Once you have listed down the tasks that have to be done in your business and crossed out the ones you’d do yourself, the next step in determining your staff requirements is:
IDENTIFY QUALIFICATIONS FOR EACH POSITION
To fill up each position, list all qualifications required in terms of skill, education and training, experiences, and personal competencies and characteristics. Include age, gender, and other requirements which you feel are important for a certain job to be performed well.
For example, for the the bookkeeper-secretary, the requirements might be:
- Female, single, 18 to 35 years old
- Business graduate
- Must know how to use fax machine, photo-copying machine, and Microsoft office programs
- Must know how to compose business letters
- Preferably with six months experience in bookkeeping and secretarial work.
- With pleasing personality
- Attentive to details
For sewers, your requirements might be:
- Female, 18 ti 45 years old old
- High school graduate
- Must know how to operate high-speed sewing machine
- Preferably with one year experience in a garment factory
- Physically fit, with good eyesight
- Willing to work overtme
- Willing to work on any shift, if there are two or more shifts.
SET UP SALARY/WAGE RATES
It is advisable at this point to determine salaries and wages to be paid for every position you have. Applicants need to know how much you are willing to pay them. Determining your employees’ compensation rates is a critical decision because:
- On one hand, labor costs affect the profitability of a business (thus simplistically, you can reduce labor costs by keeping wages down)
- On the other hand, the wages you will pay will be an important factor that will motivate your employees to stay in and give their best effort to the company (thus low pay rates are not conducive to keeping worker productivity high).
The usual way to fix salary rates is to match industry rates — the rates normally paid in a given industry, the garment industry for example.
Some small entrepreneurs make it a point to pay wages slightly higher (about 10 per cent) than prevailing industry wages. These employers would say that by paying 10 per cent higher, they get highly trained and efficient workers who increase production by more than 10 per cent.
Other employers pay a new worker at par or a bit lower than industry rates which is then adjusted upwards after the employee has made a good showing during the trial or probationary period.
When you have done all the steps needed to identify your manpower requirements, you are now ready to begin the process of recruiting, screening and selecting the people to work with in your business.
Adapted from: Introduction to Entrepreneurship, published by the SERDEF and UP ISSI
(Watch out for how-to articles on recruiting, screening and selecting employees.)
Photo: “Woman working at a sewing machine in a garment shop” by Kheel Center, c/o Flickr. Some Rights Reserved