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By Suzanne Deutsch
Featured on farmcenter.com

Hiring the right people for the right tasks is one of the greater challenges farm operators face every year. It’s even more critical for producers with only a few employees since each one has a proportionately larger impact on their business. While a good employee is a valuable asset to an operation, a toxic employee can hurt your bottomline. They can run up your repair bills, throw off production schedules or sap workplace morale. Workplace performance consultant and motivational speaker Michelle Painchaud says employers can avoid a lot of these problems by not rushing the hiring process.

Farmers have to remember that people are on their best behaviour during a job interview Painchaud says. Some are tempted to embellish or color their accomplishments; others will outright lie to get the job.

Young people are very astute and a good number have excellent interview skills. “Students coming out of high school, college, and university have up to 40 hours of interview training,” Painchaud explains. “They come prepared and know how to answer tough questions.” These are good reasons to hire slowly and not just rely on just a 20 minute chat.

Michelle Painchaud works with her clients to make sure their employees are a good fit for their operation. (Seacliff Farms, Leamington, Ontario)

Since potential employees have been coached on how to impress employers during job interviews, Painchaud says producers need to work on their interview skills too. She offers a few basic tips to use as a starting point:

Spend time listening: Farmers are proud of their operation. They talk about their crops, equipment, and their business but sometimes forget to ask enough questions.

Ask open-ended questions: Behavior based questions will reveal the way somebody acted in the past and will predict how they will act in the future. So rather than asking if they can run a combine, Painchaud suggests having them give an example of what they did when something went wrong when they were operating one.

Asking who their favourite or least favourite boss was will tell you if they will be a good fit for your management style. Answers to questions about teamwork, such as talking in length about the get-togethers and informal baseball games, will reveal how much the person is expecting to socialize and how important family time is to them. Questions that target the culture of the company will give you an indication if that person will be able to handle changes and work towards the goals you’ve set out to accomplish.

Go on-location: Unless you want to fill an office job, Painchaud suggests taking people into the barn, the field, or the shop and continue the discussion in that atmosphere. You’ll able to gauge interest and skills by the questions they ask and you will be able to study their body language.

Spell it out: Once someone has been hired it’s a good idea to provide him or her with a written job description. Employees need to understand what their priorities will be. The most common reason that employees don’t meet performance standards is because the owner or the manager has not clearly told the employee what their expectations are.

Give feedback: Every human being wants to know how he or she is doing so it’s important to conduct performance reviews.

“This is also a time to verify if your employee is still happy,” says Painchaud. “According to the Human Resources Association of Canada, the number one reason people quit their jobs is their boss, the second is lack of appreciation. Salary ranked fifth. Employees that are complacent or bored might be looking for work somewhere else. If you can make their work a bit more challenging by adding another task or responsibility, you have a much better chance of keeping them.

Document problem behaviour: In many instances, all that is required to fix or adjust problem behaviour is a one-on-one meeting to discuss expectations and consequences if the problem isn’t rectified. Painchaud strongly suggests writing down the date, time, a brief description of what was discussed at the meeting and the worker’s reaction to it.

This information should be placed in the worker’s file for future reference. While farms have traditionally been exempt from provincial labour standards legislation this is slowly changing. And, employees that aren’t given a chance to correct their shortcomings before they are fired could file a wrongful dismissal suit.

“Firing is becoming more complicated”, Painchaud says. It’s becoming really important that producers make sure that their dismissal process follows the letter of the law.