Prior to even Interviewing people you need to be organised with a Letter of Engagement, Letter to Unsuccessful Applicants and your induction process. So if you haven’t already prepared this prior to interviews, you will need to do so now.
Letter of Engagement
The Letter of Engagement informs new employees about the terms and conditions of their employment with your business, this includes, start date, position, hours of work, length of probation period and pay and other entitlements.
To create your Letter of Engagement you will need to gather the following information:
- Pay Rate
- Hours of Work
- Shift penalties and loadings
- Leave entitlements, and
- Notice of termination of employment.
You should have been gathering most of this information from previous blogs that I have written. But if you haven’t you can either go back to my blogs or go to the Fair Work Australia Website to find all this information out.
The next step is to consider if you need to seek legal advice before employing your new staff member. It’s not law that you have to seek legal advice when employing staff, but some jobs and industries might have specific requirements to do with restricting future trade or confidentiality clauses.
Talk to other employers in your industry or with Fair Work Australia directly to find out if you need to seek legal advice before offering a position to a new staff member.
There are a few good templates that I have linked to below so that you can have a starting point for you Letter of Engagement
Letter of Offer Template – Business Victoria
Letter of engagement, casual employee – Fair Work Australia
Letter of engagement, full time and part time employees – Fair Work Australia
Offer the Successful Applicant the Job
Once you have written your Letter of Engagement and gone through the recruitment process, finding the right person, you then need to offer them the position.
It is a good idea to contact the successful applicant as soon as possible, as delays may give them more time to consider alternative offers. It is also a good idea to offer the job to your preferred applicant before advising the unsuccessful applicants of your decision. This allows you to offer the job to another applicant if the preferred applicant declines your offer.
The initial job offer is usually verbal, at this time you should make a time to meet with them so you can give them their Letter of Engagement and also the New Employee Packs that we talked about in a previous blog – Engaging Workers – Preparing for recruitment and copies of any relevant company policies, such as code of conduct, uniform or social media policies.
In the meeting that you have arranged with them you need to go over the Letter of Engagement, explaining the terms and conditions of their employment, going through the New Employee Pack with them, answering any questions they may have and discussing with them your expectations of them and the position.
It is a good idea to give the new employee time to consider the position and the contents of the Letter of Engagement. So once you have provided them the letter and the New Employee Pack, give them your contact details and tell them if they have any questions to contact you. Then advise them that they have to return the forms and signed contract to you by a certain date.
Once they have returned the forms and signed Letter of Engagement, photocopy the letter and give them the copy. This way you both have a copy of the Engagement Letter for future reference.
Notice to Unsuccessful Applicants
Once you have received the acceptance from the new employee you need to notify the unsuccessful applicants. Over the years the main complaint I hear about businesses when it comes to employing staff is how they never let people know that they were unsuccessful.
I realise that you may have had QUITE A FEW people apply and sending them a letter/email or ringing them will take up a huge amount of time. But it is your reputation that is on the line.
If someone is offended by you not taking the time to let them know their application was unsuccessful ten they will tell people how you are not nice and things like, if they don’t even have the decency to advise me of this, what are they like as a business? And your reputation will take a hit.
Fair Work Australia have a template for a Notice to Unsuccessful applicants, you can download it here.
The next step is your workers first day, we will cover this in next week’s blog. If you have any questions about this or any other part other HR/payroll blogs that I have written recently please email, or contact me on Facebook or Twitter.
