Employee Onboarding – A Success Story

“His work is always good quality, and yet every project is a struggle”.  My client was ready to bring a contractor on as a full time employee, but knew that something was still missing. The employee’s work was always good quality and done to standard. And yet… everything seemed to take longer than it should,…

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Business Values: Management Starts Before You Hire

It is the eternal dilemma of the manager or business owner: how to manage people with inspiration, leadership, and motivation, still maintaining a results-driven approach? Of course you want to nurture your team, let people develop their strengths, create a job they will enjoy, and more. But not to the detriment of meeting targets. How…

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How I work – Professional Competencies

Professional competencies speak to how technical skills are applied. They will demonstrate an employee’s potential for promotion within the business. Everybody claims to want the same competencies in a candidate, so I examine how these are exhibited in the workplace, against the company’s goals. With this I build a prioritized competency table, like a point…

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How To Ask Bad Interview Questions

Let us also dedicate a few words to bad interview questions. Here are some formats to avoid: Yes/No questions. Especially ones where the obvious answer is yes. “Are you good at problem solving?” If anybody answers no let me know, I would like to interview that person for this blog. Trick or silly questions. “If…

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How To Ask Good Interview Questions

Interview Questions matter – having spent the last few weeks explaining competencies and their value in the hiring process, it is worth discussing how to ask the right questions during the interview process. Job interviews are difficult to handle. Candidates are nervous, anxious to please and make the right impression. Employers are hoping for a…

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How to Use Competencies

Let’s take this back where it all started: several weeks ago we talked about how challenging hiring can be.  Especially for small businesses: it is a high risk endeavor, which consumes a great deal of time and raises more uncertainties that it does answers. Problems arise early in the process, though they sometimes only become…

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How to Choose Your Competencies

Using these two groups of competencies helps to list out specific traits. There is nothing on those lists that an employer would not want in his or her workforce. But choices must be made, so how do you choose the competencies for your team? Bringing it all together What can be taught, what must be…

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Back to Hiring For Competence

I first introduced my view on Competencies in December. In the post I differentiate between what can be taught and what has to be innate, and it remains relevant to the current theme of this blog. See the full post here: Hiring for Competence.

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Examples of Professional Competencies

Photo by Alice Achterhof on Unsplash

Professional Competencies are about getting the work done. If Basic Competencies spoke to soft skills, then Professional Competencies point to a person’s effectiveness in the day to day tasks of the job. As mentioned, these are not about a specific technical skill, rather the universal abilities to, well, get things done. The categories of Professional…

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Examples of Basic Competencies

For many years we have been struggling with the definition – and correct appreciation – of soft skills. Basic Competencies are a useful replacement. Many employers find “soft skills” too vague: when it comes to actually evaluating and choosing a new employee they prefer a material selection process; something to which they can point with…

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