Identifying and Handling Difficult Employees

While hiring procedures and employee standards of conduct should be of utmost importance in starting your business, no process is perfect. Employees who know the right words to say but act against company values can still slip through the cracks.

This doesn’t mean that they are hopeless, but you as the business owner need to know how to identify problems in the workplace before they become disastrous and figure out how to best discuss this with otherwise productive employees. This guide will help you to identify and solve problems with employees that might be dragging your production down.

Over-Confidence

Confident, independent employees that are also good team players are an invaluable addition to your firm. The problem arises when the confidence comes without humility where even high-performing members believe that they can do no wrong.

These crew members can be especially difficult when they can keep other employees quiet due to their high performance, but that makes it especially important to address the issue. As the business owner, you need to remain calm while discussing the problem.

These individuals can turn into great leaders if they have the intelligence and maturity to realize how they are affecting your firm and what they can do to improve.

Refusal of Responsibility

If a team member constantly has a non-personal reason for every point you mention in a performance review, that is an issue. Responsible team members will admit to their mistakes but be aware and confident enough to admit when something is out of their control.

While these employees can be irritating it is important to hear their side of the story, conveying patience and diligence. Sometimes those who are constantly complaining might feel unseen or unheard. Certain employees might have complaints that are unfounded or unreasonable, but that doesn’t mean that all are to be dismissed.

Workers who cannot provide a reason for their gripes might not be mature enough for your workforce, but others might have insight into how things could do be run better or how your team could get more operational support. Don’t just write them off as a complainer, but their attitudes should be tempered if it’s detrimental to morale.

Lack of Communication

Some businesses require constant socialization, especially in a high-volume or high-stress environment. Workers that are not suited to this kind of work should be identified and ruled out in the hiring process, but it is not always so simple.

Employees who suddenly go dark or stop offering reports despite a good history should be met with. An individual’s work-life balance could be disrupted and that needs to be discussed. Some employees are hesitant to speak about family or financial difficulties to separate the office from home.

While this is an admirable attitude, it can be damaging to both the worker and the company. Sudden changes in work ethic are often the result of emotional difficulties, and employers should always check in with their workers.

Giving an overworked or overstressed employee time off or a lighter workload can improve team cohesion and employee retention as they know you care for their overall well-being. Letting your workers know that you see them as more than a non-feeling resource is never a bad decision.

Personal difficulties with workers often stem from temporary hardships or inner issues that they’ve never had to address. As the business owner, you can be the one who can turn those perceived flaws into advantages for both parties. Always discuss potential issues with your employees before you move to immediate criticism.

No matter how you want to improve your workforce, Corporate Business Solutions can help arrange the best scenario for both your business and your employees.

How to Hire for Remote Positions

Hiring is always a tricky topic for even the most experienced corporations and hiring departments but trying to put together a team that will usually work from outside of the office can introduce an entirely different set of issues. 

Luckily, the evolving work environment has allowed hiring managers to adapt alongside employment trends, so firms can save on office space by hiring remotely and ensuring that their workers are dependable and efficient. 

Avoid Unnecessary Applicants 

Subjecting both your staff and potential hires to rounds and rounds of virtual interviews can prove to be a very inefficient process. Making sure that your job posting provides all requirements and responsibilities but also avoids any sort of filler content can save both parties a great deal of time. 

Remove any irrelevant content about local lifestyle as you may be hiring internationally for a remote department. Tend towards bullet points and clear lists so that every applicant can be clear on what will be required of them and determine whether they can meet the challenge.

 Use Open-Ended Questions 

Learning how an applicant thinks is always an important part of the hiring process, but this can be far more useful when you don’t have a chance to meet him or her face to face. Preparing a template for your hiring managers ensures quality control of the hiring process, but it also helps to make sure you are learning the right things about your potential hires. 

Asking people how they would deal with a disastrous meeting or resolving conflicts in the workplace is far more important than making sure that they have a certain amount of experience with a given network system or coding language. Knowledge can be taught, but wisdom and experience cannot. 

