Recruitment Strategies for Improving Employee Retention
From searching for the right candidates to employee onboarding, it can take a lot of effort, time and money to find the best people who have a real cultural fit in your organisation. That’s why it’s so important to maximise your employee retention, as high turnover rates can be very costly and impact on morale and productivity.
The first step you can take is to make sure you hire selectively. Your retention levels will be determined by your recruitment process and who you choose to hire. If there’s hitches in your recruitment process, then you’re more likely to hire someone who isn’t a good fit – who’ll be more likely to leave after shorter periods of time.
How your recruitment process can improve employee retention
If you haven’t already, explore your recruitment process and see if there’s anything you can put into place that will help select the best candidates. Is there anything that can be implemented to help you get to know your candidates better? Or how do you know if you’re not missing out on scheduling interviews with some of the most promising candidates?
Here are a few things to keep in mind if you want to improve your employee retention from the get-go:
Accurate job adverts
The first step in finding new hires is your job advert. The wording of your job ads can have more of an impact than you think so it should be a team effort, with some testing when it’s done. The wording used can attract people with specific types of motivations, or even be more favoured towards a certain gender – so make sure you try to eliminate anything that might deter applicants.
Another thing to consider is honesty in the job description. If you aren’t completely open about what the role is going to entail, the chances are that once the employee discovers that their new job isn’t quite what they expected they’re going to be left unsatisfied – and much more likely to leave. Even if there’s a part of the job that isn’t so glamorous, be honest about it.
Person-organisation fit
Take a fresh look at current and aspirational organisational culture. There’ll always be a type of person who’ll match this much more than another. Looking at company culture will help you understand the predictors of performance and you can select the right things to measure in your candidates.
Hiring for values fit will allow you to see how well a candidate will fit into your workplace – and a values fit has shown longer retained employees. When sharing a values alignment with co-workers, they’re likely to be much happier in the workplace and satisfied with their work, meaning they’re less likely to leave. The Shine platform will allow you to measure your candidates against your existing team and reduce the bias in your recruitment process by showing you the most suited candidates.
Recruitment Automation
If you receive a large number of applicants and feel like you’re unable to make sense of the good CV’s from the bad, Shine provides a video interviewing platform which will help you find the best talent and improve your employee retention. The use of video interviewing in your recruitment process will let you virtually meet your candidates in the earlier stages and they can let their personality shine through, so you can identify the best talent from the start and feel confident in your shortlisting decisions for face-to-face interviews.
If you use video interviewing, you can rest assured that you’re finding the best candidates while reducing your time to hire – all while improving your candidate experience and giving everyone a fair go. You can learn so much more from video’s than you can from a CV!
Outreach
Your outreach strategy will also impact what type of people will apply. Do you know what’s best for the role you’re recruiting for?
If you don’t have a specific candidate persona in mind, or want to be more diverse in your search, vary where and how you do your outreach. Job boards, LinkedIn, social media, recruitment fairs – there’s a very long list you can start from once you figure out what will work best for you. Take recruitment fairs, for example, mostly used for student and graduate recruitment whereas LinkedIn focuses much more on experienced professionals. You’ll reach the most suited people through different channels and the better the fit, the better the retention.
Employee retention doesn't stop there! Our next post discusses the strategies that you can implement into the workplace. Or, our Ultimate Guide to Recruitment Technology will certainly get you ahead of the game when improving your recruitment process.
Contact us today to have a chat about your recruitment process. We’d love to help!