After posting a new position description far and wide, a company often gets hundreds of applications within just a few days. With a mound of resumes to sift through, the hiring manager might worry that by the time they discover the best, most qualified fit, that job seeker may have already moved on to a different opportunity. By the looks of it, recruitment and employee retention won’t get easier any time soon. But following these three strategic steps will help organizations hire for retention better and faster than ever before.
Step 1: Target Outreach to Build Pipeline
Any company that wants to come out ahead of its competition needs to hire the best talent in the market. Unfortunately, 52 percent of people who apply to a job are underqualified, while nearly 50 percent of companies report few or no qualified applicants for the positions they are trying to fill.1
In addition to submitted applications, organizations should also consider outbound efforts to strategically source the kind of talent they want to retain in the long term. There are several options for finding candidates whose skills and background experiences align with the requirements of an open role:
- Diversify sourcing channels. Candidates may be more receptive to outreach messages on less conventional websites. Profiles on such sites can yield unique information that allows hiring managers to personalize their outreach.
- Find strong candidates on LinkedIn, target each with a personalized DM, and then follow up with a note to their work e-mail with information about the open opportunity.
- Tap into current employees’ networks and consider implementing an employee-referral program.
- Customize messages for the target audience. (For example, if a company offers a high-demand benefit, such as a flexible work environment, its messaging should mention that.) Always give enough information to pique the prospective candidate’s interest, focus on what might be most important to them in a role, and explain why they’re being contacted for the position.
Step 2: Recruit, Screen, and Hire to Retain
After building a strong pool of technically qualified candidates, a company will want to assess them for culture fit—something that can spell the difference between making the right (or wrong) choice. Hiring for culture fit does not necessarily mean hiring someone the hiring manager or the team likes; rather, it means being open to hiring people who are unlike others in the organization.
Resumes and LinkedIn profiles don’t tell the whole story. Besides being self-reported, they are limited to showing only past experiences. By leveraging psychometrics, an organization can get a clearer picture of a person’s potential—current and future—when it comes to situational behavior, actions, opportunities for improvement, communication styles, and values.
Each role and department within a company has different needs. There is no one-size-fits-all approach. Because each individual who joins or leaves a team plays a part in the company culture’s evolution, it’s imperative to hire individuals who share or have demonstrated the values that the organization has identified as paramount, who believe in its vision, and who are excited about the work it is doing.
To achieve that goal, a company needs to determine what its current culture is and what it wants its culture to be, then hire in a way that allows it to achieve both that target and the best balance of the behaviors, motivators, and work styles for the team in which the role resides. Psychometric profiles of current team members can help a hiring manager produce an ideal candidate profile, assess future success based on benchmarks, look at similarities and complements between candidates and the current team, and then identify the candidate who will make the most significant positive impact. With psychometric-based recruiting technology (part of what is known as Culture-as-a-Service), organizations can leverage culture analytics about their teams to deliver talent more efficiently.
A candidate’s psychometric profile can provide a multidimensional snapshot (rather than a bulleted list of facts) of their critical behaviors, motivators, and work energizers, as well as sought-after skills such as communication, creativity, and adaptability. By assessing this kind of data alongside cognitive abilities, hiring managers can discover fuller representations of candidates, mitigate unconscious biases, and engage in a more inclusive approach to evaluating candidates.
Step 3: Involve Team Members
Involve the employees who will collaborate most with a new hire both within and across functions. Their feedback can validate the hiring manager’s assessment and further ensure that the candidate has been hired for both retention and fit. Plus, involving current employees in meeting potential new hires helps increase transparency, keeps communication open, and provides employees with an opportunity to have an impact on decisions that affect their jobs—all helpful for their own engagement.
The Result: Better Hires
Great talent isn’t available for long. But by creatively expanding their pipelines, using psychometric assessments, and involving their teams in the hiring process, companies can accelerate their time to hire and be more confident that their selected candidates will stay for the long term.
