No More Rotten Eggs – Getting the Right People

Forget having state-of-the-art equipment or a handsome list of Fortune 500 customers. Your business is guaranteed to tank without having the right people. Most companies, mine included, spend an enormous amount of time training and cultivating employees. Those tasks look easy compared to the onerous job of finding qualified prospective employees in the first place.

No strangers to the printing industry, Debra Thompson and Bill Greif of TG & Associates (www.tgassociates.com) come to the rescue with their new book, "No More Rotten Eggs: 13 Steps to Hiring Grade AA Talent." Thompson and Greif specialize in human resource services and are steeped in experience in the printing industry. In a business where we are so desperate for help that it's often tempting to hire the first live body, their advice instills in us the necessary guidance and discipline to follow a more precise path that guarantees better results.

"No More Rotten Eggs" provides a well-rounded approach to the hiring process starting with accurately defining the job and the skill sets of the individual needed. The book is chock-full of helpful tools, such as an employee referral form (the best way to find great prospective employees by the way), interview questions that better reveal the candidate, background check release forms, reference checking forms, samples of Internet ads and much more. Better yet, all of these tools are also handily available on the CD-ROM that comes with the book, so you can quickly put the tools to use.

While all the tools are helpful, I found the Anti-Discrimination Guidelines section to be particularly useful. We all know not to ask questions such as "How many children do you have?" and "Who is going to babysit them?," but Thompson and Greif offer excellent examples of acceptable questions that you can ask to help determine, for instance, a prospective employee's reliability and punctuality.