Plan Interviews in Bulk

 While it can be daunting, planning a few days of back-to-back interviews can be the most efficient approach. Most remote positions will attract plenty of applicants due to the lack of travel for interviews and widespread internet access. 

This frequent contact with hiring candidates will make comparisons easier and you can meet with your team to trade notes at the end of each interview block. Without rigorous notetaking, it can be difficult to remember faces or voices over virtual or phone interviews. 

If you and your hiring personnel can handle to high-volume, planning blocks of interviews can be good to ensure that you never forget a candidate that stands out amongst all the others, so good workers don’t get lost in the shuffle. 

Give Them a Tour 

Just because an employee is working remotely doesn’t mean that they’re not a part of the team. Taking a candidate on a tour of your office space over some sort of visual-telecommunications app can give them an idea of your work philosophy and make them feel a more personal connection with you and other employees.

 This can also give applicants a sense of your firm’s capabilities, who they can report various things to, and introduce themselves to fellow workers. Small touches can make workers feel valued and close to one another, even if they are on other continents!

 Hiring is never an easy process. The birth of remote work has come with its benefits and drawbacks. Entrepreneurs can now save on real estate, but they must be even more diligent when filling remote positions.

 Planning job postings to be direct and clear can help cut down on obviously unqualified applicants. Designing interview questions to gauge workers’ personalities and values over binary knowledge can help make up for the lack of physical contact. 

Planning interviews in a compact time frame can make remembering exceptional candidates easier. Finally, giving a virtual tour of your office helps to increase a sense of camaraderie and ensures potential hires that your firm is very much a team despite physical distance. 

No matter what advice you may need in your hiring process, CBS-CBS.com can help you in all aspects in finding the best employee to serve your company!

 

 

 

 

 

How to Increase Employee Retention

A running truism in entrepreneurial circles is that “one great employee is worth ten bad workers”. A key to success in business is making sure that you attract, identify, and hire the best workers possible, but the challenge doesn’t stop there.

Owners need to provide a situation where the best people happily return to work for years. Employee retention is just as important as the hiring process and here’s how you can make sure that you organize and keep the best team possible at your firm.

Perfect Your Onboarding Program

Ensuring that your new hires are getting off on the right foot is crucial to making sure that everyone knows what to expect and how to operate in a new workspace. Many fresh workers are understandably nervous upon starting with a new firm, so it’s paramount to make their onboarding to your staff as friendly and clear as possible.

Letting employees know what their responsibilities are and what resources they can access can set the tone from day one. No one wants to lose a good worker to cold feet because they were unclear or alarmed by a hostile or vague orientation process. This is especially important for hiring to fill a remote position.

Make Sure That Your Compensation Is Competitive

Never forget that your workers are generally looking to pay their bills. Business owners need to constantly monitor their competitors to be sure that they are offering competitive wages as well as benefits packages when applicable.

Even the most passionate worker can be forced to leave if your offerings don’t keep up with market trends. Don’t miss out on exemplary employees because your company hasn’t updated its compensation or benefits packages.

Provide Constant Feedback

The ritual of annual performance reviews is going the way of the dinosaur, and this is a good thing. Quarterly reviews can be a great way to let your employees know that you acknowledge and care about their production. Furthermore, it can be a great way to discuss your employees’ goals and have them thinking about their future within your company.

This relies on your ability to make performance reviews a welcome experience. You and your team members should be excited to discuss their work and everything that the future might have in store. Don’t make promises that you can’t keep, but don’t make employee reviews feel like being called into an interrogation.

Acknowledge Work-Life Balance

Your employees need to be seen. This means noting that they are not just cogs in the workings of your business, but that they have dreams and ambitions outside of the workplace. Doctors and emergency personnel may have periods where they have to be on-call for several days, but this doesn’t mean they don’t have other obligations.

Likewise, programmers and journalists may have to participate in a “crunch” to meet certain deadlines, but managers should acknowledge that this can’t be a constant in the workplace. Demonstrate how proud you are of your workers for meeting certain milestones or periods of chaotic business with a long weekend.

