How to make your newly recruited employees feel welcome from day one

After expending time and money to recruit great employees, make sure they have good experiences with your company in the initial days and weeks. These impressions can affect their long-term loyalty and help determine whether they stay with you for the long term. Here are ideas for making new employees feel welcome in your workplace…

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Seven ways to interview candidates more effectively

What could be easier than sitting down and asking someone a few questions from a list? When put that way, interviewing sounds easy. But as you may know, it’s not as simple as it sounds. The process of interviewing candidates for a job requires organization, preparation, and the knowledge to ask the right questions. Save…

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“Unlimited” vacation for employees: intentions vs. results

Time-off philosophies are changing a bit with some companies, mostly small or growing start-ups, now offering “unlimited” vacation as an employee benefit. The term is misleading—Could someone take a year off? Probably not—so other more accurate phrases, such as “flexible vacation” and “self-managed vacation,” are starting to be used as well. Unlimited vacation has advantages…

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An HR best practice: How to terminate an employee

Most business owners and HR managers consider terminating an employee to be the most unpleasant of their responsibilities. The manager who wakes up, considers the coming day and thinks, “I can’t wait to fire so-and-so,” is rare … and maybe shouldn’t be a manager. Terminating an employee, even when due to performance issues, requires sensitivity,…

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How to properly use social media to screen employees

Most companies now use social media research to screen job candidates and learn more about them before interviewing or hiring them. About two-thirds of employment managers use LinkedIn to screen candidates’ professional background, and a similar percentage use Facebook or Twitter to screen for personal information shared by candidates. Those are legitimate tactics because social…

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Beware of the dangers of small talk in interviews

Most job interviews begin with a bit of small talk, and that’s fine. In fact, small talk before the formal interview serves several useful purposes. It helps candidates relax and express their personality before the questioning begins. It lets interviewers form initial impressions of candidates’ social and communication skills. And small talk offers both an…

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Can I ask that? Beware of the dirty dozen interview questions

More than a third of hiring managers said in a nationwide survey that they weren’t sure whether they could legally ask some questions in job interviews. The poll, conducted by CareerBuilder, also found that 20 percent of the managers had asked a question that they later discovered was illegal. To protect your company from claims…

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