Category Archives: hiring

How a Bilingual Employee Can Be Vital In Your Company

Bilingual Employee – English isn’t the only important language anymore. Simple as that. While it is still the most dominant one, at least in terms of business, French, German and Spanish languages are getting there very fast. Europe is much like a big family and English speaking people aren’t the only ones that are important for doing business.

Bilingual Employee

In fact, there are a whole lot of positions that would help their business owners greatly if they can speak at least one other language except English and those positions are very common today. Take social workers, nutritionists or marketers for example. The non-English speaking population is growing day by day, and if you want to increase your customer range, you need to consider hiring bilingual employees seriously.

Increasing your customer base with a Bilingual Employee

Having bilingual employees on key positions in your company can make a huge difference. Let’s consider two examples: HR and health specialists (just about any branch in healthcare).

Having a bilingual HR specialist will allow you to hire employees that are great at their work (IT sphere, writers, bloggers etc.), but can’t speak English (or are very bad at English) for any reason. Those employees can become vital for your company since:

  • They will require a lot less salary in most cases compared to similar professionals who are proficient in English, but still be able to do an outstanding job for you.
  • They can help broaden your reach. You will have the opportunity to dip into new markets, ones that still require your product or service, but can’t communicate in English.
  • They can increase your customer satisfaction by a lot. While it may seem a minor thing, but people love to be spoken to in their mother tongue, even if they do speak other languages. If you ever encounter a delicate issue with one of your customers, an employee who speaks their language may become your life saver in those dire situations.

Bilingual health specialists can be even more important. If you are in healthcare business (psychology, therapy or run a hospital/clinic, etc.) bilingual medical staff can be the difference between a loyal customer and a passerby, or in some cases, even the difference between life and death.

If a non-English speaking patient comes to your clinic with some serious health issues and can only speak French or German, your bilingual employees will suddenly become life savers, no matter whether they are nurses or janitors, as long as they can properly translate everything for the doctor.

Training the rest of your staff

What’s really great about bilingual employees is that you don’t necessarily need to have a lot of them to increase your customer reach, retention rate, satisfaction level, etc. Just a handful of them will be able to train the rest of your staff to become more or less proficient in another language, which can lead to even more opportunities.

When communicating with customers, even a few words in their mother tongue can make a big difference. Great bloggers for example, know about this very well and use it to their advantage along with other blogging secrets.

Finally, bilingual employees, regardless of their position, can be very handy when it comes to business negotiations abroad. If you consider entering new markets, those employees can become half-time or full-time translators for your negotiators to ensure that everything goes on smoothly.

You might think that you can always hire professional translators when needed, but there is a difference between hiring a translator and having somebody from your team that cares for your company help you succeed abroad.

This will not only increase that employee’s motivation, but also show your business partner that you have taken the first step towards entering a new market seriously, since you already have people that speak the necessary language, not just hired translators.

When it comes to business, every opportunity should be weighted seriously and taken if there is a positive risk-reward scenario. The absolutely beautiful thing about having bilingual staff members is that there is no risk whatsoever: only opportunities. And depending on your business, those opportunities can make all the difference in the world.

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How Can You Get Individual Superstars to Work Together?

When you have a small business, you need to have the best hire to be part of your tram. However, it’s not always a piece of cake to gather aces and put them on their best places and get them to work altogether.

Most managers are then faced with the question on how to combine their talents, skills, and brains for one project and lead them to work harmoniously.

Vince Lombardi believes that the secret to building a team of superstars is to motivation them to work towards a common goal. But even if we’re not talking about sports, the same motivation is quintessential in any team, especially in the workplace.

In the Team Effectiveness Review led by Elaine Yew at Egon Zehnder during the late 90s, she discussed the six critical team competencies that can make an A-team thrive.

Let’s explore the six ingredients that make individual superstars work great with a team.

Balance

It’s not enough that the team understands the importance of diversity of skills and strengths. They should be also willing to incorporate them. Dan of The Leadership Freak noted about 13 reasons why teams lose momentum and one of them is dominant members who cause others to feel insignificant.

