Does your grade point average really matter? It may matter to keep you on the college sports team or to help you to get into the school of your dreams. However, in the world of employment, recruiters are looking for more than just a percentage grade. Most recruiters want to know who you are, what you can do for them and why you are better than the next person. Most of those questions have nothing to do with the actual number given to you by the school you attended.

What Are They Looking for Then?

Each industry is different. In some fields, hiring a candidate with a high GPA does matter, especially in the fields of science and math. However, most HR professionals are looking deeper to determine if you could be a good fit or not.

1. Your personality and drive matters most. When you walk into an interview, you need to shine. Are you making eye contact, smiling? Are you a good communicator? Do you have the type of attitude that this particular field requires? This will matter far more than your GPA?
2. Experience is also important. What type of experience do you have that makes you more valuable? For example, those just out of college may not have job experience in the career of their choice. They may have experience in various school activities, private organizations or in other related fields.
3. What type of courses you took and how you did in them will matter. The recruiter wants to know that you not only got a degree but that you are interested, passionate and genuinely knowledgeable about the courses you took.  Further, getting a high GPA by taking the easy courses is not going to help you. Rather, you should be interested enough to take the more in-depth educational programs. Do you have the education in the field needed to do well?
4. What else did you do during school? Did you gain work experience? Did you lead various clubs and organizations? Did you participate in the community? Though your education is important, most recruiters hiring a student right out of school want more than just that. They want someone with more in-depth world experience. You can get this by working with a staffing agency like LC Staffing.
5. Your skills or portfolio also matter. What are you bringing away from your college education? Those who have extensive training may have portfolios with outstanding work. It is easier to know how well a person fits in a position when there are examples of the person’s skills to look at and compare to others.

Answer the question, “What can I do for this company?” When you do, you will understand what the company is really looking for when hiring. When working with recruiters, determine what stands out about you compared to others. What makes you more valuable to the recruiter than the next person that will hand in an application? These things help to keep you apart from the rest of the applicants and are often far more important than a simple GPA.

A performance review is a fair way to review a person’s ability to do his or her job. Since this can be a very subjective situation for even the most skilled of HR pros, it is essential that a business have a performance review available that helps to display exactly what the tasks and requirements are for maintaining a job. If an employee’s performance begins to falter, it becomes critical for the HR pro to use a set standard of evaluation tools to determine if that person needs to be put on probation or let go.

Making It Fair

There are many ways to measure job performance. You may measure it based on the quantity of work completed. You may measure it on the quality provided. You may measure it on the timeliness of the person’s arrival or skills or it may be something completely different from this. What is essential is to have the same scale to rate every employee on. When you do that, you will reduce the risks associated with making unfair or unreasonable decisions for letting an employee go.

Tips for Addressing Employee Performance

How can you address a problem you see occurring? The initial step is to correct the problem at the time it happens. No matter how small, an initial correction becomes necessary. If the employee gets the proper training or information and continues to make the same mistake, it is time to consider a performance review.

• Use the same form for a performance review for every person that works in the same position. This ensures there is no favoritism or miscommunications.
• Use the performance review as a tool to train if you hope to keep the employee. “This is what is expected. This is what you need to do.” It is clear, defined, and it is written on a piece of paper.
• Keep person opinions and comments out. Rather than say, “you have had a bad attitude the last week,” say something like “your performance has slipped in quantity produced and I’m noticing you are late for your shift.” This ensures you are addressing the actual problems not the subjective information provided.
• All employees face equal standards. If Joe gets to leave early, so does Sally. The key here is setting standards and enforcing them equally across the board. It is not always easy to do, but it does become necessary.
• Ensure the decisions you make a based on facts gathered from more than one person. If the management team can come together and discuss a problem, it becomes easier to handle that negative performance. It shows that it is not just one manager with a problem, but the team.

By being reasonable, and holding people accountable to their actions, you reduce the risks associated with problem such as unfair firing or favoritism within the workplace. Every situation is different, but when you can use one performance document to rate an employee based on the facts, you reduce any risks associated with performance misunderstandings.

By and large, the business community has been on a massive hiring freeze for the past four years. As rays of sunlight are beginning to creep up along the horizon many businesses are trying to get out of the “belt tightening” frame of mind they’ve been clinging to during that time and enter into a hiring mindset.

