3 Secrets To Hiring And Retaining Top Talent

Companies eager to achieve their growth targets must invest in people to expand the size, the diversity, and the capabilities of their teams. A pipeline of quality talent will help improve product development processes, optimize market positioning statements, and enhance sales conversion rates to achieve the desired growth targets.

So what are some of the ways you should think about hiring and retaining top talent to achieve those company dreams? The key is to think about both words in that statement; hire AND retain top talent. If you have a revolving door of people coming and going, you’re losing out on not only opportunities to achieve your growth targets, but you risk derailing your brand image and reputation among future talent prospects.

• Define your brand’s mission and core values

While many brands rush into talent sourcing and hiring decisions, successful companies take the time to articulate their own reasons for existence. It’s important to define what makes your brand unique from all other companies in the marketplace. This is how you put forward a unique value proposition that helps with hiring and retaining top talent.

Keep in mind that as your company interviews professional talent, those talented professionals are interviewing your brand as well. They want to know things like:

• – Your company’s culture
• – The perks of joining your team
• – How employees are onboarded
• – Ways your firm measures success
• – And more

By articulating your brand’s mission and values, you have the foundations of how to earnestly answer those questions for interested prospects. Show them what makes your company special and give them a reason to feel excited about coming aboard your team.

Hiring and retaining top talent is a lot like the dating game; you need to attract them early on to pique their interest so that they want to see you again. Successful daters are sure of themselves and know what value they can bring to a relationship. Companies that adopt those same mannerisms will attract more new talent to successfully build their employee rosters.

• Create a culture that rewards employees first

Companies may not want to admit it, but employees have gained a lot of leverage since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the disruption to global supply chains, the pandemic has given more talented professionals the courage to speak up about what they want and what they demand from the companies they choose to work for throughout their careers.

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered what’s been known as “The Great Resignation,” a mass movement by unsatisfied workers to leave their roles and find new opportunities elsewhere. It’s one of the reasons you have such an amazing opportunity for hiring and retaining top talent today compared to just a few years ago. Leverage is now in the arms of the employees, and they’re not afraid to use it.

Demonstrate why professionals who are ready for a change should consider your brand as their safe haven. Show them how your culture is built around employee satisfaction in order to peak their interest in a new opportunity.

Have flexible work hours built into your terms and conditions

Flexibility is one of the benefits that emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic that more employees are demanding from companies. A study by global real estate services firm JLL surveyed 2,000 talented professionals about their expectations in the workforce. According to the results, 75 percent of respondents expect employers to support work from home policies.

This is very important because it can be a make or break negotiation with top talent. People want the flexibility to choose how, when, and where they choose to do their work. If your company is still mandating strict “work from the office” policy, you’re losing out on attracting some of the most talented professionals in the market.

Demonstrate your support of work-life balance

Health and wellness are two mental traits that became more important than ever throughout the coronavirus pandemic. People are placing greater premiums on their ability to manage time more effectively so that they can work to live rather than live to work.

In the same JLL study, people were asked what were their top priorities when securing a job. For the first time ever, work-life balance was ranked as more important than a comfortable salary to live on. The results showed that 72 percent of people ranked work-life balance as their biggest point of negotiation compared to 69 percent who said salary was their biggest concern.

There’s no hard and fast rule on how many days of the week people want to work from home vs. be at the office. But it’s important to provide those options so that people can maintain a healthy work-life balance. Keep in mind that global productivity didn’t suffer during the COVID-19 work from home restrictions and, in some cases, even improved above and beyond the office structure. Don’t fight this emerging trend; all it will do is cost you exceptional talent.

Prioritize faster interview and vetting processes

One of the biggest turnoffs for talented professionals is a long and drawn out interview process. We’ve all experienced it before; you go in for an interview and think you did a great job. But then you don’t hear anything for four to six weeks, leaving you in this unsettling limbo that impacts how to move forward.

You may not realize it, but a company that has this outdated interview process is considered a red flag by today’s talented professionals. There’s a great story about a software engineering manager who described his hiring experiences, including one example where, after clearing three rounds of interviews, he was told to expect another six. At that point, he made the decision to walk away from the company rather than continue through that process.

Senior leaders in a company value and prioritize their own time, but talented professionals do just the same. If you’re going to waste their time with endless rounds of interviews, they’re going to see that as a sign of disorganization and an inability to promote healthy work-life balances. You’ll lose them before you can even get halfway through the interview process.

• Invest in talent acquisition software that creates results

So how do you successfully go about hiring and retaining top talent to grow your business? Remember that hiring talent is only half the battle; you want to keep them happy and satisfied so that you can retain them for the long term. Retaining great employees is far more effective and cost-efficient than constantly investing in hiring and training new talent.

The key is to use a trusted talent acquisition solution to create the type of employee-first relationships that matter to talented professionals. Solutions like High5 allow your company to tap into a network of 18,000 subject matter experts, all of whom are people who once worked the types of jobs you’re trying to fill. They know what skills, knowledge, experience, and passion are necessary to be successful in those roles, which makes them uniquely qualified to source, vet, and recommend talent based on those credentials.

The benefit of this type of platform is that it allows you to build a community of would-be applicants who could all provide real value to help grow your company. You can build talent clouds that plug you into a network of capable professionals, and you can use our subject matter experts to maintain an ongoing dialogue with everyone in those talent clouds. This will help each applicant feel more connected and comfortable with your brand, helping them develop a greater interest and understanding of what value you have to offer.

Most importantly, solutions like High5 allow you to make faster hiring decisions. Our platform has a proven track record of helping companies reduce hiring times by 70 percent, allowing talent acquisition teams to dedicate more time and energy towards solutions that will further contribute to growing the business. It’s a great solution to improve speed to hire rates, plug you into a community of skilled professionals, and ultimately save time and money on hiring and retaining top talent to support the growing needs of your company.

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