We grow our clients' businesses by finding them amazing talent. Based in the Midlands, we have been growing since 2004 and have clients all over the UK and Europe.
Precision People is a specialist search, recruitment and consultancy services organisation, focussed on providing a range of recruitment and people solutions, to a wide spectrum of industry sectors, for client organisations nationwide and beyond.
WE PUT THE RIGHT PEOPLE, IN THE RIGHT SEATS, FOR THE RIGHT REASONS.
A dynamic talent management and executive search consultancy that provides an integral link between the directors of growing businesses and high achieving candidates. Combining in-depth industry knowledge with the latest in talent resourcing and search methods.
Our team is comprised of specialist recruiters who know their industry inside out, ensuring a deep understanding of the specific skills and experience candidates need in order to fill the unique requirements of your vacancy, whether temporary, contract or permanent, from design to engineering recruitment.
Important Succession Planning Tips for Family-Owned Businesses.
The majority of family-owned businesses are run by baby boomers, which makes the need to have a well thought out plan for leadership transition essential. Some business owners are fortunate enough to have the next generation ready to take over and lead the entire organisation (whether they have the skills and determination to grow the business is another matter!
I have worked with family businesses within manufacturing that have continued to thrive as offspring have been taught over several years, in readiness to finally take over the family reins.
I’ve also worked with and heard of family businesses in which the sons or daughters, once they have taken over, have made the wrong decisions and consequently, those businesses were not as profitable as they once were.
Finding the right leader should be a top priority. Succession planning can be a challenge, which is why we have compiled the top tips for effective planning. You can preserve your legacy with an effective succession plan.
So as head of a family run business, what should you do?
You have to determine from the outset, whether your children are serious contenders to run your business. Ask yourself honestly, if they truly have the soft skills as well as the business knowledge to grow the business after you have stepped down. Are they willing to learn from you? It’s one thing them working for the family business but quite another them actually taking over the responsibility of a company.
The earlier you plan for a leadership transition, the more effective it will be when the time to handover leadership arrives. To prepare:
If you have identified potential successors, which could be relatives or other people in the business, assess what gaps they have and create a personal development plan to prepare them for their future role. The better prepared they are, the easier the transition process will be.
Alike to when you hire a new employee, it is crucial to define the necessary skill-set and experience for the role. But more importantly, define the personality and values that the candidate will need in order to preserve the current culture and legacy of your family business.
Carefully plan out how you are going to determine the right fit through interviews, assessments, previous experience, references etc.
It is just as important to have the right interviewers. Who knows you and subsequently, the values of the family and the business? Having external advisors who will have a more holistic view of your business may help you make the right decisions when hiring.
In my experience, finding the right person for a family business is all about cultural fit. Are they going to fit and get on with the culture and the values of your family business?
You don’t have to completely give away the family business that you have worked so long to create, but an LTIP will be necessary to retain your future leader and preserve the family business.
Identify what truly motivates your high-potential employees. Unleashing the full potential of your key-employees and keeping them motivated will ultimately be the key to successfully preserving your legacy.
These top tips can help you to plan and develop your succession plan, preserving your legacy with the right leader.
If you are currently planning ahead for your manufacturing family business, contact Recruitment Director, Phil Walker, on 0116 254 5411 or email phil@precision-people.uk who has several year's experience recruiting senior hires for family business and offering honest, simple advice to help move your business forward.
What creates a successful culture?
One key aspect of creating a successful culture, is really understanding what your culture is and how it makes your business unique. Your culture is your competitive advantage. In a world where products and even services can be replicated by competitors, its culture that is your completely unique and sustainable competitive advantage.
In the same way that no two people are the same, no two companies are the same. There isn’t a particular type of culture that will make your business X% more profitable, implementing a culture that isn’t your own is likely to have an adverse effect. (Hence why trying to change it should only be in extreme cases).
How to understand your culture within your business
To really understand your culture, it’s vital to sit down with trusted team members from a variety of levels. The culture at board level may differ to the culture at entry level - it’s important to understand these differences and how they affect your business.
Deduce what attributes your successful employees have, do they correlate with your culture? Following on from thinking about what negative traits unsuccessful employees have had. Why did they leave the business? You’d be surprised at how many of these negative traits are cultural.
Once you understand what it is that makes your culture unique, the next step is protecting it. Whatever the size of your company it is important to hire people that fit into it, after all, one bad apple can spoil the bunch.
How to hire someone according to your culture - 3 killers questions.
It’s important to note that finding someone who fits your culture isn’t necessarily someone who will bring a breath of fresh air into your business. Often what you’re really looking for isn’t a someone who fits your culture, but a culture add.
