Be Successful Here

Job interviews are your only chance to meet an applicant and find out if they have the personality, character, and skills to make a great employee. But the job interview is only as useful as the questions you ask. When you conduct interviews, it’s important that you ask tough questions that will bring out a person’s true nature. If your questions are too easy, an intelligent but not necessarily qualified candidate is going to coast through them with platitudes and clichés, making it difficult to find out any meaningful information.

Questions for Applicants

· “What are your three greatest weaknesses?”

The greatest weakness question has become cliché, and most candidates are already prepared to answer it with some meaningless answer that they researched online. If you want to really challenge them, up the ante. Force them to continue to think about what their weaknesses might be and see how they conduct themselves while they’re flustered.

· “… That’s great! Do you mind showing me right now?”

Often at the interview you’ll ask if the person is familiar with various software tools or other skills that they need to complete the job adequately. Candidates also lie – or at least they exaggerate the truth. When you conduct interviews, you need to make sure that your applicants are being honest, and there’s an easy way to do this – once you’ve asked if the person has a particular skill, ask them to prove it to you right then and there.

You don’t need to actually have them prove it. All you need to do is see their reaction. Candidates that do not truly know how to do what they claimed will give some excuse such as “well, it’s been a while, so I may be rusty.” Candidates that truly have the skill will confidently say yes.

· “Pouvons-nous continuer l’entrevue d’emploi en français?”

When you conduct interviews, it’s not uncommon to look for candidates that are multilingual. Candidates, however, are much more likely to claim they know a language that they have only a cursory knowledge of – such as taking a few classes in college. Do they truly know the language? You can find out by asking them in the language they claim to be familiar with whether or not they are willing to continue the interview in that language.

Monitoring your carbon footprint is especially vital to our planet, especially if you are a business. It is crucial to reduce greenhouse gas emissions wherever possible. If a business measures their emissions, they can learn how to effectively manage them. By doing so, it can have a large impact on helping tackle the problem of climate change. There is even the opportunity to reduce your business’ expenses in the process. If you own or manage a company and you want to reduce that company’s carbon footprints, the following explains some procedures that can get you started in the right direction.

Something as simple as turning off all lights overnight reduces carbon footprints. This goes for shutting down all appliances that may otherwise go unnoticed, such as computer monitors. It has been shown that leaving the lights on overnight in the typical office will waste enough energy to have heated one thousand cups of coffee. You can introduce such things as occupancy sensors, which only turn on lights when there are people in the room. You can also change your energy provider to a green energy supplier.

Heating is another way that businesses lose a lot of their energy. If you reduce your need, you reduce your carbon footprint. One way to do this is to have a thermostat controlled system installed that keeps the building the same temperature all the time, which can be set for different temperatures overnight. The heat should not come on at all if the building is empty. Also, make sure that there are no radiators or vents that are blocked, as this can cause a system to work harder than it has to. Maintaining the proper insulation is also important.

Be sure to stay on top of where your equipment is placed, as well, such as you do not want to place a piece of equipment that heats up near a cooling vent. Also, not regularly maintaining your equipment can add as much as ten percent to your bills without you even realizing it.

What is Arc Flash?

An Arc Flash is a short circuit through the air when insulation or isolation between electrical conductors is breached or can no longer withstand the applied voltage.

In an arc flash incident an enormous amount of concentrated radiant energy explodes out from the electrical equipment creating pressure waves that can damage a person’s hearing, a high-intensity flash that can damage their eyesight and a superheated ball of gas that can severely burn a workers body and melt metal. The pressure wave can send loose material like pieces of damaged equipment, tools and other objects flying through the air.

The best way to prevent Arc Flash from occurring is to de-energize the system before beginning any work and always verify that the energy is controlled.

Examples:

• Arc flash incidents typically occur in applications above 120 volts and can occur when electrical equipment is being serviced or inspected.
• Some incidents occur when a worker is removing a cover or trim from a piece of equipment.

What are the two types of faults in an electrical system?

A Bolted Fault consists of a low impedance short circuit between two separate phases or between phase-to-ground. Because of the low impedance path, the short circuit current present is very high compared to an “Arc Fault” in a similar system.