As the leader, you are responsible to help your members understand each other’s skills and strengths despite the fact that superstars tend to be “me-focused”. By identifying each superstar’s motivation, you can work around how to best motivate and inspire them to work with others without feeling the need to be always be on the spotlight.

Energy

An ambitious team thinks about long-term momentum at a high level. Superstars are naturally driven individuals who always have the thirst for victory and excellence and each member’s enthusiasm would easily rub off on others.

Alignment

Do your team members understand the larger team purpose? If not, you may want to direct all theirefforts on one central objective. It’s time to leverage their thinking. TribeHR Staff said businesses are most successful when employees’ personal goals are aligned with that of corporate goals. Yes, while each member may have personal goals and priorities, team leaders should aim to make the business thrive and ensure that each team player’s goal aligns with that of company’s.

Resilience

Author Margaret Heffernan said that social capitals make a group resilient. By that, she means trust, knowledge, reciprocity, and shared norms. If you are a team leader, it helps to show your team the outcome of their collected efforts. Writer Glenn Llopis said one of the ways to inspire a team is to make them feel that their hard work makes a difference beyond just profitability.

Efficiency

One of the biggest challenges to teams is how to deal with pressure not only individually, but also as a team. You may encourage your team to try a few quirky de-stress hacks such as photography contest activities or simply employee’s day out. After a super-busy week, your team deserves relaxing and reenergizing activities to keep them motivated and happy at work.

Openness

Do the team members’ value engaging with the broader organization? When each member has connection to one another, it becomes effortless for them to share ideas, concerns and contribute towards the common goal better.

Having great individuals work together as a team is a great opportunity and a challenge to focus on the over-all and high level goals. By focusing on the over-all objectives, one can minimize the potential clashes within the team and make the best use of individual talents, skills and take advantage of the adversity of the group.

Having aces on their best places allow each team member to feel significant without having the need to be constantly on the spotlight and think more of the common goal as opposed to focusing solely on individual ones.

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Looking For Your Company’s Data Analyst? Here’s What You Need To Know

Data analysts, or more fancily called as data scientists nowadays, have become essential people to have in expanding businesses. Despite that, the employment rate growth for this occupation is rather slower compared to other office-related jobs. However, they are one of the few who enjoy handsome salaries. And unlike other office personnel, data analysts usually dictate the future of the companies they serve.

The job of a data analyst is to assess, organize, and gather data from different resources. They use the data to formulate useful and possibly important information. Mostly, data analysts are involved in product research and development, and market trends and conditions analyses.

A data analyst candidate must have a four-year university degree related to computer science, business administration, math, and statistics. They need to be knowledgeable of statistics, data management, computer science, and data analysis tools and software applications such as Microsoft Excel and Tableau on Hadoop.

In addition, the candidate must be familiar with the most common data format types such as XML, JSON, and RDF. To some extent, he or she must be familiar with using programming languages in order to create data analysis solutions of his or her own and improve the functionality of the data solutions that you use.

Translating data into layman’s terms

The candidate must be an expert when it comes to translating data and information in layman’s terms. He or she must know the easiest and fastest ways of distributing important information. He or she must be an expert when it comes to creating and interpreting graphs, data mashups, scorecards, and dashboards.

When it comes to skills, data analysts must be detailed-oriented; if possible, they must be a bit critical. Of course, mastery of intermediate mathematics is mandatory. In large-scale companies and systems, a data analyst must be also capable of handling databases, employing data management concepts, and troubleshooting database structure problems.

On the other hand, people who have experience as operations research analysts and market research analysts are good candidates to apply for data analyst jobs.

When hiring a data analyst candidate, one of the most important questions that you should put on the table is how many data management applications the candidate knows and has used. Do they know some of the few most used applications in data analysis such as Spark and Tableau on Hadoop? Do they even know how to take advantage of scripting languages such as Python to manipulate and handle huge streams of data?

