How to recruit and retain skilled employees like a pro?

We will handle the topic in two separate parts. First, we will talk about how you can recruit skilled employees when the war for talent is still raging. Second, we will discuss employee retention best practices, so that you don’t have to fear attrition and even enjoy loyalty (yes, it’s achievable).

According to ManPowerGroup, 75% of employers all around the world are struggling with finding skilled employees and filling roles. The scarcity is affecting companies of all sizes. Global talent shortage for companies with less than 10 employees is 71% and for companies with over 5,000 employees is 74%. And the shortage is similar across industries too, topping at 77% in Health Care & Life Sciences and at its lowest (71%) in Energy & Utilities.

Therefore, this is a global problem and not unique to any sector. In this blog, we will focus on how small businesses (others will benefit too) can up their recruiting game and have skilled employees stick with them for the long run willingly.

First things first. Before we jump into the ‘solution’ let’s take a little moment to address the ‘problem’ and its roots. It will help us better implement the necessary changes.

With rapid advancement in technology the demand for technologically skilled employees rose to an astonishing degree that the market cannot meet.

The supply of skilled workforce (especially science, technology, engineering, and mathematics professionals) cannot keep up with the rising demand.

The disconnect between required skills for the workplace and what’s taught in educational institutes also creates shortage of relevant talent.

The ageing workforce is resulting in retirements at a rate that the entering workforce cannot match, contributing to the huge talent shortage.

After the pandemic, with the rise of pro-labor sentiment and the evaporation of the stigma of changing jobs there is an extraordinary rise in employee turnover and many (29 million in 2020 only) expediting retirements.

Industries like healthcare, renewable energy and technology are expanding so rapidly that they often require more than they can get.

In the U.S., the sharp decline of birth rate (since the Great Recession of 2007) that does not seem to turn around anytime soon, also contributes to the labor shortage.

The distribution of talent is not even across the world. Some regions suffer from oversupply for specific skills while other regions deal with shortage.

The answer to this question cannot be limited to the good old ‘create a compelling job description, use multiple channels to find talent, consider candidates that fit the best, showcase the benefits you provide, and so on…’

These are all valid points, but some new elements need to be added to the mix for effective employee recruitment and retention during this talent shortage.

Job openings being available over and above their demand candidates can be more selective in their approach. Recruiters have to learn about the candidate’s wants and needs, and clearly (without false promises) portray how working with them can tick off some of the items on their list. ‘Honesty’ will go a long way.

Remote work, flexible days, and flexible hours are some of the benefits that have become essential to today’s workforce. These are some of the most appropriate benefits for small businesses to offer as they don’t cost anything but are very attractive to employees.

Employment gaps still carry a stigma around them that prevents adept workers from seamlessly joining the workforce. If you try to understand the reasons behind the employment gap you can utilize the untapped potential within this group of people.

During a labor shortage using the existing candidate database is wise. Find old applications from the same profile and connect with them via email or warm call. Catch up with the old candidates, learn their present career goals and wants from their jobs to figure out if your company and the candidate can help each other.

Candidates being selective can move away from applying for a role at your company if the application process is ‘way lengthy’. So, another way of attracting more applicants is to make the process simpler which will also help create a positive impression about your company.

Now that you have added the new elements, let’s see how to use the old elements right:

Many businesses continue to search for the ‘perfect’ employee to never find it and only to ‘settle’ for less. That’s a dangerous attitude if you want to hire and retain your talent.

What you should do instead is look for soft skills (accompanied with a minimum specific knowledge, obviously) and how well they fit within your team and work culture (more on that later). You can fill the remaining expertise gap with training.

When you are giving your candidate personas names and pictures to make them realistic and multidimensional you also risk getting biased.

Try keeping as few personal identifiers as possible to maximize diversity and aim your personas to represent actual human beings and not some overly idealized (fictional) character.

Job descriptions are one of the most fundamental problems to solve. Both employers and candidates know that job descriptions are a hodgepodge of qualifications, skills, and platitudes so extensive that they cannot reflect reality.

But this superfluousness prompts candidates to puff up their resumes too and pretend to be the superheroes they are ‘required’ to be. If you can be direct and honest in your job descriptions, attracting ‘real’ candidates would gradually become easier.

Advertise your job openings using multiple channels so that you can reach a diverse and wider pool of talent. You can use online platforms like social media, job boards, and your own website.

You can also use your network, such as industry contacts, alumni, referrals, to source and recommend potential fits for the role. Additionally, you can partner with consultants, recruiters, and educational institutes to access qualified and specialized talent.

Okay, you have updated the benefits you were giving. But being competitive is also a necessity. You have learned about your candidate’s expectations and to secure the right talent you should meet their needs.

Once again, the benefits may not be only related to salary, compensation, or flexibility, it can be career advancement paths, learning and development opportunities, and rewards and recognition.

Effective communication is a must to make candidates trust your company. Throughout the hiring process you have to maintain a clear and timely communication explaining important details, responding to their feedback and answering their queries.

Building the correct image and reputation about the employer will go a long way when it comes to employee retention.

If all this seems like a lengthy process, and you want an expert or a team of specialists right now because you have to meet a new demand within a tight deadline, you can hire virtual assistants from reliable outsourcing vendors like DedicatedVA.

