From The Editor

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Do you wrestle with finding the time to explore new technologies and markets? Let's face it, you probably wear many hats in your organization and may struggle to find time to balance the jobs of human resource manager, salesperson, operations manager, and bookkeeper. At the RSPA's annual thought leadership summit held this year in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, I interacted with many POS VARs during the event's numerous educational sessions. It was at these valuable sessions that I accumulated many "golden nuggets" regarding hiring and retention best practices that might make the HR-related aspects of your job easier. (As a quick aside, among the RSPA's many education offerings to its members, this conference was packed with educational value. I highly recommend you consider attending next year for both the educational sessions and opportunity to network with other VARs and industry leaders.)

At the St. Thomas event, keynote speaker and consultant Bill Whitley facilitated a brainstorming session amongst event participants on recruiting and retaining high quality employees (collectively, the group generated nearly 50 ideas!). There were a few standout ideas that received positive response from the majority of participants. For example, good communication was identified as a key way to retain and motivate employees. Specifically, one idea was to have a company "brag board" where any employee could feel free to post a "job well done" directed at another employee. One company holds a monthly contest, giving an award to the peer-nominated employee who went beyond usual job duties. Asking employees to comment on co-worker performance was noted as having a great impact on employee morale and gives management increased visibility into employee performance. Another communications-related idea was to hold frequent meetings where all aspects (e.g. financials, short- and long-term goals, business victories and defeats) of the business were openly discussed by all. It was noted that employees are more motivated when they feel like they're an integral part of the business and achieving its goals.

Another idea the group lauded was the use of personality tests in the hiring process. Based on the premise that technology skills can be taught, but fitting a corporate culture is something that cannot, personality and aptitude tests can help measure a potential employees fit within a company. Two tests used successfully by participants are the DiSC personality assessment (which measures dominance, influence, steadiness, and conscientiousness in a personality) and the Wonderlic personnel test (used to assess aptitude for learning a job and adapting to solve problems). Those companies who used these tests claimed to have greatly increased success in identifying good and bad employee candidates.

Following are a few more ideas that garnered positive response. Rest assured that I'll continue to pass along more ideas as I come across them.

• Create a friends and family network who will refer job candidates. Monetarily reward employees who refer candidates that are hired.

• Implement a standardized interview process with deep probing questions.

• Have multiple people interview a candidate, and use a score sheet to compare scores.