
If you want to succeed as an entrepreneur or even as an HR leader, the best possible way is to get the best talents to work for you, keep them happy, so they stay loyal to your company. Result? When employees are happy and content, they love their job, they go that extra mile to keep the customers happy. And happy customers mean more revenue and more growth for your business. However, it may not be as easy as it sounds. When the market competition is tough, when everyone is looking for the top talents to work for them, how do you attract the best talents to work for you? Here are two tips that can help you to get an edge over your competitors.
1. Build a Strong Employee-Friendly Culture
Competition for attracting the top talent can get fierce. But having an organizational culture that deeply values its employees and offers ample opportunities to accelerate the career growth of employees can work as a big differentiator for you. That’s because a LinkedIn study shows that employees are 12x times more like to leave their current organization if they don’t believe they can achieve their career goals with their employer. The number can skyrocket to 30x more for new employees. Hence building and portraying a strong employee-friendly culture is going to give you an added advantage when it comes to attracting top talents.
2. Make your Offer ‘MAGNETIC’
Employees look for what they ‘get’ for what they ‘give’. As McKinsey points out, employees consider inspirational and supportive leaders, a company with a great reputation, values, and culture, interesting job roles, and lucrative perks and benefits when considering a job role.
Focus on these four aspects and make your offer ‘MAGNETIC’ to add an element of distinctiveness in your employee value proposition.
Now that you know how to attract the top talents, it is important to know how to retain them. But before that let’s understand why employee retention is important. The cost of employee turnover is high – as much as 2.5 times the employee’s salary based on the role. In addition to it, it has a direct impact on the company culture, lowered productivity, and decreased engagement. Attracting the best talent won’t help much if you don’t have a structured employee retention plan in place. Here are some strategies that you might find beneficial.
3. Leadership Communication
When employees get to hear their leadership about the plans of the organization, the overall organizational goals, they feel motivated about their work. Leaders who aspire to their employees through effective and timely communication go far in retaining their best talent. So, get your leadership talking as much as you can to keep your employees motivated.
4. Appreciate and Acknowledge
A little bit of appreciation and acknowledgment at work can go a long way. Employees who are appreciated for their work from time to time feel a lot more motivated and valued at work. Employees who know how their contributions are making a difference to the organization and its customers, feel engaged and stick around for a longer duration at work.
5. Retention Starts with Recruiting the Right Candidate
HR leaders should focus on designing a recruitment strategy with an elaborate interview process so that you can pick up the right talent who will stick around with you for a longer duration. That’s because the longer an employee sticks with you, the more productive they become with time. So, device strategies and train your recruiters to identify the right talents and seek the values in them that will ensure that they are aligned with the cultural goals of the organization.
6. Devise Continuous Learning
Every employee should have a definite career path while working in your organization. Along with upskilling your employees regularly, ensure the deserving candidates get promoted from time to time with greater compensation and responsibility. This will ensure that they take ownership of their role. Regular job rotation also ensures that employees can break the monotony at work while they get a chance to work in other functions or job roles.
7. Leverage Data
Organizations have tons of employee data especially those from the exit interviews. Leverage these data through analytics and artificial intelligence to gauge who are the most probable candidates to leave the organization, what are the reasons behind them, and work proactively to close those gaps and reduce attrition. When you look closely at those data, you will be in a better position to uncover any pattern. For example, if most employees have mentioned commute time as one of the reasons to leave, work on it, and see if a flexible timing or remote working can be offered.
Although you can take different measures to attract and retain employees, however, remember, no strategy is full proof. Hence, employee turnover is inevitable, although you can control the rate largely. So, always be prepared and have a plan in place when you lose your star performers.