Helping Your Employees Prioritize and Set Strong Goals

Helping your accounting and finance employees prioritize and set strong goals is essential for business success. Planning what your team should achieve in 2024 helps create a foundation for success.

Working with your employees on goal-setting provides steps that inspire and motivate them to attain your organization’s long-term vision. The results include increased employee engagement, productivity, and performance. These factors elevate employee morale, attraction and retention, and your bottom line.

Implement these tips to help your accounting and finance employees prioritize and set strong goals!

Develop SMART Goals

Your employees’ goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART):

  • Specify what should be achieved and why it is important.
  • Clarify what the measurements of progress and success will be.
  • Make sure each challenge can be overcome in a reasonable amount of time.
  • Focus on the benefits of each achievement for the employee and the organization.
  • Develop a sense of urgency to remain on track and reach each objective.

Create Similar Goals for Employees with Similar Jobs

Maintaining consistency in goal-setting for employees with similar job duties and responsibilities supports an environment focused on growth. Having employees work toward similar goals supports healthy competition to reach milestones and objectives. These activities help minimize employee frustration and resentment.

Monitor Employee Progress Toward Goal Attainment

Regularly check in with each employee to determine whether they are on track to reach their goals. Allow time to answer questions, provide constructive feedback, and offer support.

If an employee misses a deadline, help them determine what happened and how the issue can be resolved. Then, reset the deadline and follow up at the given time.

Reward Employee Goal Achievement

Recognize and reward each employee who reaches a goal. Include the steps taken to attain the objective and the impact on your company. Also, consider giving the employee a certificate, additional paid time off, bonus, pay increase, or promotion for their hard work.

Honoring employees who attain goals shows you value and respect their contributions and results. These actions encourage employees to continue their behaviors and increase their value to your organization.

Do You Need Help with Hiring?

Developing SMART goals provides your employees with guidance and motivation to increase their value for the organization. Also, creating similar goals for employees with similar jobs supports healthy competition to reach the objectives.

Monitoring employee progress toward goals helps your team stay on track and reach their objectives. Also, rewarding your employees for goal attainment encourages them to continuously increase their performance and elevate your company’s success.

If you need help with hiring, Casey Accounting & Finance Resources can provide you with skilled professionals who can help reach your business goals. Reach out to us to learn more today.

4 Updates You Can Make to Job Descriptions to Gain More Applicants

Your job descriptions provide managers with clear guidelines for hiring, developing, and managing employees. The descriptions also clarify the job expectations for employees and support compensation, performance standards, and development decisions.

Your job descriptions are an important part of your job postings. They let candidates know the duties and responsibilities of a role and the requirements to be successful in the position.

Because your job descriptions serve multiple purposes, they need to be current. The following are four ways to can make sure the information is updated.

Implement these four tips to update your job descriptions to increase your applicant pools.

1. Position Summary

Summarize the main job duties and responsibilities.

  • Make the role attractive to job seekers.
  • Share information about your department.
  • Include who the employee reports to and whether any employees report to them as well.

2. Minimum and Preferred Qualifications

Clarify the qualifications that candidates must have to apply for the role. Include the qualifications that make candidates even more attractive to the hiring manager. Focus on the major end results of the role.

  • The minimum requirements are a shorter list of your objective criteria.
    • Include the minimum education and experience required for success.
  • The preferred qualifications are nice to have if applying for the position. A candidate without the preferred qualifications still may be hired.
    • These qualifications are on a longer list of more subjective criteria that can be discussed in more detail during an interview.
    • Examples of preferred qualifications include soft skills such as communication, attention to detail, and organization.
    • The preferred qualifications set candidates apart from those with the bare minimum qualifications.

3. Duties and Responsibilities

Include the main job functions in order of importance.

  • Be as specific as possible about the job duties and responsibilities.
  • Explain whether the employee makes recommendations to a decision-maker or makes the actual decisions.
  • Use clear action words and specific adjectives for each task. For example, “Create Excel sheets from raw data, including pivot tables and formulas such as if/then. Perform data entry to update, sort, analyze, and summarize in reports for leadership.”