The problem remains that the top-notch candidates are few and far between. More importantly, everyone wants to hire them. So, what are employees really looking for when it comes to compensation?

There are primarily four areas of life that employees are really overly concerned with: health, wealth, quality of life today, and quality of life after retirement. With that in mind, these are the most important benefits to most people who are looking for jobs today.

Opportunities to Earn Bonuses

People are willing to go the extra mile to help make the companies they work for profitable. They do it all the time. Most people, especially coming out of a major economic recession, are even willing to take a hit on salary if they believe they can earn bonuses in time to make up the difference. In fact, the opportunity to earn this extra income will have them working even harder to make your business the greatest possible success.

Health Care Coverage

This benefit is actually number one in the hearts and minds of employees at every level of the corporate structure. There is a ton of uncertainty over the upcoming health care bill that was recently passed in Washington. People don’t understand. They have a lot of questions. They are more concerned than ever before that they have adequate health care coverage to care for their families now and in the future.

Dental Care

This one has surprised a lot of people – though certainly not anyone who has paid out of pocket for major dental work in the past several years. It really shouldn’t be surprising that health and dental care weigh heavily on the minds of employees from all economic backgrounds and walks of life.  Dental problems have a tendency to escalate if left unchecked and can lead to serious conditions like heart disease, chronic infections, and other illnesses. Dental health is something people are, rightfully so, beginning to take seriously.

Paid Vacation

People work hard. They also like the ability to play hard when the opportunity arises. A generous vacation or PTO (paid time off) package can actually overcome certain salary deficiencies in the eyes of many potential employees so keep this in mind as you establish your employee benefit packages.

401(k) Plans

Retirement is very important for workers today. It may even be more important than at any other time in recent memories. Many employees had retirement funds decimated in the recent recession due to uncertainty and upheaval in the stock market. They are facing a long and hard road to get things back to where they were pre-recession. Some of them may never fully recover. Company contributions and participation in 401(k) programs is an attractive benefit to many job seekers.

The bottom line is that priorities have shifted a bit in the past four years. Where once, the highest possible salary was a primary concern; today, people are more concerned over finding the right package deal for themselves, their lifestyles, and their families.

The past four years have seen a whirlwind of upheaval in the job market across the U.S. There have been a lot of changes made and not all of them are what anyone would consider positive. 2012 though promises to be a year of positive change in one sector in particular: manufacturing. There are a lot of people who are surprised and a little shocked by this revelation.

The truth is that the recession has helped quell one of the most expensive aspects of manufacturing in the U.S. – the human factor. Back in 1992, there was a mass exodus of manufacturing jobs from the U.S. to – anywhere else in the world but here. The reason was twofold. The high cost of labor was front and center. There was also an air of inflexibility in work rules due to regulations and, in some areas, unions. The bottom line is that manufacturing simply wasn’t attractive in the U.S. at the time.

2011 was the first time, since 1997, that there was the slightest bit of uptick in the number of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. While the cost of labor in the U.S. remains higher than other areas of the world there are a few changes taking place that have once again made U.S. soil an attractive location for manufacturing. Of the manufacturing companies surveyed in the Institute for Supply Management semiannual economic forecast, 69 percent of them expected to see an increase in revenue for 2012.

Chief among these reasons is the fact that desperate times call for desperate measures and many communities are offering tax benefits and relaxed regulations in order to bring these jobs back to our shores. The other mitigating factor in favor of a return to the U.S.A. is the fact that transportation expenses have reached a tipping point of sorts and tipped the scale of expenses in favor of operating a little closer to home – especially when coupled with the rising cost of labor in China and other countries.

The bottom line is that these jobs are slowly but surely returning to the U.S. and that means that manufacturing, as an industry, is likely to bounce back from the recession faster than many other sectors. The good news is that blue collar buying power can help drive the recovery of the rest of other sectors of the economy.

In addition to the great news on the manufacturing front for jobs in 2012, comes the news that most businesses, 58 percent of businesses that are not in the manufacturing sector, are predicting better financial performance in 2012 than in previous years. While it’s not cause to go crazy with the hiring process it definitely makes the case for a little cautious optimism for the coming year.

To find great candidates for upcoming manufacturing assignments, be sure to contact the skilled and technical labor recruiters at LC Staffing!