Evaluation Series: Human Resources

Evaluation plays a leading role for human resources professionals. Almost every aspect of their job deals with evaluation in one way or another. If you are the human resources person for your organization, you will likely use evaluation from day one.

You will use components of evaluation while developing job descriptions- you will interview and survey your colleagues to ensure that the job description includes everything it should.
Once you have the job description, then you will need to develop interview questions and complete the interviews using best practices. You will want to develop a rating scale to measure the key qualifications of a position and use it to make the hiring decision.

Once you have a new hire, you will continue to use evaluation throughout an employee’s career. You will use surveys to evaluate job satisfaction and performance reviews to determine raises. Make sure to follow best practices when determining how to measure an employee’s performance, which includes having clear, measurable metrics for an employee's performance and providing constructive feedback for areas of improvement. As you can see, evaluation plays a large role in human resources and can help you be more successful in your position.

A side note, you have likely noticed that I am using the term "best practice" a lot. I mentioned it in my last post, but I thought I should take a minute to more clearly define what exactly I am talking about when I say "best practice." So, what exactly is best practice? The Business Dictionary defines it as "Methods and techniques that have consistently shown results superior than those achieved with other means, and which are used as benchmarks to strive for. There is, however, no practice that is best for everyone or in every situation, and no best practice remains best for very long as people keep on finding better ways of doing things. See also best in class and leading practice."

Watch for tomorrow’s post- Evaluation Series: Volunteer Management