Featured Article – 2013 December

Super Tip Sheet

To minimize the risk of fraud in your business:

• Set high ethical standards, and be sure to practice and enforce them.
• Identify and correct areas of weakness within your organization.
• Establish strong controls and oversight for all business accounts.
• Monitor inventory carefully.
• Encourage employees, vendors and customers to report any suspicious activity. Consider creating a system to accept anonymous tips.

To create surveys that benefit your business:

• Keep surveys short, simple and focused.
• Make your sample size large enough to obtain accuracy to within plus or minus 5 percent.
• Use a 1 to 5 scale for easy scoring.
• Start with general questions, then move to specifics.
• Include a couple of open-ended questions.
• Review responses carefully.
• Act on the results.

To make your hiring interviews more productive:

• Establish key job competencies.
• Design interview questions that focus on these competencies.
• Have multiple interviewers asking the same questions and applying the same standards in their evaluations.
• Drill down for more detailed responses.
• Take good notes and write up a summary of each interview as soon as it is completed.
• Assemble the entire interview team to discuss the candidates and make a final evaluation.

To improve your hiring and recruiting process:

• Define job requirements carefully.
• Look for repeated patterns of success in the candidates’ background.
• Look beyond the resume and consider each candidate’s network in your assessment.
• Use your own professional network to search for prospects who might not be actively seeking a new position now.
• Find, and use, a recruiting platform that lets you prescreen candidates before the interviewing begins.
• Do not settle. Be confident you have the right candidate before making an offer.

To make the most of exit interviews:

• Standardize the process, with separate meetings to discuss administrative (severance, benefits, etc.) and work issues.
• Make the departing employee feel comfortable, and ensure confidentiality in all discussions.
• When conducting multiple interviews, look for recurring themes that suggest areas where the business should consider change.
• Keep the employees’ supervisors and top management informed of all significant findings.
• Treat departing employees with dignity. It will help preserve the standing of your business in the community.