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How
to Hire, Reward, and Keep Top Employees for Your Growing Company
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REVIEWS
OF SMART STAFFING
From
Atlanta Business Chronicle June 25-July 1, 1999
"Smart
Staffing: How to Hire, Reward, and Keep Top Employees for Your Growing
Company" by Wayne Outlaw.
Would you like to take a big step up in searching, finding, hiring
and keeping great employees for your small business? Then check
out Wayne Outlaw’s excellent book. Within is great advice on
analyzing your needs and developing a strategy to meet them.
Included are sample letters, forms, applications and evaluations.
(Upstart Publishing)
By Terry O’Keefe, Executive Bookshelf
From
HRMagazine, Tuesday, December 1, 1999, Volume 43, Issue 13.
Stacy VanDerWall.
Smart
Staffing: How to Hire, Reward and Keep Top Employees for Your Growing
Company.
Recruitment and retention are some of the toughest challenges human
resource professionals face. Although Smart Staffing is geared
for small business owners who may not have HR departments, human resource
professionals also will benefit from this how-to book that discusses
all aspects of the hiring process. Topics covered include finding
the right candidate for the job, using effective interviewing techniques,
keeping and rewarding top performers and learning from bad hiring
decisions.
The book is divided into five sections, and each section serves as
one step in a process. First, employers must establish who they
want and what they want this person to accomplish. Legal tips
also are included in the first section.
The second step shows employers how to develop
a recruiting plan and identify recruitment sources, such as advertisements,
the World Wide Web and college campuses. The third step involves
screening applicants, conducting interviews and doing background checks.
The third section also includes a chapter on how to extend the offer
and how to notify other candidates that the position has been filled.
Fourth, employers must recognize the time and effort it takes to keep
good employees. Some of the retention strategies listed in the
fourth section include orientation programs, mentoring, performance
appraisals, boosting employee morale, providing job enrichment opportunities
and offering incentives.
Finally, the fifth section examines why employees leave and how to
avoid the high costs of turnover. It also includes a chapter
on exit interviews. Sample worksheets are provided.
From
Booklist October 1, 1998
Little of today’s management literature addresses or even acknowledges
the specific problems and concerns faced by small businesses when
it comes to human resources and personnel management questions.
Outlaw left a marketing management position with Xerox to start his
own consulting practice, and he specializes in teaching hiring skills
to business owners and managers of companies of all sizes. Here,
though, he addresses the special needs of companies that are not large
enough to have their own trained human resources staff.
Outlaw shows how to establish job definitions and hiring criteria,
and he contrasts full-time, part-time, temporary, and outsourcing
employee options. He explains how to create job applications,
develop a recruiting plan, locate and screen qualified applicants,
and check references. Outlaw also considers how to retain and
reward top employees and advises that it is important to understand
the reasons behind an employee’s decision to leave. This guide
is filled with forms, work sheets, and frequently asked questions
and is a must for any small business collection.
David Rouse
Copyright © 1998, American Library Association.
All rights reserved.
From
Executive Book Summaries
Smart
Staffing by Wayne Outlaw. Upstart Publishing, 287 pages, $19.95.
When you hire someone, you want more than a warm body with a good
skill set. You want a person whose values fit those of your
company. Someone with a positive attitude who doesn’t fall apart
in a crisis. So how do you go about finding such an individual?
You could start with this book. Smart Staffing
presents five steps to finding, hiring, and keeping the best employees.
Begin by deciding the kind of person you need.
Make a list of their responsibilities and qualifications--those they
must have and those you prefer. Maybe you should consider outsourcing.
Whatever route you choose, know the laws about hiring.
Next develop a recruiting plan. Will you
look for qualified applicants using advertisements? Employee
referrals? Online recruiting?
Be sure to thoroughly screen your applicants.
This is especially critical today because 30 percent of all employment
applications and 45 percent of all resumes contain false information.
Learn to read between the lines.
Interview the best candidates and select your new
employee.
But smart staffing doesn’t end there. It
continues through programs such as career counseling, job enrichment,
and perks that will keep good employees. Author Outlaw, who
runs a recruiting firm, tells you what you need to know and shows
you how to learn from your hiring mistakes.
From
Lexington Herald-Leader January 12, 1999. Business Books by
Jan Norman.
Smart
Staffing by Wayne Outlaw, Dearborn Publishing, $19.95.
In this era of low unemployment, it’s hard to find and keep employees.
The business owner can’t afford to make mistakes that will drive away
good applicants and employees. The first step is to have a clear
picture of the job you need done and the qualities and qualifications
needed to do it. Next comes the interview and selection process.
Third is keeping employees once they’re hired. This book also discusses
evaluating why former employees quit or were fired and how to avoid
such problems in the future.
From
The Network Journal, February 15, 1999.
The most important asset in any business is its people capital.
Yet few companies, especially small businesses, pay adequate attention
to employee issues.
Wayne Outlaw, a former Xerox sales manager and head of
the Outlaw Group, Inc., a personnel recruiter and employee performance
consultant firm, believes that hiring mistakes cost businesses dearly.
He wrote Smart Staffing as a guide-book for people involved in hiring
and setting personnel policies. While the principles of the
book apply to companies of all sizes, Outlaw specifically targets
small business owners since they are less likely to have professionally
staffed human resources departments.
