Here's an article by Molly Hall and Laney Chavis, the "Don't be a Yes Chick!" girls and personal friends about the importance of training your team. As you may recall, we have been on a journey for almost a year now to find a new receptionist. We promoted Tiffany Metz, our former receptionist, to assist with office administration and marketing when team member, Kendra Ferreri left to begin her life as full-time mom. We should have known this would be no easy task - seemed like it took forever to find Tiffany.
Meanwhile, Tiffany has been holding down two jobs - receptionist and her new position. She's done very well, but that's not the point. We really need a receptionist. Tough part is, this person becomes the voice and face of the Law Offices of Hoyt & Bryan, LLC and this is not a position we take lightly. Like the title of this blog, your receptionist can help you attract and retain clients OR they can just as easily scare them away. We, like you, work very hard at our marketing efforts. We don't need one person, poorly trained or with a bad attitude, to undo all of our efforts.
I'm happy to report we extended an offer last Tuesday to Jackie Woods and she accepted. She's been with us a whole three days, and I hate to be overly optimistic, but so far, so good. She seems bright, energetic and eager to learn and to please. All excellent qualities for a new team member. We are keeping our fingers crossed and training her slowly, at least as slowly as she'll let us.
Molly posted this article just about the time we found Jackie. I actually printed it for both Tiffany and Jackie and I'm re-enforcing it's message. Fortunately for us, voice mail is only an option if all lines are busy or we aren't there. All calls in our office are answered personally. I'm still old school enough I like to talk to a person when I call. Although I don't usually mind leaving a voice mail message for someone - I can actually tell them more of what I want, I still appreciate companies that have a live person to talk to.
Stay tuned. I'm hoping there is nothing but good news to report.
Oh, forgot to mention. We found Jackie and also another new hire - hasn't actually started yet, on Craigslist. We were actually warned not to post a job offer there and we hesitated for a long time. We just weren't getting enough and enough quality applicants from our other sources - mostly the local college resource centers. So, we hoped we could outsmart the typical Craigslist job seeker. We designed a quiz for the candidates - they had to go to our website, they had to answer 5 specific questions whose answers could only be found on the website, and they had to send their resume and answers to a specific email address. Anyone who could accomplish this task - and they had a resume that was grammatically correct without typos and misspellings would be offered an interview. Easy right? Wrong! You would not believe the number of people who could not do the easy things we were asking them to do. Fortunately this exercise saved our team hundreds of what would have been wasted hours talking to people we wouldn't even consider. Amazing how many hours were spent doing that anyway. I was starting to think that the bulk of the unemployed population was unemployed because they needed to be - at least that was representative of what we saw - and that was the best of the best.
As you may know, our team hires the team. We've discovered over the years this is the most cost effective, efficient, and ultimately best way to hire team members. Our team is much harder on a potential new hire than we are - they realize they have to train and work with this person every single day. They want to make sure this is someone who makes the whole team look good - someone who will do their fair share and not bring a lot of drama or unnecessary stress to our work environment. It's only when the team says "yes" that Randy and I meet with a candidate. Easy for us, as we are generally in agreement. When they make a hiring mistake, they tell us and we move on. Sometimes the team will actually do the firing - depending on the circumstances.
Right now, life at works feels good. All positions are filled, everyone is working hard. Have a great week!
Training Employees into a Dream Team! » You won’t believe what your receptionist just did to your biggest client
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