In a previous article, we discussed hiring practices for your team and focused on employees who were out of your current area, perhaps even in an emerging market.

Now that you’ve made a superstar hire, what’s next? Acquiring top talent certainly has its challenges, but now that they are part of your team it’s well worth it to ensure that you have a strong onboarding and training program in place. You are making a large investment – not only in money, but time and resources as well.

You may be surprised to know how expensive it is to find, hire and bring on new employees.  Even more shocking is how much it costs to lose and then replace one. What we will focus on now is reducing turnover and keeping that talented person who just joined your team.

Training your new employees for long-term success starts on day one

Starting at the beginning, let’s look at your employee’s first day. This first day is as important for a top executive as it is for an hourly employee because it sets the tone for the rest of their employment.

If the employee’s first day is chaotic and unorganized, then you are sending the message that it’s okay if they work in a crazy and hectic way. It will also imply that your entire company culture is that way as well.

The employee has no other focus than to watch and observe everything going on in your business, and how people interact with you as well as with each other. They are listening intently and trying their best to fit in as quickly as possible.

The first day should be organized and well-planned. The space and tools which will be needed for the job should be available, ready and established. Give the new person some time to meet the team. Organizing a welcome breakfast or a team lunch is a great way to do this. Establish a well-organized place where employees have access to all the information they will need to be successful in their new position.

Think about what it would be like to be a new employee starting at your company.

• Do they know your dress code ahead of time?
• If they drive to work, do they know where to park?
• How do they get in the building?
• Do they need a key, a passcode, or an escort?

Imagine the employee arriving, and realizing that they have no place to park without a pass! And then they can’t get in to the building, which causes them to be late on the first morning. Stressful! It’s only day one and you already have a frustrated employee who isn’t off to a great start.

More importantly, they feel that you didn’t care enough to address these issues beforehand. All the while, you are feeling that they didn’t care enough to show up on time.

This is an elementary example, which I hope proves that it is easy to eliminate these problems if you take a minute and, with the help of your team, establish that all important issues are addressed so that their first day is smooth sailing.

Offer continued guidance, open communication and a roadmap for future advancement

Now that your new employee has their first day under their belt, it is time to deliver a very clear directive as to the job they will be doing, the resources and people to look to for guidance and a plan to move forward from that point.

I have found that progressive companies are, at this very early stage, addressing future roles and career advancement potential. If you do a great job in your current role, this is what you can expect down the road. This goes a long way to ensure that your new employees stay and turnover is kept at a minimum.

Everyone wants to know that they can grow within the company if they do their job well.

Part of any good employment relationship is solid and open communication. This may entail formal performance reviews at certain times of the year.  More importantly, it’s essential that for the first 30 to 120 days you check in with one another on a regular, informal basis. These brief, regular meetings ensure that things are going according to the plan you established on day one and, if necessary, changes are made, issues addressed and information exchanged.

Train, promote and then bring in the next generation of talent

Ongoing learning and training is an easy but crucial component to your development process. If you do not currently have a program which enables your employees to develop their skills, implementing one will go a long way towards building a strong and tenured team.

Employers who encourage their employees to learn and develop are well-rewarded. Employees stay because they are being encouraged to grow and develop WITHOUT having to make a career or company change.

Another very easy way to ensure a strong team is cross-training. This is an incredibly quick way to advance collaboration and good will. At its core is learning new skills, but an added benefit is the opportunity to walk in someone else’s shoes and the understanding that comes with seeing things from a different perspective.

Supply chain tools and technologies are changing rapidly, and allowing employees to experience and learn from others within the company helps to keep everyone up to date and engaged in how your business is advancing.

Once a well-defined onboarding and development program is in place, it becomes easy to advance your employees throughout your organization.

Promoting from within helps keep everyone motivated and leaves you with the ability to change directions quickly and efficiently.

If your business is still growing and you need to hire regularly, then I suggest starting an internship program. Partner with colleges in your area and engage their graduating supply chain students. Offer jobs, pending graduation, to the students who best fit your company’s needs. Now they are ready for your well-developed onboarding and training program, which will drive their career with the hopes that they stay at your company for years and years to come. It sure beats the revolving door employment model we currently use.

Ultimately, you are making a talent investment which will pay you back year after year.

The post Give your new employees every chance to succeed by following these simple steps appeared first on Trade Ready.

“Well,” I told him, “I could do it but I don’t think it is really necessary.” I reminded him that I just hired a Supply Chain Analyst for him in San Francisco without setting a foot in San Fran.

The recruiting and hiring process is the same for each and every role, and for each and every location. You just have to follow the right steps.

