Should I stay or should I go?

Retention and better recruitment.

I don’t think there’s any question that employers who are known to be ‘good places to work’ will be more attractive to the people they want to employ.

It goes to follow that you should consider retention having as least as much a priority as recruitment, in your strategy as an employer.

In many ways, it’s smart to focus on retention first, rather than recruitment.

Retention & recruitment, rather than recruitment & retention.

Why does retention help you recruit?

Here are some reasons that spring to mind:

• Less of a need to recruit, given people aren’t leaving for the wrong reasons. Allows better focus across fewer vacancies

• A genuine employment brand, from employees who are your advocate. Candidates can and do take references on you as an employer

• Better referrals of potential employees

• Typically goes hand-in-hand with the type of employer you want to be, if say you are aggressively growing, in maintenance mode, or a going concern with a transactional workload. Retention is better when your people’s aspirations reflect the working environment. So too is recruitment

• A strategic approach to personal and professional development gets the best out of your people while keeping them fulfilled

• Good retention typically means good reviews on Glassdoor, Indeed or even LinkedIn. Helpful ‘advertising’ when candidates research your business

• These points are all good answers to “why should I want to work for you?”

Those are simply recruitment-related benefits.

Better employee experience is another with the ensuring improved operational performance and 25% higher profit margins.

Yet, it can be a bit of a nebulous concept if you take it from the perspective of “how can we be a better employer?” with an experimentation-led approach.

Fruit bowls? Pool tables? Nice things to have - I’d be surprised if it affects your retention or recruitment.

It’s simpler to start with assessing where things go wrong and finding improvements - such as exit interviews, changing job performance or industrial action are all opportunities for an employer to improve retention.

You can also talk to your people about how you can better support or enable them.

Any new trend you see across your workforce is often a reflection of what’s going on in wider society.

Such as the work-from-home discussion.

If you choose not to allow sufficient home working, people leave for that reason, and you struggle to recruit – have you considered how interconnected this is?

What happens if you can and do allow it appropriately? It’s not a spoiler to say it will help with retention and recruitment.

Clearly working from home isn’t possible in all roles.

Manufacturing shop floor.

Surgeons.

Hard to achieve remotely, unless their jobs are already being done by robots.

But then, those same won’t be able to find remote jobs in their field either.

It’s reciprocative and reflective.

Another example might be the classic line of “people leave managers not jobs”.

If it’s the case that you have a revolving door of exiting employees, with the common factor of one manager – that may be a problem in perpetuity.

You’ll be recruiting into the same mess unless you do something about it.

Of course, you may not have identified the manager as being the cause of your poor retention, and have blamed poor recruitment instead.

That’s where root cause analysis is helpful.

By understanding the systemic issues that affect your people’s capability, motivation and fulfilment, you’ll also establish the same with potential candidates.

And where you can find practicable solutions to those systemic issues, you’ll improve your retention, and make it simpler to hire on the rarer occasion you do recruit.

The same mindset towards good retention applies itself well to recruitment: more streamlined processes, better documentation, better accessibility, and so on – all things talked about in earlier YMMV emails.

Yes, there may be costs and disbenefits to any retention endeavour, which will be part of any balanced decision on whether and how to implement them.

Start with retention, and you may find recruitment flows more easily.

The next email is on The Great People Shortage, and how you can mitigate the effects of an ageing population in how you retain and recruit.

Thanks for reading.

Regards,

Greg

p.s. While you are here, if you like the idea of improving how you recruit, lack capacity or need better candidates, and are curious how I can help, these are my services:

- commercial, operational and technical leadership recruitment (available for no more than two vacancies)

- manage part or all of your recruitment on an individually designed basis for one client

- recruitment coaching and mentoring (one place available at £200/hr + VAT)

- recruitment strategy setting

- outplacement support

Just hit reply to check if my approach is right for you.