Anything that lets your crew know that you are aware when they are going the extra mile can go a long way to ensuring their continued enthusiasm and loyalty to your firm.

Hiring practices and employee retention policies are ultimately two sides of the same coin. It is expensive to filter out the best candidates and then train them up in your company.

Doing all you can to keep your team happy and healthy pays dividends in not only your hiring department but also bolster your reputation as an entrepreneur those other talented individuals want to work for. Corporate Business Solutions Reviews can help you in every step of your mission to find and keep the right people in your firm.

Qualities of a Great Employee

Identifying high-value job candidates and employees is a crucial aspect of any business. If you are a wise entrepreneur, then you will have put considerable care into your hiring protocols and hold frequent performance reviews along with clear guidelines.  

This guide can help you and your hiring managers better identify the intangible aspects of individuals that can be a great resource to your firm. 

Appreciate Ambition

 While it may not always show up in his or her work metrics, look for employees and candidates that demonstrate a growth mindset. People with this worldview are looking to constantly improve themselves, be it in or out of the workplace.

 Appreciate those who talk about their hobbies and passions with a desire to learn and improve, as this almost always crosses into their attitude at work.

 An ambitious worker can always be taught, while a capable but unwilling employee can be a drag on both the productivity and morality of all those around them.

 Ambition can also be infectious, as growth-minded workers are usually positive people and can motivate the rest of your firm to improve themselves.

 Search for Cooperative Independence 

Going with ambition, eager workers are often quick to learn their jobs so that they can perform without excessive supervision, but this should not be confused with isolation. Any successful team needs to strike a balance between autonomy and communication with the rest of their department. This will depend largely on an individual’s role within a firm, but the concept remains the same.

Don’t confuse constantly needing assistance with being a good teammate. Good employees should be willing to ask for help when necessary, but they should never want to be a drag on production. A good crew should want to give back as much as they can while learning how to handle their role.

Hire Humility 

Much like maintaining harmony between independence and being a good team member, you need to find the proper balance between ambition and humility. High-performing but arrogant employees can quickly rise to become toxic leaders that poison your business. 

Seek ambition, not arrogance. Positive but ambitious employees grow precisely because they are humble to admit that they aren’t perfect and can always be doing better. Surrounding your employees (and also yourself) with these personalities will always result in good outcomes no matter what your company provides. 

This can be especially difficult as many candidates know the right words to say in an interview but don’t always do the right thing in their actual work. This is partially why the traditional annual performance review is going away in favor of more frequent evaluations.

Curate Confidence 

Humility does not mean meekness. Find employees that are growth-minded but confident in their current abilities. These workers are often innovative, take calculated risks, and don’t require constant assurance and supervision that they are doing their work properly. 

Candidates that are demure or too quick to agree during the interview process might become well-meaning employees, but their constant need for advice or comfort might not work well in your business model. A lack of confidence can even be disastrous in fast-paced, high-stress, or even dangerous work environments. Encourage your workers, but avoid those who need coddling. 

No interview or performance evaluation protocol will ever be perfect, and this is mostly because work culture and employee production can’t always be broken down into concrete numbers. Intangibles can make or break a seemingly stable business model. 

Never forget to pay attention to the social or soft skills of your employees/potential hires. If you’re interviewing a candidate that is unproven technically but demonstrates the previous qualities, then you might have found a diamond in the rough. 

For all other company culture or hiring advice, Corporate Business Solutions Consultants can make sure that your entire staff is happy and productive. 

Top Mistakes Small Business Make

Entrepreneurs either fail because they lack the methods, systems and controls for their business model, or they lack to ambition to go entirely in on their project.
Sometimes avoiding the wrong decision is just as important as choosing the right path.

Poor Planning

All of the ambition and care in the world is only as good as the plan to implement it. Hall of Fame UCLA basketball coach John Wooden said, “Failing to plan is planning to fail” is certainly on point for entrepreneurs. With the speed of today’s market, it’s more important now than ever that your business model is mapped out and ready to commit to a fast-paced market.