A typical rule of thumb is that the Bolted Fault current a system is capable of sustaining is roughly twice that of an Arc Fault in a similar system. Traditionally electrical equipment was designed to withstand this very high Bolted Fault current. However, a Bolted Fault rarely results in the devastating explosion associated with an Arc Fault and as such electrical equipment that has only been type tested for resistance to Bolted Faults may not maintain their integrity under Arc Fault conditions.

An Arc Fault is a phase-to-phase or phase-to-ground short circuit through air which is caused by a reduction in the insulating clearances to such an extent that the potential differences applied can no longer be withstood by the system. Such reductions can be as a result of dropped tools, or other elements that may be accidentally left behind that could compromise the distance between energized components.

Individualised training ensures that your organisation and its goals are clearly represented through every stage of the training. From top tier management down to the frontline, it is vital that everyone is on the same page and that business processes, procedures and protocols all reflect customers as the heart of the business. Therefore, programs must be tailored to encompass all levels of staffing and all aspects of business.

After in depth consultation at all levels, it is then possible to take best practice from tried and trusted methods that will specifically address relevant aspects of the individual organisation. For example, a contact centre would have little need for face-to-face training for customer service, while a front-facing company may still require telephone based training. Thus it is vital that training packages represent the goals and culture of each individual business.

Additionally, HQ management will require slightly different aspects of training to frontline managers and the exec team will have different needs to the frontline staff. This distinction is important and any training package should reflect the differing needs of the staff as well as the business.

Benefits for individuals can include a number of issues from an increased confidence in a position to increased job satisfaction which in turn will lead to increased productivity. Most people enjoy their work more when they feel they are successful at it and are only fulfilled when they feel equipped to deal with the day-to-day realities of their working life. It is a sad fact that, throughout the UK, a large majority of customer service and sales staff do not have adequate training to handle situations that are considered to be outside of their ‘normal’ interactions. This lack of support and awareness leads to, not only an unpleasant customer journey, but also an unpleasant staff journey as no one wants to feel as though they have failed at their job. Additionally, the provision of adequate and robust training will make staff members feel valued and cut down on wasted time dealing with situations that have escalated due to lack of understanding.

This is where in depth communication training can be invaluable. Many sales are lost each day in the UK due to lack of clear communication and incorrect assumptions made by both staff members and customers. It is important that staff do not assume that they know what customers require, though it is a human instinct to jump in and help when we feel that someone isn’t explaining themselves adequately.

It is a fairly common question in the document storage and archiving field these days, but can your business benefit further from moving on to digital document archiving and replacing your old filing systems?

The answer for the most part is usually, yes, of course you can, but it does invariably depend on the kind of business that you’re in. Although pretty much anyone in any line of business can benefit from digital document storage, it is without doubt much more effective the more documents that you have to store and can be of even greater benefit depending on where you’re actually storing them.

For example, if you are a company that has a few documents that are used and accessed on a regular basis, you could benefit from digital storage, but it could be seen as overkill and not necessary. If you’re a company that has hundreds, thousands or even millions of documents, then digital document archiving is pretty much made for you. With levels of documents on that scale being accessed on a regular basis, there is pretty much no way that you wouldn’t benefit from going digital, whether it’s in the space you would save, the costs, the improvements in efficiency, productivity and staff morale, it will be an advantage for you in one way or another, or even in many ways.

After all, digital document storage and management was made to make life easier and make going through and finding documents a breeze, it’s been that way since the first incarnation of a computer with a word processor, but it’s only now that we’re fully taking advantage of the benefits.

It’s also a surpringly simple process to get your documents digitised. Obviously, if you have very few you can scan them in yourself and name them whatever you wish to help you find them easily on your computer system. However if you have documents in the thousands, it’s highly recommended to use a document scanning and archiving company to do this for you. They can usually scan thousands of documents every single day and because of this charge a relatively small fee for doing so. They are also able to index the documents however you wish to make finding them extra easy and many can even offer OCR services to make the scanned file completely text-searchable and readable by your computer systems. This adds further benefits to having your documents digitised for archiving purposes.