Today was the big day and Sarah had been at work since 6.30 a.m. The first of the recruitment advertisements was out in the regional newspaper and she had to make sure the team was all prepared. It was 2 years after she had joined Meteor and helped set up the original factory. She now needed to fill an additional 60 positions within a 6-month period with new employees joining an induction programme every 2 months. The 60 positions were as follows:
■ 30 production operatives.
■ 15 service engineers and support personnel.
■ 8 Office support staff.
■ 3 Sales representatives.
■ 4 staff for a new team to advise organisations in setting up call centres. Two, as senior advisers, would act as consultants/ account executives and two would be involved in actually setting up the centres, although the roles would be flexible ones.
The call centre team was a new initiative that was being piloted at her site, run by Gary Hands, an experienced manager head-hunted from a similar organisation.
From the original recruitment exercise, Sarah had accurate job descriptions and specifications for all the jobs except the new call centre positions. Together with Gary, she developed a set of competencies for each of the four jobs which matched their specific requirements. For the senior advisers, they centred on consultancy skills, such as persuasion, planning and presentation; for the operational/training roles, they centred on leading, training, problem solving and delegation.
