Hiring Interns: Do's and Don'ts. Hiring interns for your company means more than just finding a pair of hands to get you coffee or feet to run your clothes to the dry cleaner.
Interns can be the future of your company, so it makes sense to hire the smartest and most capable workers. Last year, nearly 60% of interns were converted into full-time hires by companies. After all, interns learned the ropes through their experience. Think of it this way: You’re not just hiring a talented employee. By using your internship program as a talent pipeline, you’re also ensuring you hire field-tested workers. Hiring the best interns, however, isn’t always easy.
Adding Women Makes Your Group Smarter. I was intrigued to see the new study that shows companies perform better when they have women on their boards.
Check out this story and video at CNBC. Here is the upshot: "Credit Suisse analyzed more than 2,500 companies and found that companies with more than one woman on the board have outperformed those with no women on the board by 26 percent since 2005. " This result becomes even more compelling when you pair it with a rigorous study done a couple years ago. It showed that groups that have a higher percentage of women have higher "collective intelligence" -- they perform better across an array of difficult tasks "that ranged from visual puzzles to negotiations, brainstorming, games and complex rule-based design assignments," as this summary from Science News reports. In that research, the explanation was pretty interesting, as the authors set out to study collective intelligence, not gender. How to Build Your Franchise on a Solid Staffing Foundation. In their book Franchise Bible: How to Buy a Franchise or Franchise Your Own Business, authors Erwin J.
Keup and Peter E. Keup detail both the basics and the finer points of this popular means of expanding a business. In this edited excerpt, the authors describe how to determine if your business would benefit from franchising. To be successful, a potential franchisor must have built their own business on a sound foundation that includes well-trained personnel, good marketing techniques, and an adequate working capital structure. The same foundation blocks apply for a successful franchise operation, but as a franchisor you will need to view them from a different perspective and utilize different skills.
Your success really lies in your ability to recognize the business insight necessary to operate a smooth-running, successful franchise. Related: Why a Strong Team Is an Entrepreneur's Greatest Asset Educate current employees. Hire experienced franchise personnel. The late Erwin J. 5 Tips for Hiring a Great Web Developer. A web developer can be one of your most critical hires.
After all, that's the person who will create the online face of your company and enable you to interact virtually with your customers. So, it's especially important that you hire the right talent the first time out. Otherwise, you risk hurting your business, as well as wasting time and money seeking a replacement. Here are five tips that can help in the selection process: 1.
Job Posting. Interviewing. Traits. 3 out of 4 Hires Fail: How to beat the odds. 7 TED Talks with big ideas for hiring. Some employees can work 9am to 5pm, five days a week.
Others are available on evenings and weekends. But in today’s talk, filmed at the TEDSalon in London, entrepreneur Wingham Rowan describes another type of worker — one who has a highly unpredictable schedule. “Think of someone who has a recurring but unpredictable medical condition, somebody who’s caring for a dependent adult, or a parent with complex childcare needs — their availability for work can be such that it’s ‘[I can do a] few hours today’ and ‘Maybe I can work tomorrow, but I don’t if and when yet,’” says Rowan.
“It’s extraordinarily difficult for these people to find the work that they so often need very badly. Which is a tragedy because there are employers who can use pools of very flexible, local people booked completely ad hoc.” Rowan says that he is encouraged by websites like Task Rabbit, which allow people to pick up odd jobs. Below, more TED speakers with big ideas on hiring. Misha Glenny: Hire the hackers! The 5 Employees Every Small Business Needs. In the past few years, many companies were affected by the less than ideal economic conditions, and many instances, small businesses were hit harder than most.
For these companies, the ability to be nimble and quickly adapt to changing economic conditions can be the difference between failure and success. However, there's an equally important factor that affects the fate of a small business: its employees. Certainly employees and talent are the backbone of any company, but for small businesses -- particularly those with 50 or fewer employees -- their role can be even more crucial with right balance of skills and personalities having the ability to make or break a small business. Quite simply, the best business strategy in the world doesn't mean anything without the right people to execute it. That's why, more so now than ever, it's critical to carefully consider every hire and make sure each employee fulfills the right role needed for overall success.