Create a Business Plan That is System-Dependent Rather Than People-Dependent

Most entrepreneurs begin their business because of a skill they have to produce a product or service.  However, it’s not their lack of expertise in creating a product or delivering a service that causes businesses to fail.  Rather, it’s the lack of systems to manage and run the business that becomes the weak link for the business owner.

Does the business have a cash management system that can accurately predict the cash needs of the business 13 weeks into the future so there is time to plan for unexpected shortfalls in cash flow to meet all financial obligations?

Does the business owner have a modern management dashboard which allows him to see all the critical variables and business metrics to make informed decisions based on the numbers rather than simply relying on his gut feel for what he should do?

Being Too Rigid with a Business Model

Flexibility might be just as important as planning out your initial designs for launching your entrepreneurial project. The speed of the business world means not only ensuring that you have a solid vision of what you are trying to accomplish with your small business, but you need to be able to adapt depending on the product or service that you are trying to provide.

This can vary extensively depending on your business model. Maybe your service would be better for your customer by operating outside of a brick-and-mortar setting.

You might want to consider moving your culinary dreams to a food truck instead of a permanent location. Your consulting firm might be better served by going entirely remote. Maybe your employee pool could shrink or grow depending on operational cost and demand for your product/service.

The point is to never get too rigid in your business planning. Always be ready to flow like water around any potential obstacles in your entrepreneurial endeavors.

Sloppy Financial Records

No matter how much you love your business, it can’t get anywhere without proper funding. Either carefully handling your accounting in-house or outsourcing it to a third-party firm can save business owners a mountain of headaches down the road.

This is important for both tax purposes along with making sure that your financial situation is above board when trying to finance or sell your small business.

It can be easy to forget about monetary details while you try to grow your empire, but many entrepreneurs have found themselves in a mess of paperwork after years of neglecting their monetary records.

Failure to Track Customer Behavior

Tracking customer trends is vital to your ability to meet demands no matter your small business’s goal. Buyers are flocking to social media and the digital marketplace no more than ever. There are very few industries that would not benefit from establishing a digital footprint.

Modern society has reached a point where even elderly clients are constantly engaging in e-commerce, so taking to social media is no longer the cutting-edge form of engagement it once was. Stay on top of the customer trends in your industry to make sure that your marketing strategy is never losing ground.

There are just as many ways to plan a successful business as there are to launch a model that is destined to fail. As the business owner, you have the most power over how your ambitions play out. This can be intimidating, but it can also be very empowering.

No matter what aspect of your business you want to improve or what pitfall you want to avoid Corporate Business Solutions is ready to help you at any time!

Best Point of Sale Systems for Every Business

Having a reliable, efficient point-of-sale (POS) system can save your small business many headaches down the road. A POS system is ultimately a hardware/software combination that digitally tracks individual sales and overall sales reports, making data accumulation easier than ever and keeping track of your business exchanges all in one place.

Some software comes free of charge, but other packages can cost a few hundred dollars a month. That’s why your business needs to select the right system to maximize efficiency and minimize monthly business costs based upon your business model and POS requirements.

No matter what type of business you run, this POS review can help every entrepreneur select the system that will find the right balance.

Square

Square is an excellent choice for a POS system no matter the size or niche of your small business. It’s a cloud-based system, so you can receive and track payments anywhere. Originating as a mobile system, you can easily track your business even when giving exercise classes in a local park.

Square has expanded from its original roots, but that doesn’t mean the platform has forgotten its origins. Not to be left behind in the marketplace, Square has begun offering more grounded hardware for brick-and-mortar establishments, meaning that you won’t have to bring your phone along to accept payments at your start-up cafe or corner retail store.

Square offers a paid option for its services, and the Square Plus version offers profit margin reporting and 24/7 phone support. For growing businesses with multiple employees, this might be a worthy expense for only $60 per month.

Toast

Toast is one of the market leaders in restaurant POS systems. Toast can accommodate entrepreneurs who want to accept orders both through a hardware system in the store, to applications that customers can download and order through in the comfort of their own home.