The difficulty is to find someone similar enough seamlessly slot into the team, but someone original enough to push the boundaries and bring in some fresh ideas where necessary.
‘Birds of a feather flock together’
Interview questions
Knowing the importance of employing people who add to the culture, the difficult bit is working out who matches your requirements.
The recruitment process needs to be in place to allow the candidate to showcase what they can do and how they fit these values. The most important way for you to work them out is by asking the right questions at the interview.
Question #1: Why do you want to work for us?
Why ask it:
Although this might seem like a simple question many candidates fall at the first hurdle. This question is an opportunity to see not only if the candidate has put the effort in to research your company, but also see what the candidate prioritises from what their research has shown.
What to listen out for:
Question #2: Describe a time when you were tasked with something you didn’t know how to do and how you overcame it.
Why ask it:
The nature of a new job will entail new challenges and there is always a learning process involved. There will be times when a new employee will be challenged with something new, are they likely to take a risk and try something without guidance or are they more risk in their approach?
What to listen out for:
Question #3: Tell me about a time when something unfair happened at work.
Why ask it:
Frustration is something that is likely to happen in any job at some stage. When an employee gets frustrated it can have a profound effect on their colleagues and the business as a whole. The important aspect of this question is seeing how they handled their frustration, were they proactive in going to the source and talking about or did they let it fester and turn into something divisive in the team.
What to listen out for:
Your culture is the most important thing your company has whether your a manufacturing plant, a fabrication business or you distribute construction products - knowing what it is and how to manage it for success is the biggest sustainable competitive advantage your company can have.
Once you have the right people in place, keeping them motivated is the next challenge, why not check out our blog on 7 powerful ways to motivate your team.
The onboarding process is more important than it ever has been before due to the rapidly changing workforce of 2021. The expectations employees have towards their employer have changed drastically since millennials and generation z joined the workforce, but in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, job satisfaction is ranked according to even stricter criteria than it was before the crisis. New employees will be even less forgiving of the perceived shortcomings of their employment, so maintaining the enthusiasm of new employees should be the priority of all forward-thinking businesses.
The Unilateral Approach
Once you have hired a new employee, the best practice for staff retention is to have a structed onboarding process plan in place. A big mistake busy bosses can make is to concentrate on hiring new staff and leave employee satisfaction up to fate, or up to line managers and supervisors who would actually benefit from a unanimous approach to counteract the discrepancies between their respective management styles.
Keep Your Promises
A good work-life balance is prioritised highly by candidates on the hunt for new employment and therefore it should be offered (and even emphasised) to staff who have just joined your company. Flexible working is not possible in some industries but a demonstration of respect regarding their time and ensuring your implement the advertised benefits is conducive to sustaining interest in the role long-term.
Sustain the Onboarding Process
If you have a history of employees leaving the role within the first 6 months, then whether it is only a handful of recruits or linked a continuously high turnover rate, an evaluation of why this is occurring needs immediate attention. The first step of the onboarding process is the prevention of receiving an employee notice within the first few months to a year of newer employees starting, but it should seem obvious that continuing to facilitate employee engagement is an ongoing process.
Understandably, time and resources are finite factors that managers do not necessarily have at their disposal consistently. If you would like to look at improving your onboarding process to engender the creation of motivated staff members carving out long careers with your company, get in touch with us today to see how we can help you to do just that.
At Precision People, we are diverse. Our talents are multi-faceted, our record of success is remarkable, and our goal is to help you recruit the best people for your team. Given our 18 years of experience as a highly successful and always innovative engineering recruitment agency, we have learned which mistakes are often made and how they can be avoided.
All About You
While there are plenty of jobhunters searching for employment at any one time, it can be tempting to let hubris take over and let only a short job description get approval for the many job sites online. While the hiring process can be costly and time-consuming, it is also vital. What also bears crucial importance is how much you see from the potential candidate’s perspective. A well-written job advert will be detailed and appeal to the skilled engineer’s way of thinking.
A Lack of Detail
To attract the right calibre of engineers, you need to ensure you convey your company as exciting, challenging and filled with opportunities for progression. An engineer tends to be goal-oriented and focused on the future, so if your job description is short and lacks depth, the ambitious engineer full of initiative will simply seek out another company.
Disguising Benefits
Some companies think being shrewd about the benefits you can offer will attract people with a better work ethic, or they want to test potential candidates. However, with the skills gap still prevalent in the UK job market today, employers cannot afford to play puppeteer with potential employees. Contrary to popular belief, a talented engineer would be more likely to pursue an opportunity with you if you have competitive benefits and convey them openly because they know they are in-demand. If you don’t offer what they are looking for, they will simply look elsewhere.
If you would like to streamline the hiring process and benefit from expert outsider help, please contact our team today.
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