as a toy, and many millenials are finding ways to turn social media to their advantage at work. But even when they aren’t using Facebook to build client contacts or stay in touch with their teams, they still spend time on it during working hours. Wise managers recognize this and find ways to ensure that employees, while staying connected, are making the best use of company time.

For more practical management tips and insights into the millennial generation, contact the staffing experts at Merritt. We can help you find ways to coach younger workers, channel their energy, and offer them the support they need without losing focus on your company’s long term goals.

A “job description” is a common term that actually has a specific legal meaning. When an employee steps into a new position, it’s better for her and better for the company if she knows exactly what she’s there to do. So her position, and every position, should have a corresponding description on file that lists all relevant duties, the role the position fills within the larger company, and how the person who occupies the position will generally be evaluated.

Job descriptions should be multifunctional. If a question ever arises about how to word a posting, how to review an employee, or how to determine if it’s time for a change to either the position or the employee who occupies it, the first step should involve reaching for the file that holds the job description. A great description can (and should) be referenced often for all kinds of reasons.

In addition to being multifunctional, great job descriptions should be clear, unambiguous, and legal.

Elements of a First Rate Job Description

Required Skills

This part of the job description will help hiring managers as they staff the position, especially if this is happening for the first time. In this section, List the knowledge and skills that the position will require, beginning with the skills that are indispensable, followed by those that are optional or will be used only occasionally.

Stay brief and focused. Instead of listing twenty different clerical tasks and corresponding software programs, it might suffice to say “working/ expert knowledge of the entire Microsoft office suite, specifically Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.” Instead of listing every aspect of interpersonal communication, list “the ability to network and build new accounts by engaging socially with clients,” or “The ability to manage a large team with different working styles and frequently conflicting goals.”

How the Job is Actually Performed

In this section, describe the function of the job within the larger company. If this employee will face a broad, overarching task that supports the enterprise as a whole, discuss that task here. For example: “Employee will support the International Business Development team in the effort to build client contacts overseas,”  or “employee will assist the General Manager with daily tasks related to staff scheduling,” or “employee will review all outgoing mass communication materials for tone, content, grammar and accuracy.” 

This section will also briefly describe how these tasks are carried out. If the material to be reviewed will come in from the Communications Department and will be handed off to the Printing Department when complete, include that information here.   

How the Employee Will be Evaluated

This section will help prevent potential conflict and confusion during the annual performance review process. It can also help mangers determine when employees are ready for promotions and pay raises, and it can guide mentors as they work to understand mentee strengths and areas in need of improvement.

All aspects of a good job description should be in compliance with legal guidelines; otherwise they may expose a company to lawsuits and accusations of discrimination or employee mismanagement. If you aren’t sure you understand the legal implications of a given job description, talk to an attorney before staffing the position. 

For additional help with staffing, hiring, or general HR guidelines, contact the team of experts at Merritt and arrange a consultation.

Before the modern digital age, recruiting efforts were focused on cultivating a workplace brand and shaping job postings around a target audience. Employers followed a path to success by simply identifying a specific candidate market and then establishing a workplace culture around that market. This is still a foolproof method for attracting the attention of well-matched candidates, but the resources available to recruiters are changing rapidly in the age of social media. Are your recruiters making the most of these new tools?

Using Social Media to Identify Your Target Audience

Before you put effort into expanding your online presence and shaping your workplace brand identity, you’ll need to make some decisions about the candidates you’d like to attract. Who exactly are you pursuing? Are your ideal candidates young people or mid-career professionals? Are they funny or serious? Relaxed or driven? Competitive or team players? What are their professional and personal goals? And what online resources do they rely on during the job search process?

Your social media campaign will ideally include a list of social media profiles, an active blog, and the inclusion of some video and multimedia content on your website. You’ll want to direct these brand builders to the right candidate population.

Using Social Media to Build Your Workplace Brand

Once you’ve isolated your target audience, you’ll need to take active steps to get in front of these candidates with brand identifiers that set you apart from competing employers. A successful workplace brand starts with a strong, consistent, and functional culture. It’s a hard to portray your workplace as fun and relaxed if the opposite is true. Keep an eye on your culture and maintain pressure in a positive direction. Then use your social media resources to present an image of your workplace that reflects your chosen brand. 

1. Start an active social media feed for each open position. Teams or departments with open positions should have Facebook or Twitter feeds that are updated on a regular basis in a tone consistent with your brand.

