A crucial aspect of an organisations success is retaining staff and this is a topic that surprisingly a lot of employers are forgetting. Without a focus and an understanding of your employees, what engages them and reward strategies work for best, attracting the wrong talent can have a catastrophic effect on your turnover.

Talent management is a fundamental tool and should be used in any organisation. People decide to leave jobs in hope of greener grass all the time for many different reasons; some of which are for personal or life changing reasons and sometimes completely unrelated to the job itself. So a business can’t expect to influence all departures, however having a keen eye for talent management can increase the 3 year average which is how long an employee will remain at any one company.

Recruiting new employees to your company is a good thing, but a constant turnover is detrimental to performance, morale, and the overall sustainability.

We have provided an Employee Engagement and Retention Checklist as a guide to improve your employee retention strategies.

Strategies for attracting and retaining staff

Enforce a clear career development path. Involve workers as much as possible. Ask them questions to find out what attracted them to your company to begin with, what motivates them, and what keeps them plugged in. Employee development is also key; it’s important to provide coaching, educational opportunities, and training programs to your workforce to increase opportunity. By making it clear to new blood and existing employees that your company will help and provide progression for their careers you will help attract talent and increase engagement and retention.

Recruiting good quality Managers. Managers are often involved in the interview process. They are one of the first interactions a potential new hire has with the organization. According to recent figures; 80% of departures are due to issues related to managers as opposed to the job in hand so it’s crucial to work closely with your managers to make sure there’s a good level of communication, and that managers are working collaboratively and positively with their employees to reduce turnover.

Create trust throughout the workforce. A company with a culture of trust gets good PR and we all know that good PR goes a long way toward increasing employee referrals. Companies with higher levels of trust often have higher levels of performance and retention also reducing turnover. A company with a culture of distrust is a company certain to fail. To attract good talent and maintain positive employee retention make sure your company has a culture of trust, not distrust.

Recognition for good performance. Be it financially or with some other beneficial reward such as; extended holiday entitlement or longer lunch breaks, make sure employees are recognized when they achieve great things. The most demotivated employees are ones who have normally give it their all and have not been acknowledged. Nobody likes to be ignored. This can easily be picked up by other employees and even new recruits which can make them not want to try in the first place. A one size fits all approach no longer works. It’s important to pay attention to what motivates each individual or team, so ask them individually what motivates them and take notes of their feedback. Make communicating these policies to potential new hires part of your talent management process – and don’t forget, keep your managers informed of this policy.

Recruit the right candidates. Skill AND personality count. When trying to attract new talent, focus on both aspects, when combined they are a cocktail for success. A good way to do this is to change your interview techniques; Instead of the rehearsed line of questioning such as strengths and weakness’ etc. ask them personality based questions and find out exactly who it is you’re speaking to. If they fit in within your culture they will more than likely stay within your company for longer.

Do grades matter on your CV? There are hundreds of employers in just about every industry that still care about a job candidate’s school grades. According to The Wall Street Journal; Stephen Robert Morse, a candidate for a communications job was asked by his recruiter to be ready to discuss his scores in a coming interview.
Mr. Morse, 28 years old, said he was “shocked” that a potential boss would be interested in the results of a test he took more than a decade earlier. In the end he passed on the opportunity which is evident that employers can be putting good candidates off for what most people would consider an irrelevant exercise.

Despite putting some candidate’s off, low scores at Senior school level doesn’t necessarily put an end to a person’s chances, instead, employers are saying that they believe A levels, GCSE’s and other college entrance exams help when comparing candidates with differing backgrounds or deciding whether someone has the raw brainpower required for the job or just in fact a good communicator.

Some may say that they worked hard for their grades and want to show them off on their CV and that they went to school for a good proportion of their young lives to achieve the end goal of being attractive on paper to a future employer. Others may argue and say that they are irrelevant to finding a suitable candidate for a job vacancy, especially if the job is not primarily based around academics. The fact of the matter is, GCSE’s, A levels and other academic grades remain a relevant part in the recruitment process because they are reliable, if imperfect way of measuring a candidate’s ability. This despite the fact that there are now so many ways of qualifying a candidate such as personality tests, data analytics and behavioural interviews have given employers more information about a candidate than ever before. Academic research has proved that cognitive ability can predict job performance, but there is significant evidence linking high scores with employee success during employment.