Smart Staffing covers the entire life cycle
of employer-employee relations, from hiring to retaining, to the inevitable
exiting, all in great detail.
"The cost of a bad hiring decision can result in
the loss of customers, productivity, profits and reputation, as well
as losses from lawsuits or embezzlement," says Outlaw.
The book is divided into five steps that detail
every action that will lead to better qualified employees and lower
turnover and greater on-the-job productivity.
Each chapter ends with frequently asked questions
and answers.
Step One tells what hiring managers should do before
the need for new employees arises. Outlaw advises small business
owners to invest time in analyzing their staffing needs to prepare
job definitions and hiring criteria for each position against which
prospective employees can be measured.
"Too many companies tend to hire based on feeling,
not on a logical, defined, reality-based process," Outlaw says.
Defining your needs and determining what type of employee can best
fulfill them are essential precursors to successful hiring.
This section covers the many sub-steps involved in establishing those
definitions, including how to construct legally permissible application
forms and interview questions.
Step Two suggest ways to locate qualified applicants
once your needs are established and there is an opening. Many
of the entries are well-known, others seem innovative.
Step Three deals with an interview process that
is much lengthier than most entrepreneurs are willing to engage in;
particularly if hiring takes them away from their main duties.
But it will save time and money in the long run, says Outlaw, by resulting
in effective and long-lasting employees. The section begins
with telephone screening before in-person interviews are scheduled
and takes the process through intense evaluation and reference-checking
before making the job offer.
Outlaw cites studies that claim references are
seldom checked by hiring companies and most of those that do some
checking don’t do enough. "It’s a major mistake to skip this
part of the hiring process," says the author. For those who
aren’t sure how to go about it, he lists sources to check and questions
to ask.
Step Four deals with keeping those employees you
spent so much effort to acquire. Outlaw offers strategies designed
to turn those new employees into long-term assets, beginning before
they start work. "Don’t make the mistake of letting your new
employees be in limbo between the old job and the new without personal
contact," he advises.
Once they are on the job, the author tells how
to make them feel welcome, how to orient them and how to teach them
the skills needed to be productive. He advocates programs that
improve communications, boost employee self-esteem and provide job
enrichment, that elusive quality that makes the job more valuable
to the employee and, therefore, makes the employee more valuable to
the company. Outlaw also discusses financial incentives and
how to communicate their full value to your staff.
But Smart Staffing doesn’t stop there.
Even if you follow the first four steps faithfully, some turnover
is inevitable. In Step Five Outlaw shows how to learn from your
past hiring mistakes in order to avoid repeating them. He offers
almost as much detail on preparing for and executing an exit interview
as he did on the hiring interview. He tells what kind of questions
to ask and when, where, and by what vehicle to ask them.
Smart Staffing lives up to its billing as
"your portable human resources department" with thorough, sometimes
tedious, coverage of every step in the employee life cycle.
All it lacks is the person to follow its advice. An extensive
appendix section includes samples of all the forms and worksheets
mentioned in the text and a glossary of personnel industry terms.
Some of the conclusions Outlaw draws from candidate
evaluations seem at odds with advice given to applicants in job search
literature and might result in bypassing a good candidate. But
if you’ve followed the guidance of Smart Staffing you should have
several equally desirable backup candidates to call.
By Carol Celeste
From
Travel Weekly November 1998
Agency owners who have problems finding and keeping good employees
(the No. 1 complaint of many) might find some useful tips in the book
Smart Staffing: How to Hire, Reward, and Keep Top Employees for Your
Growing Company.
For example, author Wayne Outlaw suggests conducting
background checks of applicants to weed out the unsuitable, noting
that "security companies and private investigators will do the job
for a minimal fee between $50 and $500 (depending on where you live
and how much information you need)."
Outlaw, also a management consultant, addresses
topics such as hiring criteria; the legal responsibilities involved
with staffing; developing an aggressive recruiting plan to attract
top performers; and creative ways to reward employees beyond cash.
Published by Upstart Publishing, the book costs
$19.95 and is available at bookstores nationwide or by calling (800)
829-7934.
By Phyllis Fine
From
Meetings & Conventions. "For The Bookshelf." December
1998
RECRUITING,
INTERVIEWING, SELECTING & ORIENTING NEW EMPLOYEES by Diane Arthur,
AMACOM Books, New York City, $59.95
There’s enough information packed into the third edition of this 367-page
book to teach a course on the hiring process for human relations managers.
But for those not in HR who hire staff, information is distilled into
layman’s terms and organized to let readers easily skip to the pages
that address their particular needs. Fourteen chapters cover
everything from workplace diversity, recruitment sources (including
electronic) and interview questions to make the final choice and getting
the new hire off to a good start.
SMART STAFFING: HOW TO HIRE, REWARD, AND KEEP TOP EMPLOYEES FOR
YOUR GROWING COMPANY by Wayne Outlaw, Upstart Publishing Company,
Chicago, $19.95
Smart
Staffing covers much of the same territory, but in a more portable
256-page softcover. (It’s significantly lighter on the wallet,
too.) Each chapter includes appropriate checklists and sample
forms, and ends with a helpful list of frequently asked questions
and their answers.
The Outlaw
Group
900 Johnnie
Dodds Blvd., #115 · Mt. Pleasant, SC 29464
Voice:
(843)884-9361 · Fax: (843)881-1758 · E-mail: info@smartstaffing.net
