Hire for Retention: 4 Tips to Hire & Retain Employees
- January 17, 2022
- Humantelligence
Current trends—many accelerated by pandemic forces beyond our control—have changed the rules of recruiting, hiring, and retaining employees. Organizations must adapt and embrace new practices to triumph in the war for talent. And that now means making sure you hire for retention.
More companies will continue to adopt virtual recruiting technologies and shift talent attraction efforts to remote candidates. They’ll also consider internal talent pools and prioritize diversity and inclusion hiring. Those that do will experience stronger current and future bench strength, reduced time-to-hire, and increased employee retention.
Nevertheless, from navigating a remote workforce to operating during a global pandemic, new hiring challenges have emerged. This pattern shows no signs of slowing in 2022. Employees who delayed leaving jobs at the pandemic’s onset are now seeking new opportunities. As a result, that strong demand and supply gap when it comes to hiring talent is not subsiding, especially in certain industries like technology.
So here are four tips for better navigating the ongoing hiring challenges as we enter 2022.
Hire for Retention using Culture
To hire for retention, the best approach is to focus on culture. This is often a neglected qualification. This means that hiring who the manager likes is no longer sufficient. You have to dig deeper and find the kind of talent fit that can last.
For many who are finding new-hire retention success, the answer lies in psychometrics. When you infuse psychometric assessment into your interviews, you’re be able to uncover a candidate’s behavioral strengths and weaknesses as well as their ability to adjust to situations at work. You’ll identify their key motivators or values, as well as uncover the kind of work that energizes them.
To assess and hire for culture, you’ll need to form a current vs target profile of the team’s culture and then hire in a way that allows you to achieve your target. Your target should be based on your organization’s goals and be the best balance of behaviors, motivators, and work styles for the team. That’s hiring for fit and managing culture by intention.
The profiles are based on a quick 12-minute psychometric assessment that unlocks critical information about a person’s behaviors, motivators, and work energizers. Once you have this information for your team and ask your candidates to take the assessment, you now have the capability to produce an ideal candidate profile, and assess future success in the role based on benchmarks. You can look at similarities and complements between your candidates and the team, and identify the candidate who will make the most significant positive impact.
Executive search consultant and professional recruiter Juan Betancourt notes, “Resumes, LinkedIn, and educational backgrounds only tell some of the story. Besides being self reported, they are limited to only showing past experiences. Psychometrics more easily reveal a person’s fuller potential when it comes to situational behavior, actions, results, communication, and motivations — now and in the future.”
When you assess this kind of information right alongside cognitive abilities, you’ll also find yourself removing unconscious biases and engaging in a more inclusive approach to evaluating candidates. Doing this can help you predict greater success in the role.
Focus on your Current Workforce
Aside from hiring, the easiest thing you can do to get ahead of hiring issues is to focus on retaining the employees you have. With the increase in demand, many companies are offering financial, professional development, and educational incentives in order to entice candidates. Roll out these same incentives to your current employees. In addition to feeling valued and motivated, it will help keep them from looking for these same benefits elsewhere.
Consider giving high-performing employees stretch roles to grow into, mentorship pairing opportunities, as well as listening to your workforce on issues of remote work, office hours, and flexibility.
Matt Weidle, Business Development Manager at Buyer’s Guide states, “Employees benefit from mentorship because they believe they are valued and supported. It’s a key component of employee retention. Organizations need to invest in the growth and ongoing education of their teams at every level, noting that this applies to leaders as well. Having a mentor from day one, someone they can go to who isn’t their supervisor and ask questions about the job, makes the individual feel more connected. “
Further, both lateral and upward internal mobility has been shown to boost employee retention. Employees will be more likely to stay with your company if they believe they couldn’t find a better opportunity elsewhere. It’s your job to make sure this is true.
Streamline your Interviewing Process
You know better than anyone that once you have a strong pool of technically qualified candidates, they won’t wait around too long. To reduce your time-to-hire and go to offer more quickly, you should optimize your interviewing process. Doing so will help you identify that fit faster and with less bias.
Consider using an interview guide to structure a consistent interview experience for your candidates. When you use the same interview method, you can also use the same scoring to assess them. This reduces the risk of bias in the interview process. While the exact content of the interview guide will differ per organization and role, one of the most important components is the kinds of questions you ask.