You will be able to scale up or down in a moment’s notice and access a large talent pool, spending only a fraction of what you’d have to do for doing it in-house. Learn more about how having a dedicated VA work, if this intrigues you.

Most employers are still using the age-old hiring and retention techniques in spite of them being very ineffective.

But why?

It’s due to their singular focus on challenges like poaching by industry rivals, never-ending cost-cutting pressures, tight labor markets, and so on, that they fail to realize the more fundamental problem.

Employees leave because employers fail to provide a gratifying work experience, where the employees feel the progress they seek in their careers and lives have stalled.

According to Harvard Business Review’s qualitative dataset, there are four primary motivators or “quests” for a career move. Let’s take a brief look at them here:

When employees feel stuck in a dead-end job, get managed in a draining way, face roles that are bad fit, toxic culture, awful commute, or anything else that places them at odds with the work environment, trigger a fight-or-flight response. Getting out of that place feels like the only option.

Most employees feel the need for realignment when they experience a profound lack of respect at work. It is especially the case when their experience and skills are not fully utilized, acknowledged, or appreciated. Seeking validation, they look for new roles that will play to what they can offer.

Feeling out of control (overwhelmed, tremendously bored, and a rollercoaster ride of both) can force people to seek ‘control’ or ‘balance’ in their work. It can mean wanting work to be more predictable or having a bit more flexibility or agency over their environment.

People who are eager to take more responsibilities at work, gain the ability to pay for daily basic expenses, support their families, help repay loans, get to better living conditions, better healthcare benefits, and so on, stay on their toes for new roles with better offers.

Getting the ‘right’ employees will make ‘retaining’ them easier. That’s why the first pointers here will hinge on the hiring mindset. And then we can move on to the things you can do after employees are onboard.

Asking candidates where they see themselves in five years is the norm. But break it, and say to yourself: what is your five-year talent strategy?

You know what kind of talent you need right now, but try focusing on how the current hire will align with your long-term goals.

This mindset will allow you to choose a candidate with the abilities, skills, and expertise that your business will need moving forward.

Focusing too much on past performance and overrating the importance of a candidate’s technical expertise, hard skills, and resume is self-defeating when you are planning long-term.

Why?

According to the World Economic Forum, 65% of jobs we are familiar with today will not be around in 15 years. We can all see the trend. While guessing what future jobs will be is difficult, finding people more equipped to do them is not.

If you focus on foundation traits like learnability, drive, and emotional intelligence you can ensure knowledge acquisition and new skills without worrying about attrition.

Almost everything of value will be done by a collective human effort, so focusing on the individual can be counterintuitive.

If you pay more attention to the configuration of your team and aim to gather people with different backgrounds, you can turn their unique talents into a synergy that makes your team a great one.

While hiring, answer these questions:

This will help your team share a ‘we before I’ attitude necessary for continued excellent performance.

There is a tendency among recruiters to hire people that remind them of themselves. It harms the chances of creating teams with different (and opposite) profiles with complementary skill sets.

Remember, the progress and real growth is only possible through change, but change is highly unlikely if your talent pipeline only consists of similar people who will only maintain the status quo.

As a business owner you should aim for a diverse talent pipeline as it tends to deliver better financial results.

Soon after joining you should conduct an interview to get insight on the reasons why they had left the previous organization. If you examine these carefully, you can understand what might push them towards another job-change soon and what will make them stay.

You are conducting these interviews after their joining as they should know that this is only to get to know them better and make their job experience gratifying.

Use this interview to also learn more about the employee’s aspirations about skill development and how much the team community matters to them? It will open up doors for deeper work relationships and greater shared knowledge.

You can add conversations about this new way of thinking to your business’s regular review and development practices. Encourage your employees to talk about what might cause them to leave and what motivates them.

This will lead into concrete conversation about what is currently blocking their progress and the things that are working well.

You can work with each employee to find, modify, or design a role that will allow the most progress on both sides. Within a set of jobs, you can create new roles by examining collaboratively and transparently and finding possibilities to divide and reassign them cleanly.

By mixing and matching existing sets of jobs to play to your employee’s strengths is an approach for the long-term.

With digital tools for collaboration you can see what kind of obstacles your employees are facing and how their interactions with their team members are. You can now get your hands on real-time data and analytics about employee behavior that reveal learning, productivity, engagement, and even happiness.

You and your managers will acquire even more tools to develop and engage the employees through work design because career paths are becoming less linear and roles are becoming more disaggregated.

Therefore, whether you name this approach as job enrichment or job crafting you should allow your talent to flow smoothly from one type of work to another through multiple channels like agile operating systems, gigs, and so on that disaggregated roles creates.

This new approach to employee retention that combines collective analysis and self-reflection is the answer to the question ‘how to recruit and retain talent keeping long-term growth in mind’? Because if you leave all the thinking to the individual you (as an employer) would not benefit that much from the insights.

These recommendations, however, may feel like a lot of work but you should look at it from a ‘work smarter…not harder’ perspective and find ways to let it work for you.

You know that most development and retention efforts are one-offs. They are not very fruitful for the employees but very taxing for the managers.

But if you can embed your vision for progress into your talent processes your investment in your employees will become precisely targeted creating personalised job experiences. And that is the best step forward into making your and your employees’ journey together worth continuing.