| Averting the crisis new recruits face | Send to a friend |
| Monday, 20 February 2012 20:19 |
 By Success ReporterThis e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it Whenever a new staff member joins an organisation there is a sense of excitement and an eagerness on their part to impress their new employers. This is driven in part by the fact that they are genuinely happy about the fresh opportunity presented to them to make an impact and scale the heights of career growth, but also by the need to make it past the orientation, probation stages and on to confirmation in permanent employment. But all does not always end well for everyone in the first few weeks, or months of their new job. Ever heard of people, who get a job and work only for two or three months before calling it quits? This is induction crisis. With all the enthusiasm at the beginning, there are many cases of people who resign at an early stage simply because employers have not properly taken them through the induction, leading to losses on both sides.It happened to Jane (not her real name) when she joined a Dar es Salaam-based commercial bank a few years ago as corporate affairs assistant manager. Just get on with it “I found myself thrown in at the deep end, in a strange environment and indirectly told by my supervisor and colleagues to just get on with it,” she recalls. A month after she had joined the bank, the 30-year-old remembers having only one ‘serious meeting’ with her supervisor on the day she was shown her office, given her car keys and laptop, and then told they would be working together, “so if there is anything you need, let me know”. “From that day, he kept to his office and would call to assign me a few tasks now and then. My probation period ended after three months, and even the HR department kept quiet about my confirmation,” says Jane. Feeling anxious and vulnerable, she shocked everyone when she left the bank for a competitor, who had previously shown interest in her. Unfortunately, she is not the only ‘joiner’, who was once ‘thrown in at the deep end’. Finding themselves in a strange environment and told to get on with it, many new recruits are easily forgotten. They are left feeling anxious and vulnerable, forced to make sense of new surroundings and learn correct procedures the hard way. Ironically, many managers regard this approach with favour: after all, this was how they learned to cope and get to grips with the business. It is regarded as a test of competence, of the ability to survive in a demanding environment. But according to human resources experts, while letting new recruits find their way into the system can be a valuable ‘growth’ experience, there is a considerable risk of individuals becoming disillusioned, leaving or developing bad habits. “The induction crisis is a very upsetting situation for both the new member of staff and the employer,” says Joseph Ajal, a human resources expert. He explains that it is basically a situation where new employees find themselves at a loss as to what the new employer expects of them. “This is termed as the induction crisis because it usually happens in the early stages of an employment contract, when the new staff member is still on probation, is supposed to be undergoing induction or orientation,” notes the HR expert. How to avert the crisis Here, he offers advice on how both the new recruit and employer can avert the induction crisis: The challenge from a hirer’s perspective is a tendency to exaggerate the company’s strengths while completely down playing the weaknesses and threats to potential employees in order to attract the best talent at the predetermined wage rates. Just pick a newspaper and flip to the jobs adverts and you will be amazed at the amount of poetry and verse used by organisations advertising for jobs in hyping their brand as the one for which to work. While job seekers have been accused of embellishing their CVs, employers have not fared any better in portraying a slightly exaggerated sense of virtue and positive attributes about themselves online, in the print and on electronic media. The truth sets in too quickly sometimes when these new employees walk through the company’s gates and they are immediately assigned to their jobs without a pro;;per induction into the company’s culture, values, strategy, vision and mission as well as their exact job description and the chips begin to fall off stack of the picture they had of the organisation. Many times the new supervisor will tell the new staff member about how they needed him ‘yesterday’ and will be more than glad to get him started on his new role, with very scanty information availed to him concerning what the expectations of the employer are. How many people do you know, who do not have a job description but eagerly go to work every day? You might answer many. How about those who are clueless as to what their annual performance objectives or key result areas are? These too are many. A combination of these occurrences, right smack in the middle of an induction or orientation phase of employment will likely lead to the above situation, aptly described as the induction crisis. Sudden resignation Sudden resignation by new employees because they feel lost in a corporate maze, oblivious of how to disentangle themselves out of it, except using the age old method of throwing in the towel. All this can be avoided if there is a comprehensive induction of all new staff into the company’s culture, values, strategy, vision and mission. In addition, they should also be given a set of expectations by the employer through a job description and a performance contract, as well as the organisation’s code of business conduct or manuals from the very start. It is also very helpful for employers to be truthful about the kind of company the employees are joining and not paint an unrealistic picture or make promises whose fulfillment is downright impossible. The risk here is that if these untruths are revealed, then the organisation would risk losing the bright talent it has spent so much time, effort, and expense in acquiring and send the whole recruitment exercise back into a tailspin. The new staff members should also take the induction or orientation exercise seriously because failure to do so would mean they start on a new job from a rather shaky foundation, akin to attempting to read a newspaper only by candlelight yet they could have the benefit. The induction exercise can never be taken lightly by either party. Organisations that have mastered the skills in conducting this exercise are sure of having fewer turnovers of staff and certainly not in the probation stage of employment. For the staff, they can be assured of a more grounded start to their new fledgling careers and that, if I may borrow a cliché, they will definitely ‘hit the road running’ and find it a lot easier to settle in and excel at their new jobs. 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