Not only are prospective employers faced with largest available potential workforce since Second World War, but, as things have become more sophisticated, so have deception techniques of those who would shaft you and your company. Negligent hiring, sexual harassment, and frivolous employee lawsuits have increased sharply in recent years, as have incidents of workers’ compensation fraud and employee theft.

What Can You Do?

In area of hiring most qualified candidate for job, there are reference checks, employment and education verification and background check. A good background check should include thorough candidate identification, financial and driving histories and criminal convictions at any and all court levels. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, it isn’t that easy.

When managing a group of people there are times when you should give praise and times when you must hand out criticism. How and where is balance to be struck?

In course of your life as a manager you must do both. It is most unlikely that you have a team of constant peak performers or on other hand a team of complete duffers. Since chances are that your staff will fall somewhere in between these two extremes you will at times have to criticise and at other times praise.

Your object should always be to get best out of your staff and you need to bear this in mind. You don’t criticise bad work in order to feel better yourself. You do it to ensure a better performance next time. You give praise not only to show appreciation, but also to encourage even greater efforts and achievements in future.

Some people need constant encouragement. They lack confidence in themselves and their abilities. They need constantly boosting and building up. When dealing with them always look for justified praise that you can give and be gentle in your criticism.

Others are too confident. They are so sure of themselves that they don’t listen to instructions properly and often end up doing wrong thing. These need restraining and redirecting onto right path. Criticism may just wash off them like water off a duck’s back, but don’t let that stop you giving it when it is needed.

Then you have careless, lazy, and totally inept. With them you need to apply all your skills to deploy praise and criticism, carrot and stick, as and when needed. By a combination of praise, criticism, encouragement, and training many of these people can be turned around to do a good job.

So modify your own actions according to circumstances. Adjust balance of praise and criticism to suit personality of person at receiving end.

When praising, be careful about praising an individual in front of all his colleagues. At times this can be absolutely correct thing to do. After all in business world it is not enough to be good – you have to be seen to be good. There is always a place for public recognition of excellent performance. But beware of constantly singling out one team member for public praise whilst neglecting all others, even if this is deserved. It can lead to resentment and accusations of favouritism. It can result in team members refusing to cooperate with ‘star performer’, and eventually a drop off in performance of whole team.