HR Skills Academy: Hiring The Best

Best practices for hiring, managing, and developing employees

How can you attract, retain, and manage employees without understanding the responsibilities of the position? Job analysis, job descriptions, and job evaluations form the foundation of many HR practices including compensation decisions, training and development, performance management, and creating reasonable accommodation controls. In addition, they are used as a tool for recruiting and providing a solid foundation for legal compliance.

This skill-building session gives you the chance to:

• Understand the components of a job analysis
• Discuss the do’s and don’ts of job descriptions
• Write clearly defined job responsibilities
• Utilize job descriptions to evaluate positions for internal and external equity

Creative strategies for building a strong and diverse workforce 

A pandemic, worker shortages, wage wars and a host of other factors have complicated the process of attracting and retaining talent. This session provides a up-to-the-minute review of what your competitors are doing, national trends, innovative approaches and innovations in recruitment. We’ll look at how HR should manage the process and investigate how talent acquisition isn’t an event or just a process but a strategic approach to keeping your organization fully staffed and growing.

In this knowledge building session you’ll get the chance to:

• Engage in workforce planning to move talent acquisition from an event to a strategic process
• Describe the latest sourcing vehicles and trends in acquisition and retention
• Identify changes to your interviewing process and content to maximize effectiveness

A practical guide to hiring the right candidate every time 

While Talent Acquisition doesn’t begin or end with interviewing, it is the pivot point around which the process revolves. Identifying individuals who match your culture, who have the requisite skills to perform or have the potential to succeed in your organization depends on your organization’s ability to discern the wheat from the chaff. This program is about the skills required to ask the right questions, listen (and see) the right answers and match what you see and hear to what your organization requires. You’ll leave this class with a roadmap to effective behavioral interviewing and an understanding that interviewing is not the art of asking the right questions, but the science of translating what you see and hear into a decision. This session is a good follow-up to Soup to Nuts: The Complete Interview Cycle.

In this skill building session you’ll get the chance to:

• Identify the key principles and techniques of behavioral-based interviewing
• Demonstrate active listening and observation skills during the interview process
• Apply behavioral interviewing techniques to assess and make informed hiring decisions

Strategies for building a strong and inclusive workforce

It is common for companies to talk about the desire to have a more diverse workforce. Diversity in the workplace is associated with better performance and happier employees, and companies with diverse workforces typically outperform their competitors. Diversity begins with a more inclusive recruitment program and strategy. If organizations use the same recruiting processes they have always used, their recruitment results will remain the same. It isn’t enough to hope that your recruitment pool will contain more diverse candidates. Join us for an interactive session to learn practical strategies you can use right away to create an inclusive recruitment and hiring process.

In this skill-building session, you will:

• Identify a variety of language, generational, and cultural issues that may affect recruitment, retention, and team building
• Explain how to conduct an interview with cultural competence
• Summarize strategies for reducing unconscious bias and legal risks in recruitment decisions
• Align website, social media, marketing and job description to support DEI goals

Ensure a smooth transition of leadership in your organization 

What is succession planning and why is it important? The simple answer is it is a process designed to help organizations ensure a smooth transition when key employees leave or retire. Through a combination of lectures, case studies, and interactive exercises, you’ll learn how to identify potential successors, assess their readiness, and develop a plan to prepare them for their new roles. You’ll also learn how to communicate the succession plan to stakeholders and manage the transition process effectively. By the end of the session, you’ll have the knowledge and skills you need to create a comprehensive succession plan that meets the needs of your organization and its employees.

In this knowledge-building session gives you the chance to:

• Identify the “what and why” of succession planning, along with the risk of not planning
• Describe critical success factors for effective succession planning, including roles and responsibilities
• Conduct an employee inventory, using sample tools to create your plan
• Create talking points for championing, building, and implementing a succession planning strategy to present to your BOD or C-Suite team