Whether you are managing a small, strictly local, firm in the suburbs or a national concern with a large presence in the city, you may sometimes find it hard to reconcile the need to find new staff in a hurry with the desire to maintain an ethical hiring policy. However, while these two goals may sometimes appear difficult to achieve simultaneously, it is essential to find a recruitment approach that enables you to do so. Fortunately, when working with an efficient recruitment agency such as Skillforce, this task is made somewhat easier.
For tips from the professionals on how you can find new employees quickly without compromising your ethical labour hiring policy, take a look at the suggestions we have gathered together in this article. All of the recommendations listed below were made during an informal conversation with our unskilled and skilled labour hire experts in Perth, and can be successfully implemented by organisations of all types and sizes. They apply to all market sectors and if you do not have the time to implement them yourself, we will be happy to take over your recruitment functionality and do so on your behalf.
Labour Hire in Perth: How to Find New Talent Quickly and Ethically
Whether you are based in Perth or Brisbane, you are probably already familiar with local and federal requirements regarding the hiring of both temporary and permanent employees but making sure that these requirements are met when you suddenly find yourself facing a serious staff shortage can present new challenges that you are unaccustomed to dealing with on a regular basis. Follow the tips below to ensure that your corporate hiring policies do not suffer at such times
- Determine Appropriate Wages for Each Position – If you need to find half a dozen warehouse operatives within the week, you will not want to have to negotiate a salary for each one independently as this could be very time consuming. A better approach to take is to examine the current state of the job market in your particular industry, focusing on what your competitors are paying employees in similar positions and on the existing wage structure in your organisation. By following this approach, you should be able to set a fair wage that is acceptable to all of the candidates and that reflects the responsibilities and duties they will be expected to handle once they have been recruited.
If you are recruiting for positions that are quite unusual and you are unable to determine the applicable rate, you may wish to consider consulting a recruitment company such as Skillforce, which specialises in recruiting skilled and unskilled labour for your particular market sector. By teaming up with a recruitment company that has many years of experience, you can delegate much of the research that needs to be conducted, leaving your key employees free to focus on their day-to-day duties rather than on finding new colleagues to solve the staff shortage issues you are facing. If you are already short of staff, the last thing you will want to do is to distract your workers with tasks that could better be handled by a team of local labour hire specialists.
- Identify the Key Skills and Competencies That Each Group of Candidates Will Need – Again, if you are hiring people to fill a number of similar positions within your organisation, it will be easier to create one document detailing the requirements for all of the positions rather than a separate document for each one. Once you have prepared such a document of required skills and competencies, you can either use it yourself to quickly assess each candidate’s suitability during interviews or pass it on to a recruitment specialist that can do all of the hard work for you. For those occasions when speed really is of the essence, a labour hire specialist that already has a pool of potential candidates ready to interview will be able to help you fill the positions far more quickly than would otherwise be possible.
- Prepare the Working Environment in Advance – This is one task that you will have to handle by yourself and you should do so at the earliest possible opportunity. There is no point in arranging for several new employees to start work at your company in a few days’ time if you do not have the space to accommodate them in a safe and comfortable area. Health & safety in the workplace should always be a priority and you need to make sure that all new workers can carry out their duties without suffering from any discomfort during the course of each working day. In some cases, achieving this goal may necessitate a major reshuffle of existing employees, in which case the sooner you deal with the situation the better.
Although you will have to make the necessary changes yourself, you may wish to take advantage of the services of a health & safety consultant or a local recruitment specialist, to ensure that the space you make available for your new workers is fit for purpose. Whether you are dealing with recruitment firms that specialise in labour hire for Brisbane or Perth organisations, you will almost certainly find that the most reputable firms have the ability to provide you with the help that you require in this area.
- Make Sure You Do Not Discriminate Against Candidates in Any Way – Even with the best intentions in the world, it can be very easy to unintentionally favour a certain race, gender or age group when conducting large-scale labour hire in Perth, Brisbane or any other part of Australia. The best way to ensure that this does not happen is to remove any information relating to age, gender or race from the applications that you receive, before passing them on to the manager who has been given the task of evaluating the candidates. You may, for example, have a preconceived notion that young men are better able to fill the positions you have available but to allow this preconception to cloud your judgement during the selection process would most definitely be unethical, and would be unfair to the candidates who did not fit your ideal profile.
Outsourcing recruitment functions to a specialist third party organisation is an excellent way to avoid any prejudices affecting the selection process and will, of course, lighten the load for the managers in question at the same time.
- Consider Your Existing Workforce – Whilst, generally speaking, it is unethical to focus on a particular race, gender or age group when you are hiring new employees, it may sometimes be necessary to do so if your existing workforce is not representative of the local population. If, for example, you audit your factory staff and find out that the ratio of men to women is skewed, you may wish to address this imbalance when looking for new hires. Whether this is appropriate or not is something that you can ask your own recruitment experts to determine. Alternatively, you may approach a firm that specialises in labour hire in Brisbane, Perth or wherever you happen to be located.
Any well-established recruitment specialist in your part of Australia will be familiar with the requirements to ensure equality during the hiring process as far as race, gender and age are concerned, which means they should be qualified to help and advise you on this important matter. In the event you are not familiar with any local firms that are able to assist you, please feel free to contact Skillforce at any time.
Preventative Measures
So far, we have looked at ways you can make sure that you continue to follow an ethical hiring policy when you find yourself in dire need of a number of new employees. Now, we are going to conclude this article by taking a quick look at some of the measures you can take to avoid finding yourself in this position in the first place: how to anticipate when a staff shortage may be likely to occur so that you can address it before it becomes an urgent problem.
- Monitor Demand – If your recruitment department liaise with your sales department, they will be able to react to spikes in demand in a more timely manner.
- Analyse Seasonal Patterns – If your industry undergoes seasonal changes in the demand for your products or the supply of suitable employees, you can anticipate when both your unskilled and skilled labour hire requirements are likely to peak.
- Watch Local Health News Bulletins – If you are aware of an influenza outbreak before your competitors, you will be able to steal a march on them when it comes to lining up sick cover.
If you would like to discuss your current and future requirements concerning labour hire in Perth or Brisbane, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us during normal business hours. We look forward to helping you fill your vacant positions with the very best candidates available.