Toast can both process and distribute funds, but there will be a management fee taken off of your revenue. Toast’s integrated system can easily pay for itself in convenience, as its hardware can also be linked to your kitchen’s order display, meaning that orders will be seamlessly transferred from your server/customer interface to the sous chef’s exposition station.

After purchasing the basic hardware, Toast offers its software, 24/7 customer service, and general analytics for free. The “Essentials” and “Growth” subscription plans start at $165 and $272 per month, respectively. The premium packages offer several benefits including gift card processing and mobile-application hosting for customers, meaning that your POS capabilities can expand within Toast as your business grows. You’ll never have to jump around from different POS providers if you go with Toast!

Shopify

Just as Toast is made specifically for restaurants, Shopify is designed for retail. It is praised for its ease of use and convenient setup process.

With a range of plans from “Shopify Lite” to the “Advanced” option, retailers can pay anywhere from $9 to $299 per month depending on their needs. Regardless of which subscription option you choose, Shopify is known for its accessibility for even the most technologically inexperienced.

Shopify also offers an application for online retailers that can use it as a stand-alone service or sync their online shopping with their brick-and-mortar setups, so entrepreneurs can easily sync their Shopify online store with the POS service.

Both the software and hardware are available on both Apple and Android products, so there is no barrier to entry depending on the platform you side with.

Shopify serves as an easily accessible register that you can use on a tablet for more professional appearances or a smartphone for the sake of mobility. This information can then be immediately updated to Shopify’s accounting services.

Store registry can be tracked by providing each employee a unique PIN, tracking sales made, hours worked and orders logged. All of these features make Shopify a great all-in-one solution for retailers who want to operate entirely online or want to open a small to medium-sized business that employs a handful of workers.

Whatever your business model entails, you can rest assured that there is a POS system out there for you. No matter your ambitions, know that Corporate Business Solutions Consultants can always offer advice with your entrepreneurial goals.

 

 

Local Advertising Tips for Your Small Business

Every business owner wants his or her project to grow beyond their immediate market but getting a business model off the ground often depends upon word of mouth and how your idea grows in your immediate community.

The internet has made it easier for firms to reach out to a wider audience, but never underestimate the power of community when it comes to growing your company. After all, every entrepreneur should always be looking to fulfill a need. Checking in with those around you can help you do just that!

List on Local Directories

While time-consuming, determined business owners should first and foremost make sure that they have an entry submitted to relevant online local directories. This is the digital equivalent of making sure that your business is included in the yellow pages.

Not only will you invite local customers to your website, but you will also rise in local internet searches, making it easier for customers to find you down the road.

Do not worry about being included in every local directory, as they will not always apply to your business model. Large metropolitan areas generally provide a dizzying number of directories, but brick and mortar businesses such as restaurants and retail stores can get an early start on advertising by placing an entry into a relevant directory for free.

Help Your Customer Base Grow Itself

Referral programs can be a wonderful way to expand your client base. This is especially true for more social experiences such as businesses that offer painting or cooking classes. Encourage customers who enjoyed your services to bring a friend next time.

Offering discounts to customers who bring a friend can both ensure repeat business and attract new clients to your firm. This requires entrepreneurs to be both realistic and generous with the referral programs that they can establish, but if these programs can be properly dialed in, a burgeoning company’s reputation can spread like wildfire.

Keep a Well-Maintained Website

Once seen as a mysterious skill, web design can be done by almost anyone thanks to various architectural software. Site builders typically only cost a couple of dozen dollars per month to design and maintain your company’s online presence.

Designing a sleek website can benefit businesses of every type, and it can increase both your local and online presence if you study up and follow some basic search engine optimization techniques. Launching your website is a great springboard to taking your business to the next level.

Between taking reservations, publishing informative content, to building a subscription base, every entrepreneur should create some sort of online platform. With how easy website building has become, there is no excuse not to be reaching out to a digital audience.

Helping your small business blossom might seem daunting at first, but with some forethought and slowly putting one foot in front of the other, you can help your company explode onto the local scene and get the word out about everything your firm has to offer.

