Probably not. And, if not, why not? You win some, you lose some, and some days, it rains, or snows, as the case may be. Most organizations are not hiring superior talent and it is likely your hiring process that is letting you down. Do you know that organizations are still hiring employees after one manager interviews several candidates?

No potential coworkers meet the candidate and no assessment is made of the candidate's cultural fit. What? Culture? What's that? Oh my goodness. While some organizations have made progress in hiring superior employees, others have not - to their severe detriment.

Hiring superior employees ensures that your organization has the talent onboard that it needs to succeed in accomplishing your mission and vision, and attaining long term profitability. Hiring fundamentals that include a systematic process for hiring and consistent execution of the hiring process result in superior employee wins for your organization.

Dan Erling (pictured), author of the book, MATCH: A Systematic, Sane Process for Hiring the Right Person Every Time (Wiley) (compare prices) asks, "Why is it that so many companies accept mediocre hiring results as the norm? The answer is simple. It doesn't occur to them that, in fact, there is a process that virtually guarantees hiring the right person every time."

You and your organization can do better than this. I promise. If you develop a systematic hiring process and execute the process faithfully, your proportion of superior employees will skyrocket. Take a look at my interview with Dan about hiring to find out how to implement a process for hiring superior employees.

Then, check out these additional hiring resources for more ideas and support.

Hiring Superior Employees

• Recruiting and Hiring the Best Email Class
• Checklist for Success in Hiring Employees
• Top 10 Ideas for Hiring Stars

Human Resources Newsletter

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Do you take advantage of inexpensive, team building and morale boosting opportunities to help your employees adopt a continuous learning mindset? One of the hallmarks of learning organizations, employers can use brown bag lunches to enhance continuous learning.

A brown bag lunch is an informal opportunity for employees to learn at work. A brown bag lunch is used to convey work information occasionally, but mostly serves to enhance employee knowledge about non-work or job specific issues and ideas.

Brown bag lunches or lunch and learns provide an opportunity to develop employees' knowledge, pique their interest about opportunities, and demonstrate the company's commitment to providing a healthy, value-based, motivational work environment.

Topics for a brown bag lunch range from viewing slides of a coworker's vacation trip to a visit from a local banker to discuss maximizing the potential return that employees can earn by saving.

Here's more about why you might want to offer brown bag lunches or lunch and learns in your workplace. Suggested topics, too...

More About Continuous Learning and Learning Organizations

• Make Learning Matter: Become a Learning Organization
• Implement a Book Club at Work
• Training and Development for Motivation

_{Image Copyright Aleksandar Petrovic}

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Are you interested in how to measure the impact of Human Resources leadership, management, actions, policies, and assistance in your organization? You should be so that your organization understands your value. A significant component of your Human Resource business planning is identifying what Human Resources measures to collect. One of the topics I'd like to spend more time on this year is Human Resource measures.

Once upon a time, standing in my kitchen - yes, I work from home - four vice presidents called me, out of the clear blue, from a client company. They were meeting to assess the effectiveness of my training and consulting activities and they made the age old mistake of measuring actions, not results.

They proposed that my accountability would be the number of training sessions I presented, the number of employees who attended the training sessions, and the number of improvements employees made in their work areas. I told them I could begin to work with them on the last one, but the first two had nothing to do with the results we wanted to achieve.

What Impacts Human Resource Measures?

This story has played out in workplaces perpetually, it seems. And, part of the problem is that HR staff members get so busy just providing services, that collecting data and measuring success and contribution, in addition, is a stretch. At least in the small and mid-sized companies where I have spent much of my time, this is true.

One of the measurements that HR has collected data on is cost-per-hire. The Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM) has spearheaded an effort to develop a human resources standard for measuring cost-per-hire. Here are their cost-per-hire benchmarking results for 2011-2012.

Additionally, find out more about what Human Resource measures might work in your organization and why.

What do you currently measure in HR?

_{Image Copyright Jeffrey Smith}

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Explore the power of on-the-job training to enhance employee development in your organization. Use job shadowing as a significant component in on-the-job training, too.

Probably because I was a jointly-appointed training coordinator and OD consultant for a GM plant earlier in my career, both training and OD have always remained dear to my heart. An early memory that has always stayed close, too, is the day that the tool and die guys invited me to their training meeting and asked me to be their training coordinator.

In those days, you could be assigned a job, but you couldn't do the job, if the employees didn't accept or seek your services. As I write this, I find myself laughing. In those days, I say, but isn't it still the way - in all coordinating or managing roles? Someone has to decide to follow you. Hence my sense of pride and accomplishment when first, the skilled trades employees, then the tool and die guys, invited me to their party.

As a result of these experiences, I learned that on-the-job training is the most powerful form of job training. Employees who aspired to these skilled positions attended classes and apprenticeship programs, but the bulk of their training was working side-by-side with experienced employees in a job shadowing situation. And, the power of job shadowing should not be limited to hands-on skilled trades either.

Job shadowing is significant for employee development in any on-the-job training approach. Even employees who aspire to management roles benefit from on-the-job training in job shadowing opportunities. Learning to lead a meeting, taking responsibility for a team's product development results, and participating in coaching and mentoring for a management role is just as significant for an employee who aspires to an office job.

Do take a look at my 12 possibilities for on-the-job successful training: Provide Job Training - On the Job.

_{Image Copyright Catherine Yeulet}

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