How to Find and Keep Great Talent in a Competitive Market

You could be looking through a broken spyglass!

If your recruiting process is tiresome and fruitless or your turnover is much higher than you’d like, it may be time to replace the lens.

Hiring seems like a pretty straightforward process: You post an opening, people apply, you look through resumes, do some interviews, and hire the best candidate. But what if you post your job opening and there are no applicants, or people are applying but you’re having a hard time finding a great fit for the job and the company culture?

What if you’re hiring great people, but they’re handing in their 2 weeks in less than a year?

There are a few different ways to approach both of these challenges, but first, let’s tackle finding great candidates:

How to Find Great Talent

Don’t be narrow in your search

How is how you are searching/who you are searching for limiting your candidate pool? The way you search for talent is just as important as the job description itself. The more accessible your search and application for the job are, the more qualified candidates you open your business to who may have not been able to find you or submit.

Questions you should ask yourself when considering the approach and scope of your search:

• Are you posting on socials? Is the position on your website?

• Which third-party recruitment sites are you using?

• Are your submission preferences helping or hindering what you are hiring for?

• Can this position be done remotely?

Be a place people want to work with and at

Your reputation is more than just how your clients and prospective clients see you, it’s also how potential employees and team members see you. Your reputation as a business encompasses your reputation as an employer, arguably one of the most crucial parts of owning and running a business.

Do you know what your reputation as an employer is? If you read that question and are sitting there with furrowed brows or a good ol’ “confusion face”, you need to find out.

One way to do that is by routinely surveying your current team. Creating a survey that can be answered anonymously within your team, asking about their experience and establishing a safe place for them to be honest about their employee experience. The key to this is honesty and trust. The more you learn about your team’s experience, the more you can understand how to best position your company to prospective clients. Not only that, taking the time to show a genuine inquisition into your team’s experience will show you the values your team has and how you can better match/align that to company initiatives and care.

Grow your network - make that net work

There’s a saying, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”

Simply put, it's not true, because connections are great but you need to know your stuff.

However, networking is a critical part of any person’s career, and you never know who you will meet. All it takes is one conversation to make an impact. So why would you want to shy away from that? Attending networking events, whether conferences, tradeshows, social events or even webinars, helps you to meet new people, fact. An additional fact is that the more you connect, the more you learn. People are fascinating, everyone’s lived experiences and skills are incredibly unique.

Now you’ve found great talent, or you’re on your way to finding great talent, but there is another step to this process:

How to Keep Great Talent

Be a place people want to work with and at

Advice so nice, I’m saying it twice! Think: what makes your team want to stay working for you?

Getting great talent is meaningless if you can’t retain them, so how do you ensure you are a place your team wants to continue choosing to work with and for? The important distinction is “continuing choosing to work with and for”, and too many employers forget that employment is a collaboration, not a dictatorship.

Assuming your needs as an employer are being met through this collaboration, the same needs to extend to your team members. These are mandatory questions you need to ask to understand if you are meeting the needs of your employees:

• Is your compensation rate scaled with the cost of living?

• Does your compensation review include inflation, geographical caveats etc.?

• Does your benefits package meet the needs of specific and unique needs of each member of your team (including you)?

• What is your company culture? Does it nurture your team’s spirit? Does it uplift them?

Let’s simplify it even more: why should your employees stay with you?

Understanding your retention can be answered by this one question alone. How you answer this question will say a lot about you, your management style, how you value your team, and how you think of your business as a whole.

Create and nurture a culture

If the culture is right, if the culture is consistent, the choice to stay will be that much easier. The benefits and the compensation can only take you so far, company culture is another piece of the puzzle.

A strong company culture plays a crucial role in employee retention by fostering a sense of belonging, purpose, and engagement. When employees feel valued, supported, and aligned with the company’s mission and values, they are more likely to stay long-term.

The best way to think about this is to create the workplace that you want to work at, put yourself in the shoes of various people/departments of your company, understand the way people talk with one another, etc. The next step is to nurture that culture, to actively work towards successfully continuing and prioritizing the culture’s role in how you treat the work, your clients, and each other.

A relationship in and out of the workplace (but not how you’re thinking)

Hello, HR? Right, so obviously, and let me make this abundantly clear when I say “a relationship in and out of the workplace” I mean your investment in your team. Your element of care should not just be limited to the workplace itself, specifically, when it comes to employee career development and checking in with your team.

A person’s job is only one part of their life, regardless of what they do and their position of power (responsibility), including you and your team members. That being said, we spend a lot of time with the people we work with, and connecting with your team and learning about them from them is part of that.

Here are a few ways to foster this professional relationship with full-picture empathy:

• Include prioritizing and discussing personal goals (non-work-related goals) when it comes to your yearly reviews and reflections

• Assist your team members in achieving their personal goals by enrolling them in continuing education opportunities (short-term and long-term)

• Have a frank conversation about work-load and work-life balance

• Be vulnerable because if you want your team to be vulnerable with you, you need to practice what you preach

Now that you’ve read through how to find and keep great talent, it’s time to put it into action!

Your next step is to review your recruiting and current employee policies to ensure they reflect what we’ve talked about above.

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