By Hardik Harsora, Co- Founder of Effex Business Solutions

This article was originally published by

• APN News
• Punjab news Express &
• Mumbai News Network
• business digest magazine

Businesses strive and grow because they offer something, a product or service, of value to their customer. The word “Value” has a broad definition in this time and age. It is the product or service offered plus the experience the customer had buying it and using it. Thanks to all the technological advancements, if the experience is bad, the customer has a million alternatives to go to and as many ways to provide negative feedback. The current scenario therefore, makes it imperative for businesses to run efficiently.

In India businesses can be broadly classified into three categories:

• Corporate
• Family run small and medium size businesses
• Start-ups

Corporate are equipped with various selection tools, psychometric tests, a matured human resource department and budget to source and hire the right resource. This however is not true for the family run small and medium size business. These businesses do not have the knowhow of selection tools, tests nor do they have a team of human resource professionals. They often hire people who are available to them in their community or at best, take the services of another small business offering recruitment assistance. Start-ups on the other hand are crunched on budgets to invest into activities like these and often end up either doing things by themselves or rely on friends and their old job connects. The interview process followed to select a candidate is poor as well and often is ‘believe in the said’ types. These issues lead to incorrect hiring, having a wrong person on the job means employing inefficiency and that means delays, errors, rework and ultimately loss of business as the promised value is not delivered. This, when realized by the stakeholder, leads to a massive push to improve performance with unrealistic timelines, designed with increased frequency of feedback, coaching, corrective actions and training leading to low employee morale and burnout. Not to forget that the promoter will end up investing a lot of time to manage this situation, which he could have otherwise used to grow his business.

Hardik Harsora, Co- founder of Effex Business Solutions, a management consulting company, said, “businesses are made up of two things: processes and people; both of which are enabled by technology to make things easy and quick.” People however play a very crucial role. It is the people resource that executes the process and uses the technology to create value. If the people resource is not right, processes and technology by themselves cannot help the business become successful. There are several challenges faced by an organization to get the right people resource but I believe using the right recruitment process can help the organization to overcome this battle.”

Following are the below four steps in sequence which should allow an organization to get the right person for the job and can protect them from all the hassles of incorrect hiring.

1) Think of the tasks you want to get done – Let’s assume you want someone in back office to punch in the orders and make invoices

2) Think of skills required to do that task – Assuming you use MS Excel and Tally to make invoices and keep track of the orders. The candidate will therefore require skills to use MS Excel and Tally

3) Hire a recruitment agency – You have to pay only when you select the candidate and you also get a replacement if the person leaves within an agreed time line. This is usually less expensive than letting the work suffer due to incorrect hiring or unavailability of resource

4) Interview – Test and Select – Interview the person to know the background and his/her chances of staying with your company. In this case, past behavior is the best predictor of future. So check the reason of leaving the previous companies and estimate what kind of job he/she needs and will motivate them to stay long. You may also want to understand the need of job they have and the family dependency on this job. Test the resource on MS Excel and Tally by letting them perform the exact same work on dummy data