Applications and interviews background information
In different countries, different conventions apply to the process of job application and interviews. In most parts of the world, it's common to submit a typed or laserprinted CV (curriculum vitae —British English) or resume (American English). This contains all the unchanging information about you: your education, background and work experience. This usually accompanies a letter of,application, which in some countries is expected to be handwritten, not wordprocessed. A supplementary information sheet containing information relevant to this particular job may also be required, though this is not used in some countries.
Many companies expect all your personal information to be entered on a standard application form.
Unfortunately, no two application forms are alike, and filling in each one may present unexpected difficulties.
Some personnel departments believe that the CV and application letter give a better impression of a candidate than a form.
There are different kinds of interviews: traditional one-to-one interviews, panel interviews where one or more candidate are interviewed by a panel of interviewers and even 'deep-end' interviews where applicants have to demonstrate how they can cope in actual business situations. The atmosphere of an interview may vary from the informal to the formal and interviewers may take a friendly, neutral or even hostile approach.
Different interviewers use different techniques and the only rules that applicants should be aware of may be 'Expect the unexpected' and 'Be yourself^,
Progress interviews are interviews where employees have a chance to review the work they are doing and to set objectives for the future. Such interviews usually take place after a new employee has been working with a company for several months, and after that they may take place once or twice a year.
In different countries, and m different trades and different grades, the salary that goes with a job may be only part of the package: extra benefits like a company car or cheap housing loans, bonuses paid in a 'thirteenth month', company pension schemes, free canteen meals, long holidays or flexible working hours may all contribute to the attractiveness of a job.
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Employee loyalty in service firms
NEW YORK
Hotel, shop and restaurant chains, which employ thousands of people in low-paid, dead-end jobs, are discovering that high labour turnover rates resulting from the indiscriminate hiring of “cheap” workers can be extremely costly.
Cole National, a Cleveland-based firm which owns Child World, Things Remembered and other speciality shops, declared a «war for peoples in an effort to recruit and keep better staff.
Employees were asked: What do you enjoy about working here? In the past year, have you thought about leaving? If so, why? How can we improve our company and create an even better place to work? Employees replied they wanted better training, better communications with their supervisors and, above all, wanted their bosses to «make me feel like I make a difference».Labour turnover declined by more than half; for full time sales assistants, it declined by about a third.
Marriott Corporation, a hotels and restaurants group, has also decided to spend more money on retaining employees in the hope of spending less on finding and training new ones. In one year, it had to hire no fewer than 27,000workers to fill 8,800hourly-paid job slots.
To slow its labour turnover, Marriott had to get a simple message accepted throughout its operating divisions: loyal, well motivated employees make customers happy and that, in turn, creates fatter profits and happier shareholders. Improved training of middle managers helped. So did a change in bonus arrangements.
At the same time, Marriott became more fussy about the people it recruited. It screened out job applicants motivated mainly by money: applicants which the company pejoratively described as «pay first people». Such people form a surprisingly small, though apparently disruptive, part of the service-industry workforce. Marriott found in its employee-attitude surveys that only about 20%of its workers at Roy Rogers restaurants and about 30%of its workers at Marriott hotels regarded pay as their primary reason for working there.
Many middle managers in service industries are more comfortable coping with demands for more money than with demands for increased recognition and better communications. They will have to change their ways. Surveys say that when 13,000employees in retail shops across America were asked to list in order the 18reasons for working where they did, they ranked “good pay” third. In first place was “appreciation of work done”, with «respect for me as a person» second.