When Hiring Is Not Enough: How to Attract and Retain Top Talent
To thrive and prosper in the competitive age, leading companies like Google, Amazon, Uber, and Apple pay much attention to building strong teams consisting of the best talent. They know that every newly joined employee can either help their company to move forward or slow it down.
In the book Leading Organizations, McKinsey senior partners Scott Keller and Mary Meaney focus on ten issues leaders face, chief among which are attracting and retaining talent as well as developing the talent they already have.
Your company should focus on three key processes to get the right people, in particular, smart recruiting, smooth onboarding, and continuous learning and development. But first things first.
The Future of Work Influences the Future of Recruiting. How to get ready?
Recruitment has undergone visible changes over the last few years, and now the process of searching for promising candidates and filling open positions is much more than just looking through paper resumes. In fact, the scope of recruiters’ responsibilities is much broader. In order to address the future needs of a company, hiring teams should leverage the following practices.
- Prioritize positions to avoid budget overruns and speed up the recruitment process.
For every company, cutting costs is crucial for profitability and subsequent growth, so it’s important to learn to prioritize and firstly fill key vacancies that will contribute to business the most. Here we can refer to the Pareto Principle (The 80/20 Rule) that suggests 20% of the workers produce 80% of the results. Of course, it’s a rough estimate but the key is that most things have an unequal distribution.
At Google, they know that many competing companies such as Facebook or Twitter are also hunting for the best talent. That’s why Google allocates plenty of resources to speed up the recruitment process and win over best candidates to fill key roles and avoid the costly mistake of losing a promising employee right when they need them.
- Support new employees from Day 1.
Caroline Stokes, the executive coach and headhunter behind The Emotionally Intelligent Recruiter, emphasizes that “recruiting is not about hiring and then ignoring, but about hiring and then supporting the person as they get integrated into an organization.” We all know how it feels when it’s the first week at a new job — you don’t know most of your coworkers, you have a lot of questions, you feel excited and terrified at the same time, you’re overwhelmed with information and emotions. That’s why support is crucial. “When you’re a recruiter, you have an intimate relationship with that person, and you want them to succeed,” adds Stokes. Welcoming a new employee onboard means engaging them from day #1, through ongoing peer and manager support, smartly organized job-related training, and open communication.
- Use technology and data to match a perfect candidate with your company.
The evolution of the recruiter’s role assumes that a key responsibility of hiring teams will be predicting future talent needs and being ready to meet them from then on. Caroline Stokes says that we’re on the cusp of a new age in recruiting (Recruiter 3.0):
Recruiter 1.0 was when an ad would go into the paper and people would apply via snail mail. Recruiter 2.0 was the digital age, where you got a job on LinkedIn. Recruiter 3.0 is the age of the machines — or, more accurately, the age of the human-machine partnership. Recruiter 3.0 is going to be the A.I. age, wherein recruiters need to step up into being data savvy — not in the same way as Boolean strings and managing spreadsheets, but in really getting closer to the clients, internal and external.