4. Physical Requirements

Clarify whether there are any physical requirements to complete the work. Include whether accommodations can be made for candidates who need them.

Want Help Hiring Accounting and Finance Professionals?

Sharing clear, updated information in your job descriptions lets candidates know what would be expected of them in the role. Clarification of the position summary, minimum and preferred requirements, duties and responsibilities, and physical requirements help candidates decide whether to apply for a position. This narrows down your options when deciding who to contact for an interview.

If you need help with crafting your job descriptions or recruiting candidates that best meet the hiring qualifications, contact the experienced recruiters at Casey Accounting & Finance Resources. Reach out to discuss your needs today.

What Tools Are on Your List for 2018? 10 Innovative Technology Tools for Talent Acquisition

At a recent Illinois Search and Staffing Association meeting, various tools for talent acquisition were discussed.  During the presentation, the company Talent Tech Labs was identified as an industry leader in the evaluation of emerging technologies for talent acquisition.  Upon further research, according to Talent Tech Labs, the top and most innovative technology tools include:

  • Employer Branding – Technology for monitoring your reputation for your organization and, more importantly, your value proposition for your employees
  • Mobile Recruitment – Technology for addressing candidates through Smartphone applications and social technology
  • Analytics Platform – Taking big data and analyzing the information to help in achieving better informed decisions
  • Candidate Relationship Management – Technology to manage relationships with potential and future hires
  • Video Interviewing – Using video technology to streamline the interview process
  • Online Assessments – Talent assessments are used as a part of an online screening process to help determine which candidates have the skills required
  • Referral Platform – Automates your referral process to get more candidates and more hires
  • Job Marketing and Distribution – Technology to market your jobs and get the proper distribution out to the potential network of candidates
  • Recruitment Chatbots/AI Enhanced Processing – To improve the candidate’s experience, a Chatbot can help recruiters collect information on candidates, ask screening questions, answer frequently asked questions and schedule interviews with human recruiters.
  • Digital Reference Checks – Automate the reference checking process

Talent Tech Labs engages in investigation, research, validation, and acceleration of emerging technologies that can improve the state of play in talent acquisition through collaboration and connecting early-stage companies with forward thinkers in the industry. To keep on top of talent acquisition technology, learn more at www.TalentTechLabs.com.

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Why We Love Millennials in the Workplace!

Millennial are often associated with negative terms including entitlement, poor communicators and technology reliant!  But, we have found that it is actually a joy to work with millennials!  Some of the attributes we enjoy about working with millennials include:

Focuses on Collaboration

Millennials are very collaborative to work with.  They are very communicative, which is great when you work in an environment that has a lot of moving parts.

Purpose

Millennials share a sense of purpose with their teammates and work together on meaningful projects.   They bring a creative spirit to new initiatives introduced within the workforce.  Start an internal social group in your company and see what amazing benefits arise from it!

Technology

Millennials are tech-savvy and like to help others by offering solutions that support innovation.  They are very good at leveraging technology!  They want information fast since they often will be on their smart phone and working on their tablet/computer while viewing a program – and can switch easily between devices.  Make sure you have multiple monitors for their desks!

Want to Make a Difference and Contribution to Society

Millennials are always looking for ways to better themselves and the community.  Having a community spirit helps companies develop programs for the good of others.  What better way to bring meaning to work!

Tolerance

Millennials are by far the most accepting of gender equality and LGBTQ rights.  They are a generation of change and progression.  They care about the issues and will help to make changes.  They accept and celebrate their differences including breaking the stigma around mental illness.  Having a tolerant workforce helps to lift everyone up!

Highly educated and they love to learn and be developed

Millennials are on track to become the most highly educated generation in the history of the United States.  They want to be mentored and coached, and be the best employee they can be!

As you can see, there are many reasons that millennials are an asset to the workforce.  From collaboration, purpose, technology, making a difference, tolerance and education, companies will have a new set of challenges that will bring meaningful change and growth to their organization.

Source:  http://www.smartceo.com/zimmerman-millennials-in-the-workforce-what-they-want-and-how-to-manage-them/https://www.theodysseyonline.com/6-reasons-millennials-awesome

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