The Job Description: Hiring a New Employee

Series Summary

Since the advent of the Internet, individuals beginning an employee search or a job search have a wealth of resources available when the time comes to look for new employees or new employment opportunities. In many ways, job hunting and job posting have been totally revolutionized as online classifieds, resumes on the web and the pure immediacy of a so-called live job search help both employers and potential employees find the information and positions they need more quickly and easily. Though the modern job market has changed a lot in the last ten to fifteen years, there are still fundamentals of hiring new employees that have not changed.

In this free online video series learn from Tine Buechler, President of Business Growth Training, Inc. as she gives her professional advice about hiring new employees. Learn fundamentals of hiring new employees such as, gauging the market, outsourcing, networking, placing a job ad, reviewing resumes, preparing your questions, pre-screening the applicant, conducting the job interview, promoting your company in job interview, checking references, testing for skills, offering the position and negotiating, thanking all of the applicants, and training the new employee.

Video Transcript

"Hi! I’m Tina Buechler from Business Growth Training, I’m here today on behalf of expertvillage.com to talk about tips and techniques for hiring a new employee. In this clip I’d like to talk about the job description. The first thing you need to do when you’re looking at hiring a new employee is actually to decide whether or not you really do need to hire an employee. You need to look at the existing job descriptions of the other people that you have, look at where the skills shortages are. Is there somebody who, if you realign the work within the workplace maybe there’s not a need for a full-time person? Second thing is you realign the work within the workplace you maybe able to determine specifically where your skills shortage is and from there you can determine what it is in terms of skills set, knowledge and attitudes that you’re looking for. From this you create your job description and in your job description there’s several things that you’re looking for and I got some highlights over here. You need to look at what are the skills that you require from this person to do this job, education, work experience and qualifications and from that what is the minimum level of education? What is the skill level? How many years of experience are you looking for and if you’re not looking for certain number of years of experience is there some kind of specific skill level? For example are you looking for somebody to word process 40 wpm with 5% error rate? What are the technical skills specifically that you’re looking for? Second of all you’re looking for knowledge, skills, knowledge and attitude, in knowledge is there any specific knowledge you expect somebody to have before you hire them? If you’re in a specific industry you might require this new employee to have existing knowledge that’s where you want to be able to draw on that and that might be part of your job description and the last thing is there certain kinds of attitudes you’re looking for. Are you looking for somebody who is a problem solver, who takes on a task and somebody who works really well alone, those are the kinds of things you’re looking for. Every business has its character, has its own personality and when you hire somebody you want that person that new employee to fit in with the personality of your company. This information needs to be incorporated in your job description it will help you then make a better decision and a better hire, so one of the very first things you need to do is spend a lot of time thinking about specifically what is it that you want to hire, specific skills, specific knowledge, specific attitudes and once you have a really good idea of what it is that you’re looking for then of course it’s a much better chance that you will get it."