Recently Ten Percent Legal Recruitment was assessed for the investor in people accreditation.
We worked very hard on this and spent some time as a company ensuring that all our procedures and policies were in place and that our staff were aware of the various requirements of the Investor in People process.We wondered how the assessment would go and also what the questions were likely to be during the interviews.
The assessor was very friendly and explained from the outset what she was wanting to do and we were already aware that we would have thirty minute interviews with the directors and managers and twenty minute interviews with the staff.
We also had the Investors in People programme so we were able to look and see what the actual questions would be based on, but there was nowhere to indicate what questions would be asked in the investor in people assessments.
So if this helps anyone else, here are the questions we were asked in our investors in people accreditation:
The assessor asked us what the division of the company was and spent some time querying this with us. She also asked us what evidence there was from when we set up, of how well we had achieved this and our vision and whether we were still on course to achieve the vision that we had in the first instance.
She asked a lot of questions about the background of the company and targeted them towards the general question of whether we had achieved what we set out to achieve or whether we were still working towards it.
Obviously we were careful to identify issues that related to the staffing side of things as we had we were aware that the Investors in People process meant it was to do with the people, but generally we answered the questions according to the company's aims from the outset.
We also got asked a lot of questions about our training plans and policies and it was evident from the outset that although we had a staff handbook, the information contained within it did not give any information at all about our training policy which was an oversight on our part.We also had no evaluation of our training policy which was another question that we were asked particularly closely about.
We set out details of our training which in our case is mostly in-house as our Managing Director (i.e., me) does a lot of training and study and is recognised in the industry as an expert on our sector.
I also had to explain all the different paths that the company went down which included alternative business ideas and entrepreneurial developments which for us are very important as we aim to move very quickly into other areas, as and when work drops off or when we identify a niche to go into.Questions were also asked about how we identified our training needs, which seemed to be a fairly central focus to the interview and something that we found fairly hard to explain, being a very small company.
Our business development plan and training development plan which had been put together by our locally funded business adviser were not deemed satisfactory and a lot of further explanation was required on top.As well as this, quite a lot of questions were asked about our equal opportunities and the enablement of every member of staff to have the same access to training.
We had been advised to be very careful that everyone in the company knew what attributes made a capable manager and everyone had been instructed to have a think about this and based on information provided to us by our business adviser.The assessor took careful notes in this particular part and I got the impression that this was fairly important in terms of whether we reached the standard required.
The attributes that our company gave were in recognition of performance, the ability to provide constructive feedback, the ability to build teams, the ability to lead a team, good communication skills and recognition of good performance.Interestingly during our feedback the assessor did indicate that as a manager in our company, some of these were not really applicable and she would have preferred it if we had thought of our own definitions and given these.
We have taken that point on board and she probably was quite right.
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Questions were also raised about evaluating training, and one thing we had not thought about doing was setting out the cost or time of our training and assessing whether it was any use to the company. In fact I got sent away during our assessment to have a think about this further so I was in a position to either give concrete evidence or to arrange for the assessment to take place again so we could discuss it. This would be something beneficial for any company to do before the IIP assessments, and it was certainly interesting to do it as it was an eye opener to see what training time I had spent in the previous week, which was over nine hours (without realising it!).