The most important thing to remember during international hiring

Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of steps when you are hiring internationally. However, the most important thing to remember is that it is essential that you follow the labor and employment laws in that area. It’s also crucial that you have a good understanding of visa sponsorships and regulations, should you be hiring someone to work in a country where they are not a resident.

As an example, should you transfer a current employee who is a U.S. citizen to live and work in this position in China, it is necessary to ensure that the Chinese employment rules are followed, or both you and your employee could find yourself in a very bad position.

If you are a large corporation, chances are that you have an HR representative in each of your major markets who handles your international hiring process from that market.

But, what if you are a startup or a mid-market player finding yourself in growth mode? Increasing your business brings the potential for expansion into new market territory domestically or internationally. What then?

Smaller companies can hire global employees too

Let’s break down the process so you can see that it’s not really that complicated.  You want to make an out-of-the-area hire, so what do you do first?

First, the most important step in any hiring process is establishing a solid idea of what you need this person to do; tasks, skills, responsibilities, etc.

Then, you need to decide who else will be involved. Who will they report to, and who else needs to be involved in the hiring process?

If there is more than one person involved in the hiring decision, it’s important to establish that you are all on the same page as to what you are looking for in a candidate.

Sometimes this is an easy task, and sometimes it is necessary to enter in to a mediation-type process like job benchmarking. This is an even more worthwhile exercise if you are hiring outside of your typical market reach, or for a role that is new to your organization.

If you aren’t familiar with job benchmarking, it is a process where the company decision makers agree, in advance, what the job will be, what skills are needed to perform the job, the experience needed to be successful in the role and lastly, an idea of what the perfect person for the job might look like on paper. Then, when everyone is in agreement, you hire to that benchmark.

We help clients hire the correct person using scientific assessments to ensure that we are hiring within the target benchmark. You can find more information on the products and tools available here.

You will also need to do some research to assess salaries for the employment market you plan to target, and decide on an appropriate pay for your new employee. Doing market research on the country where you are planning to hire is the best plan to find a competitive salary range. Searching for similar jobs online should give you an idea of what the job is currently paying. An additional step is to visit the Economic Research Institute where they have a calculator for international salaries.

You want your offer to be on the higher side of the scale and perhaps above the scale for an excellent candidate. Remember that you are depending on this person to be an independent self-starter, and now is not the time to save money which may result in hiring a person who cannot do the job.

Once you have decided on the role, you need to come up with a timeline to search, interview and hire the right person so that they are on board right when you need them to start. If you have an HR team, they need to know what your target hiring schedule looks like.

If you are partnering with an outside, independent recruiter, this is a very important part of the process as they are also working on other positions with other clients. Having a schedule established ahead of time makes for a better experience for everyone, especially if you will be dealing with long distance and multiple times zones.

The most effective way to interview candidates remotely

Now that your schedule is established and you have carved out a target hiring date, you need to determine how you will review and interview this person from across the world.

Perhaps you can start with a phone interview to get a general sense of the person. We use Spark Hire, a video interviewing tool. Our clients choose the interview questions and the candidate tapes themselves answering those questions. Once a candidate sends their videos, we’ll share the video link with the client’s hiring team. This is a useful tool for this process, as it gives you a strong idea of how the candidate presents themselves, and how comfortable they are with technology. Surprisingly, you can also usually tell who prepared their answers and who was comfortable answering from the cuff.

As a next step, Spark Hire has a live interview mode, or you can conduct an online interview via Skype or any other video call service. At this point, you may have an employee in the area who you can task with conducting a face-to-face interview and report back their findings.

Your HR team or your recruiter will also check the candidate’s references, and there are numerous assessments that you can easily administer online which will further indicate their abilities, aptitudes, skills and talents.

Making the final (and best) decision

By now you’ve narrowed the pool of candidates down to those that will be a great fit. If there is one stand-out candidate, fly them in to meet with your core team and use that time to introduce them to your company culture and philosophies.

If there are still two or more candidates, it makes sense for you to travel to meet them in person. Once you’ve made the hire, you may want your new employee to come to visit you after the start in their new role.

Having your new employee visit your established operations is a good way to impart in them your company culture, philosophy and mission. It will also open the doors for communication between the new employee and your established team, which should help with the immediate onboarding. It will help the employee navigate through the new role, office, location, plan, etc.

Depending on your situation, you may still have a lot of questions once you’ve made your hire:

• How do I provide them with benefits?
• What payroll and tax issues do I need to navigate with international employees?
• How do I train employees in other countries?
• What’s the best way to manage employees who are working abroad?

Stay tuned for a future article, where we’ll cover those questions and more, to help you get your new international employees up to speed as quickly as possible.

