How to Employ the Right People for Your Business

Julie Starr • March 31, 2022



If you’re running a business sooner or later you’re going to need to employ people to assist you. The employment process can be a tedious one. It can also be expensive. Finding the right employees will require patience and sometimes persistence on your part. 

When you post a job opening in your company there are a lot of people who will apply. Making the right choice can seem overwhelming. However, if you bear a few tips in mind the process should not be overly tedious. Here’s what you need to consider when hiring employees.

Your Company Culture

Your company culture is something you need to take into serious consideration if you are going to be employing someone. Your company culture determines whether or not an individual will fit in. 

To determine if someone is right for your company culture you will need to look at the values of the people you are hiring. 

Decide on the type of mindset a person needs to have before they can work in your company. This will help you to bring in the right employees who will not clash with your company’s culture. You can hire a company such as Global PEO to help you select the right employees for your business.

Outsource Recruitment Services

For some businesses, recruitment experience might be something that’s lacking. It may also be something that some staff doesn’t have the time to dedicate to, which is why recruitment agencies are a great shout. 

With recruitment agencies, it can outsource recruitment which is led by those with professional experience and time dedicated to getting the best staff for the company.

It’s money well spent when understanding how much do recruitment agencies charge for their services. It’s an investment worth making to hire staff where the company doesn’t have the capacity to do so.

Create a Job Description

Creating the right job description is essential if you’re going to attract the right candidate. You need to make sure that you make it clear what type of person you are looking for in your organization. 

The job requirements should be detailed. This will eliminate confusion and prevent the wrong people from applying in the first place. It’ll make it easier for you to find suitably qualified people to shortlist.

Good Interviews Questions

Creating the right interview questions can go a long way in ensuring that you select the right candidate for the job. 

The only way to find out more about a candidate is to ask poignant questions.

Make sure that you ask questions that target the skills and personality areas that are the best for your company culture and the job requirements. 

When you decide that a candidate is suitable make sure that you go over their references carefully. Call and send emails to the references to find out more about them and what they can offer your company .

Make Onboarding Easy

Once you have found the right candidate for the job you should try to make the onboarding process as easy as possible. 

You will need to brief your current staff members about the new addition to the company and also ensure that you make it easy for your new employee to start their jobs. The bottom line is that the onboarding process should provide clear instructions to minimize confusion and frustration.

Start Recruiting

Now you know exactly what you should be doing in order to start recruiting the right employees for your business. Employing new people can be a challenge. You will want to make sure that you hire top talent for your business at all times. 

To do this you have to have a strategic plan in place for how you are going to recruit and bring people into your business. Having a streamlined process for recruitment will help to ensure that you always employ the best persons for any vacant role in your organization.

How Student-Led ‘Energy Audits’ Are Cutting School Costs (and Lighting the Way Forward)

By Julie Starr • July 14, 2025
What happens when students stop waiting for adults to fix things and start conducting their own energy audits? Money gets saved. The lights get switched off. Data gets analyzed. And a quiet revolution in sustainability begins—inside schools that once overlooked their own inefficiencies. Across the globe, student-led energy audits are proving that change doesn't always need to come from a policy shift or a major capital budget. Sometimes, it begins with a clipboard, a spreadsheet, and a group of curious minds asking: Why are the hallway lights on at noon when sunlight floods the building? The Energy Detectives These audits aren’t science fair projects. They’re rigorous investigations, often done in collaboration with facilities staff, local environmental nonprofits, or even engineering mentors. Students go from classroom to classroom measuring electricity usage, checking for phantom loads , and identifying where heat is escaping in winter or air conditioning is leaking in summer. One high school in Ontario saved over $12,000 a year after its Grade 11 physics students ran an energy audit and suggested simple changes—LED upgrades, motion sensors in bathrooms, and smarter heating schedules. They didn’t just propose ideas. They pitched them with spreadsheets, thermal images, and payback timelines. It worked. Learning That Pays Off—Literally Unlike textbook learning, these audits blend real-world math, environmental science, economics, and persuasive communication. Students aren’t just learning about sustainability. They’re doing it. And the savings add up. From dimming overlit hallways to reprogramming HVAC systems that run all weekend for empty buildings, students are surfacing blind spots that administrators often overlook. In some districts, their findings are influencing energy policy. Elsewhere, the audits have inspired school boards to hire sustainability coordinators—often alumni of the student programs themselves. There’s something poetic about a school funding new books or laptops from money saved by students who found out the vending machines didn’t need to be plugged in 24/7. Why This Matters More Than Ever With education budgets tightening and utility costs rising, every dollar saved is a dollar that can go back into classrooms. And here’s where it gets interesting from a family finance perspective, too. If you’re a parent setting aside money for post-secondary savings, every bit of school efficiency helps. Fewer energy costs might mean more programming, better STEM facilities, or even bursaries. That raises a broader point: when families save for their children’s future, they often look into RESPs (Registered Education Savings Plans). And many wonder—is a RESP deduction available on my taxes? While contributions themselves aren’t deductible, the gains grow tax-free, and students often pay little to no tax when they withdraw the funds during school. A Movement Worth Replicating These audits aren’t just an exercise in environmentalism. They’re leadership labs. Students learn how to spot inefficiencies, speak up in board meetings, and make a business case for change. They don’t just flip switches—they shift mindsets. And they carry these habits into adulthood. The result? A generation growing up not only with climate anxiety, but also with tools to tackle it.

