What to Do When your Best Employee Quits

 In a world of fairytales, your top employees would stay on board for years and years, and you wouldn’t have to worry about substituting them. Unfortunately, reality proves otherwise. When one of your best employees resigns, you can try to convince them to stay but you can't refuse to accept their resignation. Top employees leave for many different reasons: lack of advancement opportunities, excessive workload or simply because they want to pursue a new challenging role. Once the resignation decision has been made final, there may be nothing you can do to change the employee’s mind. The good news is that there are some steps to take to ensure you handle the process as efficiently as possible. Akhtaboot is here to the rescue with a number of tips to follow if a top employee hands in his or her resignation papers. 

Discover Their True Reasons

Many top employees don’t leave bad jobs so much as they leave bad managers. This is why some managers find it hard not to take resignations personally. Of course your best employee will usually never tell you that you are a bad manager so they don’t burn any bridges. You can find out the real reason by allowing the employee to talk freely about his reasons for leaving. From salary issues, personal issues, stress, or others, it might help you do something about it to prevent future incidents. Once you identify the real reason, accept the resignation gracefully and do some self-reflection.

Consider Offering a Counter-Offer

While it never hurts to try to retain your best people, this doesn’t mean that you use counter-offers as a retention technique, otherwise it will turn into a salary negotiation tool. You should be choosy about who to give counter-offers to and let some of them go without a battle. However, if the cost of him leaving is greater than replacing him, counter-offers can be your last shot at trying to retain your top employees. If money is the issue, propose a reasonable raise. If it's about the job title, consider revising that, but if the resignation is all about change, accept it. You don’t want to go through the same dilemma again in a few months.

Make the Transition Smooth

Once the final decision is made, make sure that the rest of the employees know what is expected from them. Allocate enough time to hand over the departing employee’s work to his colleagues. Top employees usually take care of such matters before they leave. Decide whether you wish the employee to work out their full notice period or just leave right away. However, if you do the latter, be sure that you have an available substitute who can immediately handle the job.

Be Transparent

It’s highly essential that you keep the rest of your employees informed when it comes to employment changes. The more information you provide your employees with, the better for long term success. Keeping information concealed can result in gossip and rumors spreading throughout the company. Once the decision is made, start engaging in an open dialogue with your employees as soon as possible.

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Maintaining Employees’ Productivity during Tough Economic Times

During bad economic times, budget cuts and workforce reductions might be a necessity. Managers are often left with the task of meeting their performance objectives with fewer resources. To keep up with these demands, managers must find a way to maintain employee productivity at a time when morale may be declining. Akhtaboot presents you with 4 tips that would help you with managing employees during tough economic times.

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What Not to Include on Your CV

Things Employers HATE to See on a CV!

If you’re looking to win the job search game you have to leap ahead of your competition by taking your CV writing skills to the next level. Many people believe that they have to include all of their work experiences on their CV, which eventually may become unmanageable if they switch jobs many times during their career. What you don't include on your CV can be as important as what you do include. Akhtaboot is here to the rescue with a number of things you should leave off when writing your CV.

Short-term Jobs

Including short-term jobs in your CV will raise red flags for hiring managers, as it will give an impression that you are unstable and that you don’t have a clear career path. A few months in a job won't be sufficient to present any real accomplishments anyway. Short-term jobs can be included in one case; if the job was contract or project based, it won't raise any question marks as you'll have an explanation that doesn't reflect poorly on you.

Additional Pages

If you're under 30 years of age, your resume should only be one page. If you have enough experience to justify a second one, two pages are fine. Hiring managers may spend only 20 or 30 seconds on each job application initially, so extra pages are either ignored or frowned upon. Your resume should be for highlights, not extensive detail that should be tackled during the interview.

Your Last Salary

Salary information should never be included in a CV, as it is guaranteed to make you come across as naive or greedy. And by sharing such information you can actually harm your salary negotiations later on. Since employers are likely to inquire about the salary range you're looking for, there's no point trying to negotiate before you have a real job offer.

Your Photo

Since your appearance has nothing to do with your ability to do the job, there’s no need to include personal photos in your CV. While adding a photo might make your CV stand out from the others being looked at, there are times when this isn’t necessarily a good thing! A photo can take up valuable space on your CV that you could use more effectively to promote your key skills - which is what will ultimately help you land the job.

A Complicated Design

Unless you're applying for a job as a designer, CVs with an unusual design and weird colors can backfire on you as it will give the impression that you don’t understand what employers are looking for. Line up all headings to keep your resume looking clean and professional and avoid excessive graphics use, boxes or distracting lines and designs.

Fancy Self-descriptions

Your CV should only highlight your experience and accomplishments. It's not the place for subjective self-descriptions, such as "great leadership skills" or "creative innovator". Hiring managers often disregard anything subjective that job seekers write about themselves because self-assessments are wildly inaccurate. Stick to objective facts and actual achievements.

Using Standard Templates

Although it can be very tempting to use resume templates, employers come across thousands of CVs per month and looking at the same thing gets boring. They can look at the format of a resume and know immediately if it is a template or an original design. If they think it is, they may make assumptions about the applicant not taking the time to create an original resume. If you decide to use a standard template, make sure that you customize the margins, font and spacing.

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