The post Find the superstar candidates for your global business without leaving your office appeared first on Trade Ready.

If unemployment rates are down and companies are hiring again, then more people are working and there are fewer candidates to fill open jobs. This is obviously true, but there is much more to it than that.

There is a big difference between “talent” and any breathing individual who can fill the job.

We are all looking for the top talent, the change makers, the future leaders who will drive innovation, bring change, increase profits, propel growth and who make our companies better than they were before.

If you hire enough talent, it will be a change-maker for your business.

Where is the next generation of talented supply chain professionals?

During the economic downturn of 2008 and 2009, companies let people go and drastically slowed or stopped hiring all together.

As a result, there were a lot of talented supply chain and logistics professionals, mostly middle management, who left the industry after losing their jobs and did not return.

Part of the problem arose when time away from the industry left these employees unable to keep up with industry advancements in technology.

When companies started hiring again, they found these once-talented managers had left the industry and, in most cases, would not or could not return.

This put more pressure on hiring managers and human resources to seek out and hire younger employees as they were graduating from school.

Without chances to succeed, potential supply chain professionals are choosing other paths

Historically, however, our industry is not the strongest at developing and running supply chain and logistics internship programs.  And, unfortunately, the college and university programs that do are facing their own challenges.

Some college students whose programs have an internship requirement cannot find placements in their field due to the limited opportunities in their location. They often rely on more general business internships to fulfill their program requirements for graduation.

This is what causes the largest problem: talented logistics and supply chain students who are forced to take these more general internships, are in turn hired for general business roles during their internships, and never find their way into the logistics and supply chain industry.

Even after choosing the right program, doing well in their courses, and positioning themselves for a bright SCM career, the lack of opportunities to “get their foot in the door” to the industry is leading these students to other fields.

Further compounding the issue, I frequently hear from hiring managers that college graduates do not have “real world, on the job” training and experience.

“Really?,” I ask. “How many college interns did your company utilize this year?”

Usually, the response is…none.

Now, hopefully, the “talent shortage” is a bit clearer.

Providing opportunities for the best and brightest to get their start

We need to change this about our industry and we need to do it right away.  More companies need to offer and utilize supply chain and logistics-specific internships, to offer students that much needed experience in the field.

The biggest bonus for the company is that they get first access to top talent, whom they can hire full-time pending graduation. When we make this change, our industry receives top talent instead of having a talent shortage.

At Small World Recruiting, we have developed a Logistics and SCM Internship Board, www.scminterns.com, to support the industry because we feel that matching interns with companies who need them is a big step in the right direction.

Posting a resume is free for students, and we are starting to spread the word at colleges and universities, who are encouraging students to register.

However, we are really busy doing what we do best, recruiting mid-management and executive level roles within the industry.  For the board to be successful, we need your help.

So please, spread the word and share and post this article.

Encourage your HR team to develop an internship program, and then post the opportunity on our internship board so that logistics and supply chain students can find it and come to work for you after graduation.

As with anything, good things take time, but I hope that in a year or two this logistics and supply chain-focused internship board will be the source of finding top talent within our industry, and that we can finally say, “No, we don’t have a talent shortage.”

In fact, we will have access to the best talent the industry has ever seen.

The post We need to stop passing up new grads and develop talented candidates in the supply chain industry appeared first on Trade Ready.

If it affects recruiters like me, think of how impactful that same constant change is within the complex world of supply chain logistics.

Supply chain logistics has never been an easy industry.  With many different pieces, parts and partners, it’s a fluid environment.  Most companies are embracing lean initiatives, and everyone has their mind set on better, easier, and more streamlined and efficient ways of doing business.

With each advancement in technology, the way companies do business internally, and with each other is changing.

This is very evident in the supply chain management (SCM) employment market as well.

There have been so many advances in the industry over the last century, starting with Ford inventing the first moving assembly line in 1913.  In the ‘50s we had the ocean container, the ‘60s EDI, the ‘70s the UPC, the ‘80s the ERP system, and in the ‘90s the birth of the mainstream Internet.

Those changes, albeit over a long period of time, have significantly advanced our industry.  But since the ‘90s, the technology has come so far and so fast that I could not list it all in this article.

This leads us to a few questions:

How does this technological advancement affect the labor market?

How do companies ensure they are hiring to the technology?

Finally, how fast can a company change direction with a new system, software, or tool and expect the team to keep up?

Train for the new needs of the workplace

If you are looking to have a future in SCM, then you need to be smart, fast, flexible, engaged, intuitive, and above all else analytical.  Companies have more complex roles to fill than ever before, which drive this super-technical environment we now live and work within.