1. Each open position should also have a blog. This is less expensive and complex that it sounds. A simple blog can be started in minutes and maintained for free through Blogger or WordPress, and a link to the blog can be embedded in job postings, on the company website, and within social media profiles.

1. Keep blogs and profiles active with content like 1) day-in-the-life postings illustrating your company culture, 2) short videos of the hiring manager discussing the position, the workplace, and her own background, and 3) additional information about the company, industry news, and links to similar open positions.

For additional guidance with the recruiting process, contact the experts at Merritt and arrange a personal consultation.

Your website is the public face of your business, and depending on your industry, it may be the only thing customers take into account before making a buying decision. A company website can weigh heavily with potential employees as well. Chances are, unless your name is internationally known, talented job applicants will view your posting and then immediately visit your website. What they find there will determine their next move.

So how can a small business with a shoestring budget build a site that appeals to both customers and high quality job applicants? Here are a few quick tips.

Your Small Business Website: Appealing to Customers

We all know that a website should be clear, navigable, and visually attractive. So by all means, get rid of the confusing links and the ugly clutter. But once you’ve done that, what comes next? You may not have a degree in marketing or the budget to hire a professional digital marketing firm, but you do have your native wits and a deep understanding of your own business model. So try this thought exercise:

Say you sell furniture. Picture a customer clicking onto your site. Should the site convince him to buy furniture? Or should it convince him to buy furniture from you? Right now?

To answer this, you’ll need to understand your target audience. Determine which type of customer you specifically cater to—The shopper who already plans to buy something and has his wallet ready, or the browser who doesn’t know what she wants until she sees it. Once you’ve answered this question, make sure your shopper sees a professional, reliable furniture dealer he can trust. And make sure your browser sees beautiful images that invite her to settle into the elegant chase lounge in the sunny breakfast nook in the life she’s always wanted.

Your Small Business Website: Appealing to Job Seekers

To appeal to job seekers, apply the same principle. Understand your target audience. Or in this case, the kind of applicant you’d like to attract. Picture your ideal applicant in your mind. What is she looking for? Is she meticulous and intense? Or is she a laid-back free thinker? Is she outgoing or withdrawn? Innovative or by-the-book? 

Tailor your website to appeal to this imaginary applicant. If you want employees with a sense of humor, make sure your text and images stay on the lighter side. If you want employees who are driven and relentless, your website should convey this kind of workplace philosophy. 

To Appeal to Both Customers and Applicants

To get your message across to both applicants and customers, use every tool at your disposal. Each of the following aspects of your site should be chosen with care and attention:

The tone of all written content 
Fonts, motifs, and elements of design
Specific photos and imported images
Sounds and videos
Testimonials.

Review each of these items with your target audience in mind. The key to effective marketing is control, so be deliberate and make sure your site contains no accidents. Once your design is complete, stay open to change. Listen and respond to all visitor feedback. Contact Merritt Staffing for more small business tips and advice.

The field of human resource management came into being exactly as its name suggests: As a body of professionals trained to help companies manage and optimize their human capital. An HR department traditionally polices a workplace, enforces established protocols, and extends the arm of executive influence in order to make sure worker-management relationships are legal, functional, and profitable.

Some parts of this role are inherently bureaucratic, and in a modern world, the nature of bureaucracy is shifting. This shift is taking place across almost every industry sector, and in keeping with these changes, HR managers are gradually taking on new roles and moving away from older ones. So what does the future hold for experienced HR mangers? And what will soon be expected of new recruits to the field?

Policing vs Partnership 

Modern human resource managers need to start thinking of themselves not just as regulation-enforcers, but as members of a team, with goals that reflect those of the larger organization. In order to thrive, companies need to internalize regulations and adhere to them both in letter and in spirit. But in order to support this effort, HR mangers need to factor long term business plans and company objectives into their overall mission.

Modern HR managers need to know how a company functions inside and out, so they can make sure human capital is deployed effectively. How team members contribute, and how they’re recruited, trained, coached, rewarded, evaluated and paid all fall under the modern HR manager’s purview. Individual employee success can equate to company success, but only if HR mangers have the deep knowledge and experience necessary to keep track of the big picture.  

Referee, Employee Advocate, and Change Driver

HR managers hold more responsibility than ever when it comes to controlling company direction and workplace culture. This can include dispute resolution, contract negotiation, job training, and any other initiatives that help employees gain the skills, motivation, and support they need to move the company forward.

