Keeping the best people once you’ve found them is easy if you do things rightFor the best possible people who can fit within your culture and contribute in your organization is a challenge and an opportunity. Keeping the best people, once you find them, is easy if you do the right things right.
Scouring LinkedIn and reading through hundreds of CV’s is a tedious task for any recruiter, not to mention then working out if the ones you cherry pick actually fit with your company culture and then keeping them within your talent pool.
The Balance highlights their top ten tips for better recruiting and retaining talent.
- Improve your candidate pool when recruiting employees
Actively search out potential talent. Invest time in developing relationships with university placement offices, recruiters, and executive search firms. Enable current staff members to actively participate in industry professional associations and conferences where they are likely to meet candidates that may be a good fit. Watch the online job boards for potential candidates who may have CV’s online even if they’re not currently looking for a new position.
Look for potential employees on LinkedIn and on other social networks, place an advertisement if you need to. Bring your best prospects in to meet them before you need them as building up the pool before you actually need it is key!
- Hire the Sure Thing When Recruiting Employees
The authors of The Human Capital Edge, Bruce N.
Pfau and Ira T. Kay, are convinced that you should hire a person who has done this “exact job, in this exact industry, in this particular business climate, from a company with a very similar culture.” They believe that “past behaviour is the best predictor of future behaviour” and suggest that this is the strategy that will enable you to hire winners. They say that you must hire the candidates whom you believe can hit the ground running in your company. You can’t afford the time to train a possibly successful candidate.
- Look first an in-house candidates
Providing promotional and lateral opportunities for current employees positively boosts morale and makes your current staff members feel their talents, capabilities, and accomplishments are appreciated. Strive to always post positions internally first and go through the interview process with them. Sometimes, a good fit is found between your needs and theirs.
- Be known as a great employer
People love to see behind the scenes to get to know your company culture and practises – show them! Google, who frequently tops Fortune’s Best Companies list, for example, receives around 3,000,000 applications a year. Review your employee practices for retention, motivation, accountability, reward, recognition, flexibility in work-life balance, promotion, and involvement.
These are your key areas for becoming an employer of choice.
Word of mouth is the best form of advertising – if your current employees are bragging about your firm being a great place to work then you will automatically attract more great talent.
- Involve your employees in the hiring process
You have three opportunities to involve your employees in the hiring process.
- Your employees can recommend excellent candidates to your business.
- They can assist you to review CV’s and qualifications of potential candidates.
- They can help you interview people to assess their potential “fit” within your company.
Organisations that fail to use employees to assess potential employees are underutilising one of their most important assets. People who participate in the selection process are committed to helping the new employee succeed. It can’t get any better than that for you and the new employee.
- Pay better than your competition
You want to pay better than average to attract and keep the best candidates. Sounds obvious? It’s not. Many employers are still using the bad practice of trying to get employees to work for as cheap as possible and it’s bad practice. The majority will end up resenting their pay scale, feel unappreciated, and leave you for their first good job offer. You then incur the expense of having to re-employ a new candidate when they leave.
- Use your benefits to your advantage in recruiting employees
Keep your benefits above industry standard and add new benefits as you can afford them. You also need to educate employees about the cost and value of their benefits so they appreciate how well you are looking out for their needs. Work life balance and flexibility is key to providing good benefits for your staff.
You can’t be an employer of choice without a good benefits package that includes standard benefits such as medical insurance, retirement, and dental insurance.
Stock and ownership opportunities are also hugely popular and will attract some of the best talent.
- Hire the smartest person you can find
In their recent book, First Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently (compare prices), Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman recommend that great managers hire for talent.
They believe that successful managers believe:
“People don’t change that much. Don’t waste time trying to put in what was left out. Try to draw out what was left in. That is hard enough.”
Hire for strengths; don’t expect to develop weak areas of performance, habits, and talents. Build on what is great about your new employee in the first place.
- Use your website for recruiting
Your website portrays your vision, mission, values, goals, and products. It is also effective for recruiting employees who experience a resonance with what you state on your site.
Design an employment section which describes your available positions and contains information about you and why an interested person might want to contact your company. A recruiting website is your opportunity to shine and a highly effective way to attract candidates today.
- Check references when recruiting employees
Although this task seems tedious, don’t brush it off – check references carefully and do the necessary background checks.
You need to pursue every avenue to assure that the people you hire can do the job, contribute to your growth and development, and have no past transgressions which might endanger your current workforce.
In fact, you might be liable if you failed to do a background check on a person who then attacked another in your workplace.
These ideas can help your organisation succeed and grow and will help create a workplace that will meet both your needs and the needs of your potential and current superior employees.
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