Recruit and Retain Talent in a Competitive Market
Along with cybersecurity, mitigating regulatory risk, and sustainability/corporate social responsibility, the issue that is of paramount importance to business leaders is recruiting and retaining talent. We’ve all read about the Great Resignation and how it is upending business as we know it. Attitudes are shifting, and savvy employers are embracing the idea that their employees are not only essential drivers of business growth but also critical to every aspect of doing business. Employees are a company’s innovators, its profit-makers, and the public face of its brand. Without employees, a company cannot make, market, or sell anything. Recruiting and retention become equally difficult as employees are more empowered than ever. What can you do to recruit and retain people in this candidate's market?
Provide employees with the tools they need to succeed. Are you operating like it’s 1968 and going along with the mindset that your employees should be happy to have a job and that they’re in it for the long run? Big mistake. Your employees have a bevy of opportunities at their fingertips. Quite literally. They are being contacted on a near-daily basis by recruiters and probably have a search set in LinkedIn for job alerts. Unless they are constantly learning, improving, and doing meaningful work, they will leave. No one is going to join your company today, stick around for 40 years, and retire with a gold watch. That just doesn’t happen anymore. You need to provide a creative, engaging, compelling work environment for them right now, in the moment, so that they may grow in their careers. If you don’t, they will leave.
Make sure your compensation and benefits packages are rooted in reality. Do you know what the market rate is for your industry and field? Are you paying market? Below market? Above market? Candidates in this economy know their worth, and they aren’t going to settle for less than they deserve. You have a paltry 401(k) match? That’s a problem. You pay 20% less than market in base salary? Huge problem. Two weeks of vacation to start? Forget about it!
Utilize 360-degree feedback. You’ve probably heard the saying that people don’t leave jobs; they leave managers. There is a lot of truth in this. A person’s manager exerts enormous influence over not merely their staff’s professional lives but also their personal lives and sanity. If you’ve ever had a horrible boss—and most of us have—you know how that experience crept into all other aspects of your life. Executive leaders can be quick to blame line staff for problems when in reality, problems relating to work culture and productivity begin and end at the top. Allowing employees to review managers’ performance can go a long way toward closing this gap.
Fix your broken recruiting process. Your recruiting process is probably profoundly flawed and set up to repel talent rather than attract it. If you have unreasonable job requirements, force people to interact with clunky, non-intuitive ATS systems, make candidates go through multiple rounds of interviews only to be told that you’re “looking for a different skill set,” or it takes you months to make a single hiring decision, the problem is you – not the candidate pool. Train your hiring managers on interviewing techniques—most are pretty bad at conducting interviews. Limit the number of interviews to something reasonable. Get back to candidates quickly. The number one complaint from candidates is being ghosted after several interviews. Poorly executed recruiting achieves two things—it tarnishes your brand and repels talent.
The Great Resignation shows no sign of waning any time soon. You can sit back and cry about the lack of talent and lament that “people don’t want to work,” or you can do something to up your game. The choice is entirely yours.