Try Growing Your Own!
By Jack Ruffer

Are you having trouble finding the kinds of employees you need in the numbers you need them to sustain your organization? Support expansion? I know I am. My organization plans to grow by at least 1260 employees over the next four years which means I’ve got to locate, recruit, hire, train and develop an average of 315 new people a year (not including turnover). With the unemployment figures steady at around 4%, it’s tough out there. Just to support that growth my Human Resource department will have to double in size each of those four years but finding qualified and experienced Human Resource professionals in my geographic area is extremely difficult. No, make that nearly impossible. My solution: Grow my own. All I really need is good seed stock (an eagerness to learn and track record, however meager, for attaining goals). I’ve already got a hothouse (our company) to germinate and nurture them. 

For the sake of discussion, and to keep things simple, let’s just consider the needs of my department. I’ve got a Records person and a Benefits person. Both were there when I arrived at my 740-employee organization. They’re knowledgeable, dependable and extremely competent at what they do. What am I missing? A Staffing person, a Compensation person, an HRIS person, a Training and Development person and at least three Employee Relations specialists (we’re a 24/7 operation and I need an HR presence on the floor 24/7),

My first hire was a recently graduated college student with a BA in Sociology which is HR-related. She’s interested in becoming an HR professional but couldn’t get her foot in the door anywhere else without directly related hands-on experience. She’s now on board in a nonexempt position providing general administrative support to the rest of our department. For her first six months she’ll focus on learning benefits, workers’ comp, etc. with my Benefits person. By then I’ll have a Staffing Coordinator and she’ll spend six months learning everything there is to know about staffing followed by six months in Records/HRIS which I intend to combine into one function, six months working in Compensation and six months with me working on Employee Relations issues (somewhere along the way we’ll get her certificated), and, voilà, in two and a half years I’ve got the makings of a basically qualified Human Resource generalist.

This isn’t the first time I’ve tried this approach. I did the same thing back in the early 1980s at a high tech firm when I found I needed to upgrade my staff in order to keep pace with the company and grow for the future. I hired three new college graduates, all with BAs in Human Resource Management as nonexempts. I put one in Compensation, one in Benefits and one in Records. Their colleagues at corporate coached them on process and I mentored and monitored them on results. After six months, I moved them and six months later I moved them again. They’d learned the theoretical in college; I introduced them to the practical in the workplace. After several years, all of them were highly competent Human Resource Generalists and all went on to highly productive and successful careers as Human Resource professionals.  

If you can’t find what you need where you are and you can’t afford to import it from somewhere else, your only alternative is to grow your own.

Now, excuse me. I’ve got some gardening to do.