Author: Angela McDermott
Ongoing turnover is costly for your organization and contributes to low morale. Attracting and retaining top talent starts with recruitment. Once you've found the perfect candidate for your open role, you might think your hard work is done. However, you must ensure the new hire's onboarding experience is positive, encouraging the new employee to stay with your organization.
So, how can you develop effective employee retention strategies that encourage great employees to join and stay? Consider the following five recruitment strategies and 10 recruitment and post-hire dos and don'ts.
Smart recruitment sets the stage for employee retention
Employee retention strategies begin with your initial search for the right candidate. Ensure candidates' experience, skills and education fit the position, while you maintain an efficient interview process.
To boost employee retention, focus on these recruitment strategies:
- Confirm necessary skills. Understand the hard and soft skills required for the role versus the "nice-to-haves." Consider transferable skills, core skills and the desire to learn new things. These traits can make a candidate a good fit, even if that person doesn't check every box on your job posting.
- Define your employer brand. Do you have a well-branded career page and website? Enticing job descriptions and regularly updated social media channels help the right candidates find you and learn about your organization's culture. Ensure your recruiters can articulate your organization's core values and explain how the open position contributes to the organization. Aligning core values with the candidate's relevant skills is key.
- Partner with marketing. Work with your organization's marketing department to ensure that job board advertising and job postings accurately reflect your brand and core values. Your marketing team specializes in selling your company to clients and customers — they also can help you sell to job candidates.
- Stay in communication. Hiring managers and recruiters must communicate regularly throughout the process to collaborate on candidates and position requirements. Feedback between the hiring manager and recruiter is paramount to finding the right fit candidate.
- Build a strong interview team. Ensure enough people meet candidates so you gather necessary opinions — but not too many. You don't want to overwhelm candidates or slow down the process, causing a good candidate to walk away. Include the hiring manager and the peer group for the open position in these interviews. Determine which question each person should ask, and then regroup and share information.
Effective employee retention strategies post-hire
First impressions count. Ensure new hires enjoy a positive experience on Day 1 as part of onboarding. They should spend time with people who can help them contribute immediately: HR, IT, their managers and their peer groups. Further employee retention strategies include:
- Provide documented job responsibilities. Provide clear job direction for new employees as well as initial projects to engage their interest immediately.
- Set clear goals. Consider defining goals for the first 30, 60 and 90 days of employment to guide new employees through their onboarding.
- Assign mentors. Ask experienced colleagues or supervisors to make themselves available for questions to help new hires navigate the first few months.
- Schedule regular check-ins. Schedule new hires for weekly meetings with their managers.
- Conduct "stay" interviews. Schedule a post-hire interview during the 60- to 90-day window to understand whether the job meets expectations. If multiple new employees indicate that what they were told during hiring doesn't match their experience, you may have problems retaining them.
- Refine your hiring process. Identify where you can ask better questions during the hiring process or more thoroughly explain your culture and employee expectations.
Beyond these immediate steps, performance management, employee recognition and professional development strategies are crucial to maintain productive, long-standing employees. Work to ensure new employees see a path forward at your organization.
Common recruitment mistakes that hurt employee retention
To keep high-performing employees and support your overall employee retention strategies, avoid these common recruitment errors:
- Lack of transparency in the interview. Don't downplay something that becomes an unpleasant surprise once the candidate joins your organization. Be clear about job expectations, hours of operation and working conditions. Be open and honest early on so your new hire learns to trust you immediately.
- Bait and switch. Don't promise one job with certain requirements and benefits but deliver something else. New employees will start looking for a new job immediately, and you'll have to restart your hiring process.
- Inadequate training. When new hires receive adequate training, they feel confident in their roles and prepared for success. Inadequate training causes frustration for all parties involved and prolongs the onboarding process.
- Unrealistic expectations. Set realistic goals and milestones for new employees. Unrealistic expectations erode morale and cause unnecessary stress for new employees. Work with the employee to develop doable goals.
Develop a comprehensive employee retention strategy
By using a retention-focused recruitment and onboarding strategy, you can build the best team for your organization.
Gallagher brings more than 20 years of experience helping companies of all sizes and industries. We take time to understand your organization to build a firm grasp of your culture and the roles we're looking to fill. Our team can serve as an extension of your HR department, adding seasonal capacity, ongoing support or areas of specialty. We can handle the entire recruiting process, from application performance management to background checks to administrative support.
Trust Gallagher's recruiting team to guide your organization with best practices for defining employee value propositions. We advise how best to represent your company on job postings. And during the candidate selection process, we stay in contact with hiring teams to ensure candidates meet your expectations.
