June 2007 "The Business News" Opportunity is knocking
Mar 2007 "The Business News" Battling for talent
Feb 2008 "Marketplace Magazine" Misfiring when hiring
Oct/Nov 2008 "Bay Business Journal" Safeguarding your most important assest
Jan 2009 "MR Green Bay Improves Position Among Top-Performing Offices"
More News Releases
The people who make up your workforce are indispensable not only to your success but to our very survival in today’s completive marketplace. You are not alone if you are finding that it takes longer to find the talent you need, if candidates are reluctant to change jobs or if you are losing valuable employees to your competitors.
A variety of factors have converged to create this candidate environment. Chief among them is the shrinking labor pool as the first of the baby boomers begin to retire and the number of new entrants into the workforce continues to decline. As a result, often companies are competing for the same talent, even across industry sectors.
What steps can you take to ensure that you can maintain the workforce that drives your business? Although you can’t do anything about population demographics, there are ways to safeguard your most important asset by:
· Hiring smart
· Developing talent
· Retaining the best
The first step in hiring a new employee is not posing the opening to a job board or running a classified ad or calling a recruiter. Before any of those hiring tactics come into play, you should have a well-defined hiring process in place and plan for bringing new talent on board. It’s imperative, for example, that your management team is in agreement of the company’s vision, its goals and its objectives. Typically, three or more people will interview your candidates, and you place yourself at a distinct disadvantage if all of them are not in agreement of these basic issues.
In addition, your hiring process should be transparent to the candidates:
· Describe the process-who they will interview with, required testing, timeframes.
· Have a clear-and accurate- job description that defines roles, responsibilities and reporting structure.
· Be open about next steps and follow up with candidates-even if you decide not to hire them.
Most companies hire for a specific opening and look for the exact level of experience and expertise needed for that job. But in a situation where the competition for experienced managers is stiff, you can gain a completive edge by grooming people for positions that you know will be coming up in the future-by developing the bench strength that protects you from scrabbling for talent when they need is acute.
This means that when you fill lover-level positions, you’re looking for people who are promotable to one or two levels above their current jobs. And once you have them on board you commit to investing in their professional development so that they are ready to move up when the time comes.
Another way of developing talent is to analyze the skills that a position demands. Often these skills are not unique to that position alone. Determine if you can find someone with those skills in a related industry or position. You will have to provide training to transfer those skills to your job, but the result may be worth the extra investment if it means that a critical position does not go unfilled.
Think of retention as re-recruiting your workforce. It means applying the strategies and tools of external recruiting to your current employees. It means proactively reaching out to your top talent on a regular and ongoing basis.
Assume that your best employees are getting calls and offers from your competitors. Adopt the policy that no one will work at your company longer than one year without being re-recruited by you. Drop loyalty from your vocabulary and accept that you must continually excite top talent if you are to keep them:
· Identify employees who are in high demand and individuals who may be at risk.
· Review elements of typical offers for each key position by looking at offers that similar professionals are getting in the outside market.
· Make sure your current employees know how important they are to the success of the team. Ask them to describe their dream job and where they would like to be in the next year. Ask them what frustrates them in their current job.
· Recognize that what attracts candidate to a particular job is often different from what keeps that person there. While salary is certainly a key consideration for potential employees, pay alone won’t keep them in a job. Retention improves when you provide a work environment to rewards performance, creativity and initiative.
· Train, train, train- ongoing training is one of the most effective retention tactics in your arsenal. It begins the day an employee is hired and goes on through that person’s life at the company. And training is no longer limited to job-related training. It has expanded o include life management skills such s financial and retirement planning, stress management, creating work/family balance and time management.
· Create opportunities for employees to advance and to be given more challenging responsibilities.
There will always be factors affecting the economy in general or your industry in particular that in turn affect your ability to hire the talent that is your most important asset. Your challenge is to be sure that your company is continually striving to be the kind of workplace that candidates seek- a place where the goals of the organization and the well being of the individual are dependent upon each other.
*John Lombardi is the president of Management Recruiters of Green Bay, an office affiliate of MRINetwork®, one of the world’s largest search and recruitment organizations. He is a member of the board of directors of the Green Bay area Chamber of Commerce and the Greater Green Bay YMCA. Since 1971, Management Recruiters of Green Bay has focused on providing regional and national companies with mid-to-upper- level managers and professionals in accounting/finance, supply chain, IT, total quality management and other sectors.