While employee turnover, acquisition and retention are always important topics for Human Resources leaders to manage, given recent low unemployment rates, these challenges have emerged as top concerns for the C-Suite as well due to their impact on business growth.
Employees have more career path choices, and more clout, than ever before. As a result, many businesses are watching their talent pool shrink. So how does a company become proactive in attracting and retaining top talent? What can be done differently now to build a solid future?
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution or a magic bullet. Like other areas of a business, attracting and retaining qualified employees doesn’t have a quick answer. It requires careful planning and a solid understanding of a candidate’s journey with your company. But done properly, it will result in a sustainable process that builds a strong employee base.
Build Awareness with Positive Corporate Recognition
As a starting point, think through the experience a candidate has with your company from the very beginning. Presenting your company in the market consistently – via your website presence, the media, public relations, social media - even when you aren’t actively recruiting, is important. All are part of the candidate’s experience. This corporate brand awareness establishes an image and personality with potential future candidates for when you do need to hire. Your marketing team or agency partners do the same to attract customers, therefore extend that philosophy to attracting top talent.
Curate the Candidate’s Journey
The candidate’s journey encompasses multiple touchpoints. It begins from the moment a candidate sees a job posting for your company, through the end of their journey that may, or may not, result in a new hire. There are touchpoints along that path that require thought and consideration. For example, do your Linked In posts speak only to your business accomplishments and industry? Or are you also including “slice of life” posts and images that reflect what it’s like to work at the company. Candidates are interested in the culture of the organizations they choose to work for. Be genuine, be transparent, and be humble.
Without scrutiny, there are several elements of the journey that can fall apart. The best way to avoid failure is to map out the candidate’s journey step-by-step. Take a critical view. Identify weak areas where a candidate may drop out of your process from something that caused them to become disenfranchised with your company, the process or the people they encounter along their journey. Review “lost” candidates’ journeys to gain insight on weak points in your process. This takes time and investment to perfect, and it’s not going to transform the organization overnight. But once the journey is mapped and corrected, it will pay dividends in the caliber of employees you attract and hire.
Build a Recruitment Strategy
To attract top talent to your business, partner Human Resources and Marketing to build a strategy. Marketing knows the corporate brand and how to convey to candidates why your company is a preferred place to work. Don’t forget social media. We’ve already touched on Linked In, but Facebook, Instagram, X, Threads and others are platforms where your candidates are communicating daily. Leverage the expertise of your Marketing team alongside HR to jointly build a strategy including messaging, channels and frequency to stay top-of-mind with candidates. Each company will leverage different channels depending upon their industry and their target candidates. This communication drives awareness for the corporate brand and helps to shape an impression even before a candidate knows there is a job opening that’s perfect for them.
Proper Onboarding is Critical
You’ve done the work and have begun to attract top tier talent. You know that candidates want to have meaningful interaction with you along the journey. This need doesn’t end once they onboard. The onboarding process is the next critical step to revisit, ensuring you set the new hire up for success. This is true for entry level employees all the way up to C-Suite executives. Map out discrete onboarding processes by role type that accelerate a new hire’s productivity and engagement with the organization.
Ongoing Training & People Development
We are all familiar with the expression, “Employees don't quit a company they quit their managers.” It's largely true. Manager training and coaching is key to any retention strategy. Building clear expectations of how your company expects managers to lead and develop employees, and then providing that training before they are promoted, sets the manager and the employee up for success. Don’t overlook training and coaching for executive leadership as well. Setting expectations that your company will not promote employees solely on their technical skills is part of the puzzle. Given what it costs to attract and hire a strong employee, don’t risk losing them, and your investment, to poor management.
How to Assess Your HR Readiness for Recruitment
Maybe your company is struggling with the idea of mapping the candidate journey or determining a consistent onboarding strategy. You need a strong employee base if the company is expected to grow. You don’t have to do this alone. Growth Operators offers Interim and Fractional Human Resources executives with years of experience working on these challenges. We’ve tackled similar issues for many clients across 20+ industries. Read a quick success story illustrating one of our HR client challenges here.
Our Growth Pros quickly assess and improve processes and create strategies aligned to business goals, resulting in improved recruitment and retention at your company. Whether you need interim, fractional or advisory services in HR, our Growth Pros will meet your needs and will partner with internal teams to execute on priorities. And it’s not only about recruitment and retention. Our Growth Pros are experts in Annual Benefits Planning, HR Compliance, Organizational Design and Analysis, Compensation Planning and more. We’re ready and excited to get started. Click here to learn more or to schedule a call.