If you’ve ever had a conversation with an HR professional, you’ve likely heard us go into detail about how important a positive onboarding experience is for your new hires. This is your organization’s chance to not only validate for the employee that they chose the right position/organization to join but to also energize them to help create an engaged and effective member of your team down the road.

As an HR professional or a senior member of an organization that has conducted a reduction in force (RIF), you are well aware that it is a lengthy, meticulous, and difficult process. So much time and energy is focused on ensuring due diligence, determining what positions may be affected, preparing severance packages, planning for the separation meetings…you get my drift. It’s easy to get so caught up in focusing on the details that affect the employees who will be leaving the organization that appropriate attention isn’t always given to the employees who remain with the organization. Layoff survivors often feel a range of emotions that your organization needs to be prepared for including guilt, anxiety, sadness, stress and anger. The side effects of an organizational restructuring can be physical, emotional and psychological to your employees. So how do you best manage the staff that will remain with your organization after announcing that you’ve just laid off members of their team?

A change in your senior management team can be an interesting time for your organization. The change can either go one of two ways: it can be a smooth process where a new leader comes in and helps steer your company to new heights or it can turn into a disaster where the position is open for months at a time and you end up rushing to fill the role. By rushing to fill the role, the organization hires someone who ends up not being a fit. Fast forward one and a half or two years later and that position has turned over again. You are right back where you were 24 months prior and your organization is a little worse than it was previously and the position is still open.

If you ask any IT Director at virtually any company in America which website is most frequently accessed by their employees, they will all answer in unison: Facebook. Despite firewalling and preventative policy, social media has become ubiquitous and smart companies have learned to use it to their advantage while limiting risk.

So you want to fill a position in your organization and your recruiter has asked you to submit a job description…now what? Ideally, your organization will have already created job descriptions for similar positions that you can tweak to fit the needs of your position specifically. However, this may also be the first time your organization has hired for this particular type of position in which case you may be starting from scratch. In either case, following these guidelines when approaching the task of writing out a job description will help you to establish a relevant and comprehensive job description your recruiter can use to find the right fit for the role.

Many organizations today have the latest technology and the greatest physical resources. But if those organizations do not have the right people, they will always struggle to achieve the results they desire. Here are some of the most important components of a successful search I've learned over the years as a Recruiting Consultant for rapidly growing organizations across the Washington, DC metropolitan area.