Now that you’ve completed your study of this module, let’s return to the situation we introduced at beginning. You’re a marketing manager faced with hiring a new team member to help complete a major project. When we started this module, you had a lot of human resource questions and didn’t know how to proceed. Based on what you know now, let’s see how you could put the information into practice.

Preparing to Recruit

You start by developing a strong recruiting plan. You understand that people are the organization’s greatest asset, so you want to ensure you hire the right person for the role. You start by working with your company recruiter on an advertising plan to let people know about the job. You then develop a strong list of interview questions. You’re careful not to ask any questions that would violate discrimination laws such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Age Discrimination Act of 1967. You’ve also decided that you are going to start with telephone interviews so that you can narrow down the candidates to a handful that will come in for face-to-face interviews.

Starting Out Right

Your search is successful—your top candidate has accepted your job offer! Now that you’ve hired a great candidate, it’s important to get her prepared for the job so that she starts out confidently. Your organization has a standard onboarding process for new employees that does a good job of grounding them in the company’s history and values. Likewise, your new hire will understand more about the culture of the business. However, you want to provide every opportunity for her to be successful so you develop training that is specific to your department. This includes a variety of computer-based training, but it will also provide an opportunity for job shadowing. By partnering your new hire with someone more experienced, she should be able to ramp into her role more quickly and with greater job satisfaction.

Ongoing Development

You’ve also been thinking about the need for ongoing development for your entire team. With the learning you have completed in this module, you understand how important it is for your team to get regular feedback against specific objectives. Additionally, you have begun to think about other training that would benefit them.

Although they may not become HR specialists, every manager needs to understand certain fundamentals to maximize the value of the organization’s most important asset—its people. The material you have covered in this module is something that you will likely come back to many times during your career and will help you become more successful as a manager.