This often means acting as an employee advocate, and it always means acting as a champion of effective communication. Many vital programs that were once handled by other entities now fall to human resource managers. These may include employee assistance programs, career development programs, profit sharing and benefits programs, and strategic planning initiatives.

HR mangers are also drivers of change. Every annual evaluation period calls for an assessment of employee growth and contributions, and each new collection of data means new opportunities to adjust strategies and further optimize productivity. If you’re working to find a valuable place for yourself in the new world of HR, adjusting to a shifting career landscape, or thinking of joining the HR management field, contact Merritt Staffing and arrange a consultation with our experts.

 
At the heart of every successful company, you’ll find warm, efficient HR mangers and experienced bosses who know how to get new employees off to a productive start during their first week. Work begins on day one, and so does an employee’s long term relationship with her new company. How you help her navigate the onboarding process can have a lasting impact on both sides of the equation.

Before you begin to focus on specific hires, make sure your company can provide an updated employee manual that contains all general policies and also specific, position related information. In a modern workplace, tasks are increasingly complex and personnel changes happen fast, so it’s becoming nearly impossible for all fundamental employee information to be transmitted by word of mouth. Have a manual ready that supports everything your new hire will be told during the first few days.

Once the new hire arrives, follow these guidelines for a smooth and positive integration period.

1. 
Have her supplies and work area ready and clean. Know exactly where she’ll be placed, make sure her computer is functioning properly, and make sure she knows who to contact for questions about facilities like the copier, phone, and fax machine.  

2. 
In addition to her employee manual and position-specific worksheets and databases, make sure she has a printed schedule for her entire first week on the job. Have scheduled times established for introductory meetings with all of her supervisors and coworkers, and if possible, schedule her participation in meetings related to the projects and accounts she’ll be working on.

3. 
Have all of her necessary new hire materials ready when she arrives. This may include any HR paperwork she hasn’t completed already. It may also include key cards, parking passes, and passwords to all the databases and accounts she’ll need to access in order to begin working. 

4. 
Take responsibility for all introductions. Personally walk the new employee around and introduce her to everyone she’ll be seeing or working with on a regular basis. Assign a manager or peer to invite her out to lunch. Don’t let her navigate first-day lunch plans on her own.

Every aspect of your onboarding process should encourage the new hire to feel warmly welcomed and part of the team. Before you turn a new employee over to her supervisor and coworkers, make sure she’s spent at least a small amount of scheduled time with each one of them. And even after the first few days have passed, stay approachable and maintain an open line of communication so she feels comfortable coming to you with questions or problems. For more onboarding help, contact Merritt and arrange a consultation with our staffing experts.

Your employees are paid by the hour and your scheduling practices are designed to accommodate the flexible requirements of your business. Most of the time, you have just enough people on site to finish what needs to be done by the time the shift changes or the day ends. Every now and then, an isolated incident carries the day into overtime, and until now, you’ve had the budget resources to reward the hard working employees who stay till the job is finished.

But what do you do when your labor needs almost, but not quite, outstrip the capabilities of your regular workforce? What happens when you have just enough work coming in to justify keeping employees after hours, but not quite enough to add a few new full time positions? Before you make a long term decision, take these important steps.

Put your math skills to work

How long will this high tide last? If the recent increase in work represents a sign of company growth, then congratulations. And remember that it takes money to make money. If the tide is only expected to rise, be optimistic and calculate the cost of genuine, sustained expansion in your enterprise. If this tide of extra work can’t be explained, or will likely recede when the busy season ends, calculate the cost of three weeks, five weeks, or six months of estimated overtime. In either case, gather the data you need to make an informed decision.

Look around

Listen carefully to your employees and take a close look at how your resources are currently being used. Are these overtime tasks really necessary? What skills are required for the positions that use the most overtime hours? Are these skills expensive, i.e., will hiring and training costs for a new position be significant? And finally, are there any unskilled tasks that your most expensive employees are spending time on during regular hours? Maybe you can create an inexpensive support position so your high-cost employees can focus on completing skill-specific tasks within standard shift periods.

Consider a short term plan

Schedule a meeting between hiring managers and HR staff to discuss the merits of a short term position. Determine the cost of staffing such a position and have your managers weigh the benefits and drawbacks. Their suggestions will likely depend on the training required for the position, the difficulty of recruiting applicants with necessary skills, and how willing potential candidates may be to accept a temp-to-per offer.

For additional guidance and help with common staffing issues, contact Merritt and arrange a consultation with our experts.