Enticing candidates away from your competitors, winning them and retaining them can be a significant challenge for HR teams and recruiters.
As the workforce demographic changes, businesses must adapt and consider what the next generation finds attractive about a prospective employer.
So how can you attract and retain the very best talent?
While there is a crossover between the two, let’s look at each individually to help you hone in on strategies to encourage top candidates to pursue a position with you and ensure you keep hold of them.
How do you attract new hires?
Businesses need to keep their finger on the pulse at all times to provide an environment prospective employees want to be in continually. Two ways of doing this include:
Living and breathing your culture
Skilled candidates that know their talents, qualifications or experience are in demand can be picky when job-hunting. If they are offered two similar roles from two different businesses, company culture usually plays a part in their ultimate decision.
Developing a strong culture that people admire and want to be a part of can work wonders for your talent attraction strategies. You want them to land on your website, check out your social channels, visit your offices and think: “Wow, I wish I worked here.”
Strive to make your employees proud to work for you, and your reputation will precede you. For most candidates, their first point of call when job hunting is the internet. The rise of sites like LinkedIn and Glassdoor give potential candidates a transparent snapshot of what it is like to work for you and what your employees think of you. Does yours paint a positive and accurate picture of your company?
Encourage referrals
If you’ve got your culture and values watertight and your employees are passionate about working for your company, use them as ambassadors! Word of mouth can significantly increase your ability to attract top candidates from their networks, peer groups and even friends and family.
There is no better recommendation for prospective candidates than word of mouth from your existing employees. They are uniquely qualified in that they know your company inside out, from your mission to your culture. As a result, they may have friends or past colleagues that are ideal for an open position with the right skills and personality that would be a perfect ‘fit’ for your business.
To boot, word of mouth is a brilliant way to reduce your hiring costs – words are free after all. But many businesses choose to incentivise and reward employee referrals with a bonus when a candidate they put forward is offered a position.
How do you retain talent?
Implement the following into your strategy to ensure you keep your most talented employees loyal to your company:
Grow your team from within
Promoting internally and actively encouraging your employees to apply for your open positions can not only significantly reduce your hiring costs but will reward your employees with:
- The knowledge that you believe in them
- A new challenge to take on
- A rewarding pay rise.
Often, you may find that the new employee you’ve been looking for has been right under your nose all along. The time and money you save recruiting externally can be used to offer training and assistance to help them develop in their new role, too.
This demonstration of internally promoting provides clear signals to candidates that there is a path for development and progression and that you are invested in their career. As a result, they are less likely to pursue roles with another organisation.
The whole package
Gone are the days where employees are satisfied with just a competitive salary. Instead, businesses are now faced with the challenge of ensuring employees find their work rewarding and that it also supports a greater purpose in addition to fair remuneration.
It’s essential to ask yourself the following questions continuously:
- What matters to my business?
- What makes my employees tick?
- What makes my employees happy?
Employee benefits play an essential role in retaining staff by increasing their overall job satisfaction. Offering schemes like flexi-time or the option to work from home have become increasingly important ways of allowing your best employees to work around their hectic schedules.
Getting the right balance of benefits is seen as a crucial part of your employer branding strategy. A strong employer branding and everything that stems from that ensure you keep hold of your valuable employees and entice top candidates to consider moving to your company.
How Natural HR can help you attract and retain top talent
There are numerous features available through our human resources software that will help you not only in your recruitment efforts but also in retaining your employees:
- Increase your recruiting efficiencies, analyse hiring costs, track applicants and more with our recruitment software.
- Accelerate staff development from their very first day. Anticipate their needs, give them a voice and deepen your insights with our talent management software.
- Drive employee performance by setting goals and monitoring their progress. Identify underperformers and help them improve while rewarding high-achievers with our performance management software.
And more. Book a demonstration or get in touch to discuss how we can help make your job easier.
