Key Essentials to Human Resource Planning for your Daycare Centre

You’ve done your planning and decided that you’ll need additional help. So how do you ensure that you get the best candidate through your door?

All business owners need to understand the importance of human resource (HR) planning. HR planning is not a fancy term for large organizations to execute. Even small businesses need to ensure that their HR is in order to function properly. Failing to manage your HR properly could result in a shortage of manpower when you need it or too many manpower when you don’t need them and therefore incurring unnecessary cost.

So, what is HR planning? Marketing has its 4Ps whilst HR has 6Rs. It is ensuring that you have the Right staff in the Right numbers, doing the Right job, at the Right time and at the Right place and most importantly, do the job right.

Finding the right staff in the right numbers

There are a number of options to manage temporary shortages in manpower. Firstly, you can hire part-time workers. They are a good option especially when you have a lot of children under half-day care. You can also think about engaging temporary employment agencies. This option is more suitable for less critical positions such as teacher assistants rather than the caregiver. The next option is to have your staff work longer hours and pay them overtime for it.

For permanent manpower shortages, you’ll need to a recruitment campaign to hire. You can do this either via advertisement, referral or hire an employment agency to help you with it.

Doing the right job at the right time and right place

There are a number of factors to take into consideration to ensure that you hire the right person. You need to look indepth into a number of factors:

• What will be the candidate’s duties and tasks. Try to be as specific as possible on the job duties that is required of the candidate. This information will come in useful when drawing up the advertisement.

• Do you need the candidate to be proficient in any tools or equipment such as the computer or musical instrument?

• What’s the working environment of the candidate? E.g. What are the working hours? Will the candidate be on shift? Where is the candidate supposed to be stationed, especially if you have more than one outlet)? How many children does the daycare centre care for? What are the age groups?

• What will be his/her working relationship with fellow colleagues. Who will the candidate be reporting to? Will there be any staff that he/she will be required to supervise?

• What are the job requirements?

- What are the qualities that the candidate should possess? Do you want the candidate to be able to handle children and be patient with children?

- Do you need the candidate to possess prior experience in childcare?

- What are the qualifications you would like them to possess? Do they need to possess a Diploma or Certificate in Early Childhood? Do you need the candidate to have first aid training?

Doing the job right

Finally, you need to sort out what you’ll need to do to attract candidates of the above qualities to apply for the position and perform their job well.

• You need to decide what are the benefits you will be offering to the candidate; e.g. annual leave, insurance, subsidy (if they put their child at your daycare centre), etc.

• Most importantly, you need to decide how you intend to remunerate the candidate.

Finding the right candidate is only the tip of the ice berg. The challenge after that will be to think of ways to retain your staff.

Happy Hiring!