Two under-utilised labour secrets

There are two ways to get cheap labour into your business. Now when I say cheap, I don’t mean ripping them off type cheap, but really good value for money cheap.

These two segments are :

 Mums and young students

There are so many mums that would love a few hours work each week while the kids are at school. They are easy to train and wonderful to have around and think of the skills they bring. They are usually experienced, they naturally have multitasking skills, they are usually stable and they enjoy work because it is their exit from the usual household (broad generalizations here of course). We always get great response when we advertise in the local paper for these roles and are staggered by the quality of the people out there.

The second category is young students – those who are still in the later years of their school life ( younger than university age) In many businesses you can give a student a job that takes away a large number of tasks from existing staff. These are the lower skill requirement tasks that can be trained. The biggest secret to these students is to create a checklist of all the things they have to do each week, train them thoroughly and repeatedly on the tasks and get them to check off the list each week.

As they get to know your business you will be amazed at how much they can achieve and you will probably find they can work longer hours in the school holidays so store up tasks for them like filing and scanning archive records.

If you are hiring students I see the deal as a two way street. Your obligations are to teach them. Teach them office procedures, business practices, social interaction skills with other staff – get them along to the staff meetings etc.

And finally pay. I have an easy rule of thumb. I ask them how much all their friends ( who are probably working a checkout at a supermarket or similar) are earning per hour and I pay them more – it might only be another dollar per hour but it raises their self esteem and their work ethic and the monetary difference it makes is negligible.

You may have to cycle through a few of these kids before you find a good one but when you do it is like finding a nugget of gold.