For more help with your entrepreneurial goals, CBS-CBS.com is there to help you every step of the way.

Planning Your Small Business Website

Creating a website for your small business is one of the best things you can do for your company’s future. Not only will it improve your local presence, but it can pay dividends down the road if you decide to expand your firm’s scope of operations.

This step-by-step guide to designing your company’s website can get you started for digital success.

Decide on a Provider

Designing a website used to require extensive technical knowledge, but an entire sector of services called content management systems (CMS in shorthand) has made it possible for entrepreneurs to build a website from the ground up without needing to learn how to code or hire a website architect within one’s own firm.

Most modern website providers allow business owners to design and host their websites in a bundled service package. The sheer volume of platforms within the CMS field means that most business owners won’t have to pay more than $10-$40 per month to host and constantly have editorial abilities over their firm’s website.

Registering a Domain Name

Your domain name is your digital address, very much like a street address. This can be very important for overall visibility and message branding, but it doesn’t have to be complicated.

The cheapest and most straightforward way of obtaining a domain name is by going through one of the very popular website-building platforms. They often provide free domain names.

If you plan on coding your own website, most web host companies also offer free domain names. This will take more work, so it’s probably not a good option unless you are technically savvy with web coding and have a very specific idea as to how your website will look.

Registering a domain name can be very expensive depending on the field. Some individuals have made entire careers out of buying up domain names and selling them off after interest in given term sprouts up.

This makes it especially important to get a jump start on reserving your desired domain name and all social media accounts that might be associated with your business.

If your business turns out to be wildly successful, you can save thousands of dollars in the long run by being diligent about your digital identity.

Vigorously Test Your Site Before Launch

One of the great things about modern website hosting services is that they allow constant, real-time editing so the site always looks exactly how you want it to. This means that there’s no shame in launching a site that doesn’t “look” exactly how you want it, but you always need to make sure that it performs well.

There is a wealth of data showing how many seconds potential consumers are willing for a screen to load before leaving a website. Most website designing/hosting services will provide a checklist to make sure that the site is running properly, but as the captain of the ship, you need to be positive that your company’s website is ready for a global release. An inefficient loading time or messy interface can turn users into negative reviews. Due diligence is paramount before launching your company’s website on its maiden voyage.

Launching a small business website is a far less esoteric task than it was at the dawn of the information age. More than technical expertise, it now requires an entrepreneur’s vision, focus, and diligence.

If you’re willing to take your business model online, then Corporate Business Solutions Reviews can advise you every step of the way.

 

How to Sell Your Business

Owning and running a small business is often the most challenging yet rewarding event in an individual’s life. Many entrepreneurs dream of the day when they will design an operation successful enough to sell to an outside party and ride off into the sunset. What many forget is that the process of selling a business requires a great deal of preparation that should start years in advance to make sure the sale goes smoothly and there are no unforeseen legal complications.

One of the great mistakes owners make is not looking at the long-term future of their business, often leaving records and descriptions cluttered, hoping to clean it all up when it comes time to sell. The sale of a given business in America is under heavy scrutiny by the government. The most important aspect is the proof of the seller exercising his or her “due diligence”.

Due diligence for the owner means looking at and reporting your business’s information as if you were the party looking to buy it. Any inconsistencies or unclear records from the start of your business need to be cleaned up and kept immaculate. Depending on the size and complexity of your business, this can take anywhere from one to multiple years. This can be especially pertinent if your business’s infancy was disorderly and cluttered because of the challenge of simply getting your project off the ground. One of the great mistakes owners make is thinking that preparing business records for a sale is a brief period, but the process can go much smoother if overseen systematically.

One’s books and records should be extremely easy to understand. Buyers understand that business owners will seek tax write-offs every year but are the reasons clear. This is important not only for the buyer but for reporting to the government. Many novice business owners either are unclear in their write-off reporting or disingenuous. While this can lead to short-term savings, it can lead to legal/financial disaster when one is looking to sell his or her business.

