Hiring is hard
I recently was able to help support our talent acquisition team with some external communication needs. As I was doing research for a project, I started to read up on the shifts in hiring that have occurred, especially after the pandemic.
The biggest takeaway is that candidates have more choices now, better leverage, and higher expectations. Each of these are the types of things companies need to be paying closer attention to if they want to have high-performing teams.
According to a study done by TEKsystems, replacing an employee can cost between two and seven times that role’s annual salary once you factor in recruiting, training, and lost productivity. And that number gets even worse if you realize you hired the wrong person and have to start all over:
Given the substantial costs associated with replacing an employee, it is prudent for companies to avoid making a bad hiring decision in the first place.
Throwing a job post on the website and hoping for the best isn’t a good strategy. When I’ve been working with my project team, I’ve been trying to approach it in a few ways:
Make sure job descriptions sound like they were written by a human and are welcoming and conversational in tone, not boilerplate and plain.
Good candidates aren’t waiting around; you need to meet them where they are, because others will do so before you do.
The hiring process matters. It needs to move quickly or you’ll lose them.
But beyond hiring, an obvious solution is that companies should be trying to work on retention. 51% of exiting employees said that, “in the three months before they left [their job], neither their manager nor any leader spoke with them about their job satisfaction or future with the organization,” according to a Gallup study (2019). This should be a wake up call to anyone who is a functional manager.
People want to grow! If they don’t see a path forward, they’ll find one somewhere else. While employees who are satisfied with the status quo may not be your rising stars, top performers are the ones you need to be most concerned about as being a potential flight risk. This stresses the importance of flexibility and perks. For instance, the Pew Research Center identified a an interesting statistic regarding work from home:
68% of employed adults with a postgraduate degree and 58% of those with a bachelor’s degree indicated “the responsibilities of their job can mostly be done from home.”
So what are we doing here, people? How do you intend to keep your best workers? Be flexible. Talk with them. Have a plan. Be the boss you want your boss to be.