Hiring is hard
I recently was able to help support our talent acquisition team with their external communication initiatives. As I was doing research, I saw a lot about how hiring has shifted significantly, especially after the pandemic.
Candidates have more choices now, better leverage, higher expectations. 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 start factoring in recruiting, training, lost productivity. It’s even worse if you realize you hired the wrong person and have to start 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 team, we’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.
I saw a Talent500 survey of IT professionals that found the top three reasons a candidate rejects a job:
Lack of communication.
Lack of transparency.
The interview process takes too long.
The obvious solution to all of this is that companies should be trying to work on retention. 51% of exiting employees said that, “in the three months before they left, 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. Further, a 2021 Qualtrics study showed a few revealing statistics:
60% of employees said their employer didn’t offer any professional development or training during year one of the pandemic.
64% said they received no networking or mentoring opportunities.
And disappointingly, a disproportionate number of these were women. What are we doing here, people? Keep your best workers. Be flexible. Talk with them. Have a plan.