Bringing on Temporary Staff — Orientation and Training Best Practices

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When you need to fill a personnel gap quickly, you may need to rely upon the services of a staffing firm such as Winston Resources to help you find a temporary professional to help you during a crunch time. Although the professional we’ll find you is temporary, we’ve found that our most successful clients don’t… Read more »

How Much Can Employers Dictate Workers’ Appearance?

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While wisdom teaches us not to judge a book by its cover, practicality in the workplace says otherwise. Employers are at odds over the issue of appearance on the job. Today there seems to be an ever broadening palette of choices when it comes to things such as clothing, hairstyle, weight, and yes, body piercing…. Read more »

We Tend to Judge Faces Instantly — Be Aware as You Interview

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When we see a new face, our brains decide almost unconsciously how attractive and trustworthy a person is.  The whole process takes no more than a fraction of a second.  It happens so fast that it is possible that the rational part of our brain does not even get involved in the assessment. Because this… Read more »

Keys to Reducing Your Time to Hire

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Looking for a new hire in a timely fashion can be a trying experience.  Done properly, filling a vacancy with qualified workers takes a bit of skill to maneuver through the murky waters to which most human resources managers are subjected. Before placing an ad for a vacancy, HR departments should look at their hiring… Read more »

The Affect of Disrespectful Management on Employee Productivity

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Recent  research by business experts has revealed that relationships between employees and employers has been steadily deteriorating. The study included  almost 200 employees in different areas and looked at the effects that abusive bosses have on their workers.  The researchers compared responses among two groups – those who reported abuse from their bosses on a… Read more »

Your First Steps Post Layoff

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You’ve just been given the word — you’re being let go. Laid off. Downsized. That bites. Definitely bites. Yes, even as the economy is slowly recovering, companies still lay off workers. In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently reported that more than 152,000 workers were laid off in November 2010 (the most recent statistics… Read more »

Think You Don’t Need a Cover Letter? Think Again

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If you spend hours creating what you believe to be the perfect résumé and then put a slap-dash cover letter together before hitting the “send” button, you should rethink this strategy because Cover letters work. Here’s why: A targeted cover letter (to the specific job to which you’re applying) acts as a laser-focused advertisement for… Read more »

Failure as a Learning Opportunity

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Companies should look at the times they fail as opportunities for learning important lessons — and could come back more successful as a result. So says research from the University of Colorado Denver School of Business. The research found that lessons learned from success weren’t as helpful as the knowledge learned from failure. Company management… Read more »

The Importance of Getting — and Heeding — Employee Feedback

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If you’re not making the effort to listen to your employees via formal employee feedback systems, it’s time you started. A recent study reports that half of those companies contacted for the survey said they did not use employee surveys. More importantly — and sadly, actually — of those companies that did survey their workers,… Read more »

Handling Underperforming Employees

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It’s a headache for any manager – how do you handle an employee who isn’t performing up to par?  One way that has produced results is called the performance improvement plan. This process is set up to enable better communication between a manager and the staff member and also to make clear to the employee… Read more »