Data gathering and management

Unlike before when casual data analyses for businesses were done with pen and paper (and with little input to a computer), data analyses now happen inside the analyst’s computer. The massive influx of data that companies receive every day has caused analysts to rely on automated data gathering and management software programs.

Alternatively, the candidate must be capable of sorting out the data and creating quick decisions on whether a piece or set of data is useless or useful. After all, before the analysis of data starts, it is essential that the analyst have the right data at hand.

Aside from that, it is important that you measure the candidate’s logical and creative aptitude. The most common test to measure a candidate’s thinking skills is asking them how much marbles are inside a jar. The number of marbles does not matter first. What’s important is the methodologies the job candidate used to come up with the answer, the considerations he or she included, and the confidence he or she has with his explanations. And just for fun, you might want to ask what is the next winning lottery number combination.

If all the candidates were able to impress you with their answers and their background, then it will be up to the final test. The final test is to know how much information they have in your company and the nature of your business. That will be the decisive factor if the candidate is fit to have the job.

Picking the right candidate for the job is crucial. After all, you will be entrusting the future of your company or department to that person. Data analysts are the ones that can help you move your businesses upward. They can solve internal and external business problems and even identify them before they happen. You can also get your analyst to help you figure out your business if you do not know what is going on in or with it.

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5 Companies that are Hiring in Dublin Right Now

5 Companies That Are Hiring in Dublin Right Now

It’s March at last, and Spring is definitely in the air. It’s the season of change, new beginnings, and of course, spring cleaning. If you’ve been thinking about changing jobs, this is the season to make it happen. So, what are you waiting for? Dust off that CV, polish up that cover letter, and take a look at these 5 companies that are hiring in Dublin right now:

1. HubSpot

When weighing up potential hires, the HubSpot team are on the lookout for a few key attributes:

a). Intellectual curiosity: how do you choose to challenge yourself? What are you doing or what have you done to make yourself a better person, or the world a better place?

b). Coachability: HubSpot is looking for life-long learners. Are you both willing and able to be coached?

c). Goals: HubSpot wants you to succeed – in your career, and in life. That’s why they’re eager to hear about your goals – both professional and personal. HubSpot could well be your ticket to meeting them.

Oh, and one more thing . . .

You’ve got to be able to get behind the company’s “G.S.D. policy,” because at HubSpot, there’s no time for indecision.

This team is here to Get Sh*t Done.

Check out open positions and apply now.

2. Tapadoo

“Our days are spent taking our clients’ ideas, and crafting them into beautiful, easy-to-use mobile apps. We help with all stages of the process, whether it be idea generation, wire-framing, user experience design, and app development. The ethos is one of collaboration both between team members, and with our customers.”

“When not working on client apps, we try to fit in development of apps for ourselves.”

Check out open positions and apply now.

3. Learnosity

Walter White on one wall, and a list of “banned phrases” on another. “Beer O’Clock” on Fridays and Mario Kart at lunch.

Welcome, to the award-winning education technology company that is Learnosity.

Founded in 2007, and with offices in Dublin, Sydney, and New York, Learnosity provides world class, cloud based assessment solutions for education providers.

Check out open positions and apply now.

4. Boxever 

Boxever helps airlines and online travel agents (OTAs) deliver personalised, 1:1 marketing experiences to their customers across all channels and at all stages of the customer lifecycle, through the innovative application of technology and big data. Companies like TigerAir, Wideroe, Atlantic Airways, and more achieve higher conversion rates, increased revenue, and improved loyalty using Boxever’s SaaS-based platform.

“Right now, we’re a team of 38, and we’re aiming to grow that number to 70 by the end of 2015.”

“We have open positions in both our Dublin headquarters and Boston satellite office and we’re looking for energetic, enthusiastic and creative people with a passion for tech, to join our team.”

Check out open positions and apply now.

5. Hosted Graphite

“Two co-founders, eight other engineers all hired in the last year, and we’re growing quickly. We run a hosted version of the popular Graphite open source metric and monitoring software, and we have customers all over the world.”

Check out open positions and apply now.

For more great jobs, find and follow us on Twitter @ClinchJobs

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