A business owner essential: properly vetting employees

What do potential employers have to do to properly vet an employee? Obviously carefully constructing a set of interview questions to gauge whether the applicant is a good fit is paramount. Small businesses in the midst of reviewing applicants will generally ask questions relating to previous job experience, personal characteristics, and skill sets. Indeed, asking an applicant how they found out about an open position can very revealing. Applicants simply looking for a job will typically reply that they found the position after viewing general job listings. A better bet is to find an applicant who has taken the initiative to seek out your company. They generally have a stronger interest in helping your company achieve success.

In order to find the right fit, strong applicants should be amenable to the company’s culture.  Likewise, employers should ask applicants what they like about their current job, what their preferred career path looks like, and how their skill sets have might be helpful in the position.

However, properly vetting an applicant requires more than an interview or even calling references. If an applicant gives satisfactory answers to an employer’s interview questions, time and energy can be expended on the next step in the process. That is, an employer should take a close look at an employees prior connections, credit history, arrest record (or lack thereof), certifications, and of course, employment history. However, a potential employee must sign a consent form allowing the company to conduct this kind of investigation.

If the position your company is hiring for requires multiple, discreet levels of vetting, a professional employment agency can be hired to conduct background screenings for applicants. Additionally, if your business needs to protect against any rist, a surety company may issue a bond (a surety bond is a promise to pay one party a certain amount if a second party fails to meet a contractual obligation.) A bond protects the payee against any kind of loss if the payers fails to meet an obligation.

Most interviews will not these sorts of require advanced levels of checking, but, on the other hand, an untrustworthy or, heaven forbid, criminal employee can cause a large amount of damage to a company in a small period of time. Due diligence is always recommended.

The Rise of Working from Home

It's clear that the "American work environment" is rapidly changing due to a number of factors - demographic, regulatory, economic - but one of the more invisible changes is the transition from office to home work.  Earlier this year Marissa Mayer, citing a need for collaboration, ordered Yahoo's telecommuting workers back to work at corporate headquarters, provoking a debate about the productivity of at-home workers.  Since telecommuting is a new phenomenon, the research on productivity isn't fully conclusive, but several studies indicate that working at home may increase productivity, rather than decrease it, no matter what bosses fear about what the mice will do when the cat's away.  This assumes, of course, that a given company hires responsible, hardworking people.

The trade off is often innovation, however, as people increase their creativity as they socialize and bounce ideas off one another.  But many jobs done in offices aren't particularly creative, and employers are capable of judging the best setting for the work.  Aetna, for instance, has moved more than a third of its workers to at home employment and eliminated the need to house, heat, and cool them for a significant percent of each day.  Processing medical claims does not take a great deal of collaboration, and many people jump at the chance to skip the dress up and commute and complete their work next to their favorite pet instead of across the cubicle from some passive aggressive nightmare or a chatty Cathy.

"Through telecommuting, the company has cut 2.7 million square feet of office space at $29 a square foot, for about $78 million in cost savings a year including utilities, housekeeping, mail service and document shredding.

Teleworkers, who in addition to nurses and physicians include customer service representatives, claims processors, network managers, communications and human resources professionals, lawyers, underwriters, actuaries and others, have high productivity, Aetna says. Many are likely to be women as about three-quarters of the company's workforce is female."

From the standpoint of the worker, other benefits of telecommuting include lowered expenses for travel, work clothing, and meals out, greater flexibility in terms of family life planning, whether caring for children or older adults, and less exposure to time-consuming, mind-numbing corporate culture.  You don't have to suffer through the Sexual Harassment seminar every year.  That's a big perk.

Millenials as a whole tend to be more comfortable with the technology necessary for telecommuting and less tolerant of the time wasters of bureaucracy, so they fit right into this niche.  Many of them haven't had the opportunity to settle into a career - and its accompanying income bump either - so working at home makes more sense financially.  Keeping an old car running can be a very expensive proposition which may explain why driving is down among Millenials.  If you work at home, the commute is pretty short.  You don't even have to get a bicycle or a scooter, although you may want to, for fun and exercise.

What is your experience with working at home?  Do you know many people who do or who run their small businesses from home instead of a storefront?

Data on Small Businesses is Hard to Collect; Internet Remains Viable Marketing Option, Regardless

It seems that the number of workers in the U.S. has risen again, pushing the unemployment level down to the lowest it has been since December 2008. By adding 162,000 jobs, employers have brought the unemployment rate down to 7.4 percent--according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Even with these detailed figures, experts are uncertain about the employment rates among small businesses. According to a report from the National Federation of Independent Business, the number of employees lost per business in July was 0.11 workers. But a conflicting report from ADP said that small businesses added 82,000 employees that month, contributing more than 40 percent of all new payrolls.

This conflict underscores the perplexity of gathering data for small businesses; it can be extremely difficult--nearly impossible, in some cases--to get a realistic estimate of the goings-on in the small business industry. With so many people opening and closing their own start-ups each year, the market is constantly in flux. An accurate picture becomes very hard to develop, especially when a number of people are operating out of their homes. Studies indicate that nearly 70 percent of entrepreneurs in the U.S. choose to start their businesses in their residence. Nearly 60 percent continue to work from home after their businesses have become established.

But with the Internet in the majority of our homes and literally a single click away, this should not be surprising. If you are running an online business and you have space to store product at home, working out of your house should be a no-brainer. There is no reason to pay extra for an unnecessary retail space when the majority of your sales are online. Not to mention the fact that you can write a home office off during tax time. Even better is the fact that, on most days, you can work in comfort because the only presentation that matters online is that of your business. When doing in-person business though, much of the game changes.

But even for the people who have an actual storefront, the Internet can be extremely helpful. Using it to bring in more customers is a great strategy as many individuals turn to their computers and smartphones for suggestions and reviews in their locale. If you happen to be an automotive repair shop that has a solid online presence--and you have good reviews, which you will if yours is a business that respects its customers--it is likely that you'll start receiving more clients in the near future. People often turn to Google to diagnose issues with their vehicle, just like they do with their bodies; if you can determine the keywords that people typically search for in the geographic location of your business, you may be able to get your business to pop up during this diagnosis period. Online marketing strategies exist for every type of small business. Using these may help grow your company into something both concrete and profitable, giving you the ability to hire more people and further contribute to the employment rate.