As employers contend with an ever-tighter labor market, employee retention becomes a greater concern. To understand the gravity of our deepening worker-shortage, watch our recent Workforce Webinar segment that explains how we got here. Today, employees have a multitude of options and recruiters are hot on the trail of the best talent. This means your employees are getting solicited on a regular basis to explore those options.
Recruiting and retention functions are interlocking mechanisms that depend on each other for success. The first step to strong employee retention is for hiring managers to have a clear and thorough understanding of effective recruiting in order to hire employees who will stay with the company.
Franklin Professional Associates is built on 60 years of expertise in finding top talent for businesses throughout New England. Melissa Glenny, Founder and President, says that in her 23 years of recruiting experience, she believes “the vast majority of separations due to lack of fit, are avoidable. It takes a great deal of clarity about the position your are hiring for in order to assess candidates effectively. True clarity is usually the piece that employers get tripped up on and that throws off the entire process”.
At Franklin Professional Associates, we focus on creating an Ideal Candidate Blueprint. Getting your blueprint right requires close examination of what it takes to be successful in a role. Many hiring managers maintain a mindset that we picked up over the last 50 years when the labor supply was very abundant. Now that the tables have turned, we have to get smarter about our pool of potential candidates. Most traditional job descriptions include qualifications that are quite arbitrary when you look closely. This leaves a lot of slack that can lead you down the wrong path when recruiting and assessing candidates. To learn more about creating your Ideal Candidate Blueprint, watch our overview demonstration.
Assessing candidates to benchmarks based on the Ideal Candidate Blueprint is important as it removes bias, aligns perceptions within the hiring team, and provides quantifiable data to make a decision with confidence. Having a well-defined process also ensures you are measuring all candidates to the same standards.
Finally, commitment to removing obstacles in the way of potential candidates is important. Understanding what those obstacles are for a candidate is best done early in the interviewing stage so you can keep them engaged. There is no room for a “one size fits all” approach with people. The social contract between employers and employees has changed in recent years. Simon Sinek famously says, “Leadership is not about being in charge. Leadership is about taking care of those in your charge.”. More and more employees and employers alike embrace this understanding and we have higher expectations of employers today as a result. For companies looking to hire, the more flexible they can be with the candidates needs and desires, the more likely they are to outcompete other companies and hold on to their talent.
