TLMI has announced that the association is releasing three new DIY workforce toolkits available to all association members. The new toolkits address job candidate positions in customer service, quality control and prepress. These newest toolkits join the two previously developed toolkits that were made available to members last year, addressing job candidate positions for conventional and digital press operational roles.

In developing the new toolkits, TLMI has worked in close conjunction with the association’s human resources partner, Affinity HR Group. Affinity facilitated the focus groups for the toolkits and TLMI converter member companies volunteered their highest-performing personnel and operators who exhibit all of the key competencies and performance indicators for the targeted roles to participate in the facilitated groups.

In addition to the conventional and digital press operator toolkits, the customer service toolkit has recently been completed and is now also available as a complimentary resource. The quality control and prepress operator toolkits will be made available to members before the end of the year. The new layout of the toolkits include an additional number of dedicated templates for any role that companies are actively recruiting including templates for job postings, interview questions, reference checks, and more.

Claudia St. John, president of Affinity HR Group, comments, “For each toolkit, we brought together knowledge experts in each of the candidate positions, so these are people who are currently in these roles. I met with each of these focus groups and asked them to tell me what they do every day. My team prioritized these tasks by similar categories and created a corresponding list of accountabilities. We then asked our focus groups to rank each task from most to least important, and to weigh each to get a feel for how much time each task requires. We do this because some of these day-to-day tasks may take up the majority of someone’s time, however they are not necessarily the most important things someone needs to be doing. If a potential employer is only looking to hire for the most important things, they could hire someone who might not have the skills to do what the job actually requires the majority of the time.”

The focus groups enabled Affinity to create comprehensive profiles for each toolkit position including the position’s key tasks and activities, a skills ranking, and a behavioral assessment. From those components, Affinity was able to create an ideal candidate profile to facilitate the hiring process for potential employers.

St. John states, “The behavioral profile is critical if a company has a candidate that they are thinking of hiring. It enables them to compare the candidate’s profile against the benchmark that we’ve created to see how the candidate compares to other successful employees in the same role. The interview questions that we put into the toolkits is based on the profile of the skills that a company is looking for them to have and each job toolkit has a unique set of interview questions.”

Each of the TLMI toolkits includes a sample employment application, a job posting sample and detailed job description, an ideal candidate profile, a recommended set of interview questions, advice on how to structure interviews, and a sample offer letter.

TLMI president Linnea Keen comments, “We’re thrilled to be offering our members these toolkits to use for their hiring and candidate profiling purposes. We are all aware of just how challenging the workforce landscape currently is. Workforce Development is one of the five central pillars of the TLMI Strategic Plan and making these toolkits available is an important way that the association is continuing to support our members with these unprecedented challenges.”