While your staff may be comprised of excellent workers, you must keep their specific roles and job descriptions up to date. This does not have to be very intensive, but having clear salary, title, roles and job descriptions in place for your employees will make your business more presentable to a potential buyer. Vague or uncertain terms can leave buyers feeling nervous or confused. This is true both for finances and employee information.

Business owners who have had a future business plan in place, but never had the time or resources to implement it, can pass this on to a buyer. Sellers can discuss the generalities of a potential 5-year plan to sellers, essentially selling the potential of their business. Sellers can show buyers a lucrative future of their business that had never been previously considered.

Overall, business owners who are looking to eventually sell their businesses need to focus on three fundamental issues. The first is constantly keeping meticulous financial records throughout the life of the business, not trying to clean up years of messy finances at the point of sale. This is important not only to present a clear picture to the buyer but to avoid any repercussions from the government. Second, sellers need to realize that positioning your business for sale is a marathon, not a sprint. The process can even take multiple years, but it can be made much easier if you are thorough and clear in your business documentation.

Third, sellers should consider investing in a Certified Business Valuation by an accredited professional to aide in the ultimate negotiations for the selling price of the business.

In every step of the way from planning, financing, starting, to selling your small business Corporate Business Solutions Consultants is devoted to helping you in all aspects of your journey.

Improving the Interview Process

Many employers and employees are both finding the traditional form of job-interview outdated, especially in the modern landscape of zoom meetings and remote work arrangements. This may be the case for classic interview formats, but there are ways to reformat the interview process so that both employees and firms can find the best fit for one another.

Some firms have found success with a more structured interview process, leaving less up to the specific interviewer. This can be especially helpful at larger entities where multiple managers might be interviewing various candidates between departments. This helps to normalize interview styles depending on the role each potential employee is looking for.

This can make interview results more comparable across managerial styles and candidate results, ensuring that everyone within a department is using roughly the same interview rubric for a given position.

This approach is especially useful for more specialized or security-sensitive positions where applicants might have to send to rounds of interviews only to answer the same series of questions at each turn.

Modern HR data suggests that a shared rubric amongst each round of interviewers can make sure that with each interview the questions become more field-related or complicated as potential employees progress further along within any screening process.

This increased communication within a department might even cut the need for some interviews, thus saving a firm valuable time and labor capital.

Forward-thinking companies report the benefits of not only improving the macro-scale of the interview process but also fine-tuning things on a micro-level. Outside of very technical fields, focusing on generalized topics and work styles can prove more beneficial than stressing specific questions and data points.

Companies should focus on finding the person who thinks in a manner aligning with the requirements and responsibilities of a given position as opposed to memorizing and regurgitating a set of minute facts. Modern educational research shows that it is far easier to teach one basic information than it is to sculpt modalities of thought.

Learning how a potential employee manages inter-office conflict or works to manage multiple deadlines at once is far more telling of an individual’s long-term cultural fit than how quickly he or she can calculate how long it would take a train to travel from Chicago to Detroit.

This is not to downplay the importance of technical knowledge, as this will depend largely on the position, but employers should be aware that it is not always the most important aspect, especially when soft skills such as interpersonal negotiation or persuasive speaking are involved.

Finally, the interview process should always consider the firm’s ability to improve upon a candidate’s existing skills. A candidate might score very well on certain innate skills such as critical thinking or people skills, but he or she might not perform very well in other areas. If an employer trusts in its ability to train certain aspects of an employee, it might be worthwhile to work on an individual who is a great cultural fit otherwise.

The modern interview process is not perfect, but it can be refined for the modern workplace. Employers need to re-evaluate the needs of a given department and adjust from there. Hiring managers need to share a core rubric for a given position to reduce redundancies in the screening process, technical vs conceptual skills need to be weighted to account for each position, and firms need to consider how capable they are in training personnel up for a given position.

While this process might be time-consuming at first, it can pay long-term dividends in a business’s training and operational expenses for years to come. For further consultation on small to medium-sized business operations, CBS-CBS.com is devoted to making your hiring process as efficient as possible.