Smart Sensors, Smarter Supply Chains: Enhancing Traceability in Food & Beverage

By Julie Starr • June 20, 2025
In today’s competitive food and beverage (F&B) landscape, traceability is no longer a compliance checkbox—it’s a differentiator. The ability to track every step of a product’s journey, from origin to shelf, is vital for regulatory accuracy and to ensure brand integrity, supply chain agility, and consumer trust. Add smart sensors to the mix: the quiet, tireless observers revolutionizing supply chain intelligence. Traceability Has a Data Problem Despite digitization across many F&B operations, most traceability systems still rely on fragmented or manual data inputs. Batch numbers, barcodes, and handwritten logs often stand between a supplier and clarity when things go wrong. This approach struggles with latency and scale. When contamination or delays occur, root cause analysis is slow, costly, and damaging. Smart sensors shift this paradigm by embedding real-time, contextual intelligence into every stage of the supply chain . Whether monitoring humidity in transit or recording fill-level precision in bottling plants, they remove the guesswork by turning physical conditions into structured, time-stamped data. From Passive Monitoring to Active Optimization Sensors used to be reactive tools, alerting operators to anomalies. But smart sensors now play a proactive role in process control. They measure, and they interpret. For example, temperature sensors embedded in cold chain logistics can dynamically adjust cooling systems or flag threshold breaches before spoilage occurs. These advancements reduce waste and loss at a systemic level. In a production facility, smart sensors integrated with PLCs can enforce recipe compliance, verify clean-in-place processes, and detect micro-stoppages in real-time. This enables operations to pivot faster and isolate inefficiencies before they cascade downstream. Trust is Built on Transparency Consumers are paying more attention to what they eat and drink. They’re looking beyond labels, expecting visibility into how ingredients are sourced, processed, and handled. Smart sensors make this level of transparency achievable —without burdening manufacturers with excessive manual oversight. By capturing metadata throughout production and distribution, these sensors create a digital footprint that’s tamper-resistant and instantly accessible. When this data is integrated with a central platform, brands can respond confidently to audits, recalls, and quality assurance challenges with a level of precision that would be impossible through legacy systems. Intelligence Without Infrastructure Overhaul One common misconception is that adding smart sensors requires a top-down reinvention of supply chain infrastructure. In reality, companies can deploy edge sensors in a modular, scalable way. Many modern solutions offer plug-and-play functionality, allowing for fast integration with existing machinery and MES systems. This is where suppliers like alps-machine.com are reshaping expectations. Rather than pushing proprietary ecosystems, they design sensor-ready equipment with interoperability in mind. This future-proofs investment and keeps businesses nimble in the face of regulatory or market shifts. Designing for Data Longevity Sensors are only as powerful as the context they capture. A smart implementation ensures the data collected can be standardized, stored securely, and accessed meaningfully across departments. This means moving beyond local dashboards toward centralized, queryable datasets that inform everything from supplier contracts to marketing claims. As AI and predictive analytics become more accessible, these data-rich environments will unlock new capabilities—such as predicting demand spikes based on real-time freshness indicators or adjusting production schedules dynamically based on in-transit sensor feedback. Final Thoughts: Smarter Isn’t Optional Traceability isn’t solved by more paperwork—it’s solved by embedded intelligence. Smart sensors don’t just help businesses know what happened; they help prevent the wrong things from happening at all. For companies in the food and beverage sector, adopting smart sensors is less about chasing innovation and more about enabling resilience, speed, and confidence in every decision.