With Brexit almost upon us, and a tight labour market, if you’re looking to hire you are likely to be noticing that great candidates are few and far between. Read on for some tools and strategies to support your candidate attraction, recruitment and retention.
Invest in employee engagement
Engagement has a direct impact on retention and hanging on to your current team longer means you’ll need to recruit less frequently. Find out what would engage them further or how you could make this an even better place to work. And then act on those findings and be seen to be doing so. Even pay increases cannot always keep an employee who is disengaged, mainly because money is rarely the source of their dissatisfaction. Get to the root of recruitment and retention problems by implementing long-term solutions to increase engagement.
Review your pay and benefits
Are you competitive with the other local employers? Have you considered being more generous? These days incoming candidates aren’t just looking for a great basic salary, almost as important to many a great company culture, career and training prospects, flexibility (work-life balance) and good benefits. Make sure your offer is a good one and complements your engagement strategy.
Attraction
Why should candidates choose you over another employer? Are you making it easy for them to understand exactly what it is that you do? Do they know why your organisation would be a great place to work? Are you using those messages consistently across all your vacancy advertising channels? Apply the same strategies as your marketing team would to the product or service you are selling – create a great ‘employer’ brand which draws people to apply for your roles.
Broaden your search
Reach out to untapped pools of people by considering a different skill set or consider relaxing requirements on non-essential skills. You could target people who are part timers, job sharers, could relocate or work from homers. This is particularly key for STEM roles, which are traditionally male dominated and where there is limited supply of candidates. Why not tap into your existing team by introducing a referral scheme, rewarding those who introduce new team members? Expand or refocus your traditional recruitment advertising.
Invest in employee productivity
Consider your use of technology, are you all working effectively or would automated systems ease the pressure and increase productivity? If you have been struggling to fill roles for a while, you may need to rethink individual duties to be sure that essential duties are maintained. Make the best use of the team you currently have.
Training and succession
While it is true that in a tight labour market employees are more likely to leave, investing in training
or coaching for current employees and future hires will pay dividends. It is a great engagement tool and can provide skills in areas you are struggling to recruit for. Put a plan into place to ‘grow’ your next tier of recruits from within the team or division. Begin by anticipating key roles that are going to be created or will be losing their current incumbent in coming months. Take training and succession planning seriously. If budget is scarce, consider using your apprenticeship levy to upskill existing staff.
There are several things that you could be doing to bring on board great people in this tough labour market, however to have the most impact make sure you are being joined up and consistent in what you do.
For support with any of these steps, we’re happy to help. Get in touch today.