Despite the advance of artificial intelligence and machine learning in the workplace, employees continue to be the most important and essential element to businesses around the world. From small businesses with just five workers to massive, worldwide conglomerates that employ thousands of people, finding and retaining the right types of workers is essential for long-term success and business growth. Coming up with an innovative and effective talent acquisition strategy is crucial to help your company put the right pieces in place to drive your business visions and help you achieve those lofty, long-term goals.
The Cost of Employee Turnover
In today’s hyper-competitive economy, employee turnover is a serious economic burden for all types of businesses. While a company can certainly suffer from the loss of a star employee or the retirement of a colleague loved by everyone at the company, the steady and consistent turnover of regular employees can make it close to impossible to establish a company culture that allows a workforce to work together towards business goals.
In plain economic terms, a recent study by the Center for American Progress (CAP) estimates that the average cost to replace an employee is anywhere between 16 and 20 percent of the annual salary of low-paying to midrange jobs. Finding replacements for the most coveted employees working in executive and leadership positions might cost a company over 200 percent of their annual salary. Recruiting, hiring, and training new employees is not only exhaustive HR work, but it also takes time away from other human resource priorities such as furthering the training of established employees and creating incentives and motivations for the best workers.
Lastly, it is worth mentioning that losing quality employees also routinely results in loss productivity at the workplace. Even if the HR department is able to find, recruit, hire and train a replacement in a relatively short amount of time, new workers take several months (or even years) to reach the productivity levels of established employees who understand the work, the business vision, and the company culture.
Talent Acquisition Strategies
Last year, at least 75 percent of all companies struggled to find the right employees for important job positions. Talent acquisition should be at the center of your human resource strategy to satisfy your important organizational needs. A quality talent acquisition strategy will help you sort through candidates, identify the top talent on the market, and convince that talent that their unique skill set would be a welcome fit with your company´s long-term vision.
To avoid the stress and economic burden that is inevitable with hiring the wrong person or dealing with high levels of employee turnover, successful companies will devise strategies to identify, recruit, hire, and retain the best employees for their business. Below, we offer a few ideas and suggestions for how your company can hire better employees.
Hiring Practices Need to Align with Mid to Long-Term Business Goals
In most companies, employees are brought on board to fill a certain vacancy that exists within a certain department or area of the business. Following from this strategy, when one employee exits the company, another one is brought on to continue fulfilling the same set of work tasks. An HR department with a solid talent acquisition strategy, on the other hand, the search for employees starts from an analysis of the direction and long-term expansion plans of the business itself. For example, if your company is planning on expanding into new markets in the coming years, the hiring strategy would focus on employee candidates with experience in the new markets or niches where your expansion would take you.
In many cases, defined roles and tasks for a certain employee might not even currently exist during the recruitment process. While it can be a daunting undertaking to search for employees wherein a detailed job description might not even exist, this strategy can help HR departments think about the future talent needs that will coincide and support the long-term business goals.
The Search for Top Employee Talent Should Take a Marketing Approach
Instead of simply waiting for top employee talent to come across your website or walk into the doors of your office to submit an application, HR departments need to proactively seek out and engage with the top talent they´re seeking to recruit. In this sense, an effective talent acquisition strategy is also a type of marketing campaign. Just as marketing campaigns seek to convince consumers and customers to buy the product or service that your business offers, a talent acquisition approach will try to persuade the top employee talent that your company is the best fit for their talents and skills.
There is an abundance of data available on the web to help you identify where you can find the top employee talent. Once you find the people (or group of people) you want to recruit, you can use analytics and data to help determine why the top talent might be hesitant to apply for your job postings. Creating visually appealing marketing material that highlights an aggressive business vision, an appealing company culture, and rewarding employee incentives, you will most likely see an increase in applications from the top employee talent.
Embrace Digital Trends
Almost all employees, and especially those from younger generations, are definitely interested in working for companies that actively and openly embrace the latest trends in technology. The digitalization of the workplace will not only help your company stay competitive in a changing economy, but it also will allow you to create a tech-friendly workplace culture that is coveted by many of the top, young employees you are recruiting. For example, something as simple as time and attendance software that allows for logging hours for work done for home can be a major enticement for tech-oriented workers.
Your talent acquisition strategy, then, should go beyond simply reading online job applications. Consider reaching out to top employee talent via social media to learn more about how they might fit into your company culture and to help them see that your business is not afraid to embrace the digital evolution.
The Importance of the Employer Brand
Obviously, creating a brand for your business is essential to connect with your customer base. However, constructing a coherent employer brand is also necessary if you want to attract, hire, and retrain the top employee talent. Employer branding is an essential component of a good talent acquisition strategy as this will allow current employees to act as ambassadors for your company. A happy, fulfilled employee will most likely have valuable contacts within a given industry. If your current top employees embrace and identify with your employer brand, they will be much more likely to help attract new workers that will most likely be a solid fit for your company´s long-term growth goals.
Developing and implementing an efficient, unique, and effective talent acquisition strategy can help your company develop hiring practices that are aligned with long-term business goals, create a marketing approach to find and influence potential candidates, display your company´s openness to the latest digital trends, and create an employer brand that will help you find the best employees for your business.