It is now much more common to find a manufacturer looking for a Supply Chain Director with an engineering background than one looking for a warehouse worker.  Just twenty years ago, it was the other way around.

Cisco Systems’ SVP of Supply Chain Operations, John Kern, recently said “The supply chain industry is undergoing one of the most massive talent shifts we have ever seen.”

To prepare future professionals to survive and thrive in the talent shift, universities need to do a better job of preparing SCM students to handle the quick moving and rapidly changing environment. Students need more cross-functional internships with real life hands-on training.

When considering a university program, think about how well prepared you will be at graduation. Academic education can only get you so far. Hands on training, internships, field trips, and real word experience from professors or professionals who have recently worked in the industry is what will provide you the best start to a promising career.

Students need to dive in and get their hands dirty.

They must have the ability to multitask, change direction with flexibility, and they must possess the discipline to ask questions until they find the right answers.  They need to think for themselves under great pressure and analyze solutions.

According to a recent article in Inbound Logistics, The Top Universities for Supply Chain Technology Education, “It has never been more important for new professionals in the supply chain field to have experience with the digital tools that are essentially the backbone of major supply chain operations.”  Because of this importance, they partnered with Software Advice, who compiled a recent ranking of top SCM programs in the U.S.

These programs are doing a better job of incorporating software and technology in to their SCM programs, and are a good place to consider for either an undergrad interested in the industry or as a returning student looking to remain relevant and current for their career advancement.

Make a lifelong commitment to technological training

Since jobs are becoming more and more complex, and companies have a lot on the line when hiring someone to handle these large and ever-changing supply chains, we implemented some tools of our own to use in the hiring process.

We have started using video interviewing to offer our clients a better picture of who our candidates are.  We think this gives the company a more complete picture than just a resume alone.

However, we found that the software we use, allowing the candidate to login and control the time, pace and place of their interview, causes difficultly for most people over 50.

In comparison, the Millennials sign in, and with little effort turn in a high quality video.

The younger candidates are, in most cases, using better computers or tablets, and are comfortable enough to be articulate and expressive.  Frequently, their responses about the process are that they are impressed with the ease and simplicity of getting their first interview out of the way.

Many older candidates, however, push back on having to do it at all, and usually stumble with technical difficultly. More often than not, the video comes back to us as unusable.  It magnifies the challenges older candidates struggle with when using new technology and it brings up the obvious concern – will they be able to learn and use the technology on the job?

My recommendation for those that are not very tech savvy, is to brush up on new technology in any of the following ways:

• Follow blogs
• Sign up for industry newsletters
• Listen to podcasts
• Watch videos on YouTube
• Become active on social media

Become as familiar as possible with the technology being used within your organization, as well as in the industry.  Beyond staying current with technology, certifications are a great way to ensure that you are still learning about industry trends.

Everyone needs to get on the same page

After doing some evaluating of the most difficult positions to fill, we decided to partner with our clients in offering candidate aptitude and performance predictability testing, along with the ability to create a job benchmark to ensure that we are hiring the right person for the job.

As it turns out, many roles have become so complex that each person on the hiring team often has trouble agreeing on what skills are needed to do the job.

Creating a job benchmark, which the hiring team agrees on, and then hiring the person who most closely matches that benchmark, ensures success.

Studies prove that going through this added value process increases both employee job satisfaction, as well as better job performance and stability for the company.

It is because of the complexity of these jobs that we, in the supply chain recruitment industry, are embracing new technology ourselves in order to deliver the results that clients expect to see when placing new team members into their organization.

Looking into the future of supply chain

Looking toward the future, there is a lot of talk about, Big Data, IoT (the Internet of Things), total connectivity, increased cloud-based solutions, and even robots.

Robots? Who thought that would happen in our lifetime?  All of this will continue to drive advancements in SCM.

In the end, with every step we take in technological advancement we still must strive to master the basics.

We seek to increase transparency and visibility while controlling development, replenishment, maintenance, production, transportation, delivery and customer satisfaction.

Then, of course, we need to do all this without forgetting to drive efficiencies and mitigate risk and loss.

It is a good time to work in this industry: jobs are plentiful and salaries are increasing at a rapid rate. According to the U.S. Department of Labor,

“Employment of logisticians is projected to grow 22 percent from 2012 to 2022, much faster than the average for all occupations. Employment growth will be driven by the important role logistics plays in the transportation of goods in a global economy.”

With a very strong prediction for record growth in an advancing industry, we now all need to do a better job of learning and embracing the technology that drives that growth. Our jobs, and our future, depend on it.

The post Are you falling behind as technology transforms supply chain recruitment? appeared first on Trade Ready.