Using Psychometric-based Interview Questions
Interviews alone are notoriously poor at predicting culture add or role success. To reduce subjective bias during the interview process, you can leverage psychometric-based questions that draw from the candidate’s talent profile mentioned earlier.
By leveraging psychometrics to guide your interviews, you’re making the most data-informed choice for your role. It’s why organizations that infuse psychometrics into their recruiting and hiring process are able to:
- Consistently evaluate candidate attributes
- Automate competency, question, and evaluation criteria
- Quickly begin interviewing and evaluating candidates against ideal profiles
- Reduce unconscious bias & create fairer hiring outcomes
- Increase diversity of thought for their teams
“To reduce subjective bias during the interview process, we draw from a candidate’s own behaviors, motivators, and work energizers — their talent profile — to highlight the most important gaps and alignments when compared with the predetermined ideal candidate,” says Kerry Leidich, Co-founder of Humantelligence.
“From there, we generate focused questions to ask, along with interpretation guidelines, so you can quickly gain a deeper understanding of how a candidate will contribute to the team’s culture and perform in the role. We all know that great talent isn’t available for long. By using the right psychometrics in your interview process, you can increase the confidence of your hiring recommendations.”
Invest in your Hiring Capabilities
After 2021’s record employee turnover rates, growing your hiring function is incredibly important. Amid all of their other organizational responsibilities, human resources teams are stretched thin trying to source candidates and meet this growing demand.
Strengthening your HR team ahead of time will help you avoid needing to play catch up later next year. If you find your company with a gap in internal resources, seek out alternate solutions, recruitment firms, hiring events, and niche job boards to help support your internal HR function.
In addition to hiring capacity, it’s important to build your employer brand. Investing in marketing and communication strategies for your HR efforts can help attract new talent. Build your brand by being active on social media while highlighting employees, company culture, and benefits.
Expand your Talent Pipeline
Part of investing in your hiring capabilities means getting creative with how to expand your pool of potential candidates. Building and promoting your employer brand is an indirect tactic of achieving this. However, in today’s competitive job market, you’ll have to actively pursue candidates in new ways.
- Diversify your sourcing channels. Candidates may be more receptive to outreach messages on less conventional websites, and profiles on such sites can yield unique information that allows you to make outreach more personalized.
- Host quarterly virtual networking events for your talent pipeline that includes opportunities to learn more about your company and value-add speakers – all while you continue to build community and relationships with potential prospects
- Target individuals on LinkedIn with a personalized “InMail”, and then follow up with an email to their work email (yes, guess if it is first.last name@, or first initial last name@. Or you candownload one of those email finder extensions.
- Tap on your current employees to source their networks and consider an employee referral program.
- Like any good sales pitch, know your audience and customize your messages. As an example, mention offering a flexible work environment if you can (since that is coveted right now!), and always give enough information to pique their interest, focus on what might be most important to them in a role, and explain why you’ve reached out to them.
At the end of the day, you’re competing for a finite pool of candidates. Get creative and expand your potential list. There are plenty of underemployed populations in the workforce brimming with potential, including older workers, employees returning from child or senior care, young people, and more.
The End Result: Hire for Retention Better & Faster
The recruiting, interviewing, offer, and negotiation process often take far too long. Companies sometimes get stuck in their patterns and fail to realize that their lengthy processes are costing them strong candidates.
In this market, you can assume that candidates are interviewing with multiple employers, and an efficient, tech-enabled, and sometimes creative hiring process can help you come out on top. Focus on an integrated digital recruiting and interviewing experience that incorporates deep team culture analytics as well as intelligent automation capabilities. The results will be:
- the ability to eliminate subjectivity and streamline up to 80% of traditional recruiting processes
- reduced turnover costs (at least 20%) caused by mis-aligned hires
- better organizational effectiveness by making personnel decisions based on data you can trust
- improved team and organizational performance through more strategic hiring
When you combine these tips with the traditional background and reference checks and work sample requests, you’ll be well on your way to making quicker, more informed hiring selections that are a better fit for everyone.
If you need help optimizing your recruitment and interviewing processes, we can help. Contact us to learn more and for a free team culture mapping.