Recruit & Retain: 3 Tips to Working Smarter

Your employees are the heart and soul of your business, connecting each department, driving quality work, and serving as your brand ambassadors. The interaction and impression customers have after interacting with your salespeople ultimately is what will reflect on the reputation of your brand.

To continue to grow and expand your brand in an extremely competitive hiring landscape, it’s critical that your employees are aligned to your company’s values, goals and culture. To find candidates who match these desired attributes at the hiring stage, you need to go beyond the regular interview process and dig deeper. Here are three surprisingly easy-to-implement tactics that can complement your hiring strategy.

1. Defining your brand and the talent it needs. To ensure you are building a team comprising professionals aligned to the core values, culture and goals of your company, you first need to clearly articulate them to your candidates. Setting the standards for how your brand connects with customers and what role each employee plays in achieving this will go a long way in talent retention. Essentially, you want to attract candidates who are compatible with your company’s culture and mission while fully comprehending the impact of their efforts.

Ultimately, it is important for all your employees to truly feel that they are a natural fit and can thrive within the company culture. Understanding what candidates and employees can bring to the table and how that aligns with your organization’s needs is another facet of recruiting and retaining top talent.

Expert Tip: If your goal is to recruit people who are dedicated to your mission, then it’s crucial to earn their loyalty and respect from the very beginning. This will increase the likeliness of attracting and engaging talent who will succeed and stay with you longer.

2. Look at what lies beneath (the resume). According to an online survey, Millennials — the largest generation in the US labor force — lie on resumes five times more than baby boomers. Keep that in mind when, as a hiring manager, you come across near-perfect resumes from candidates who convey they possess all the skills and experience you need for a position within your company. How can you confirm that everything you see on a resume is true?

Running thorough background checks, education and employment verifications, and social media searches will not only help you validate those claims, but also protect you from potential criminal risks and substantially improve quality of hires. A thorough background check may reveal that those who looked like your ideal candidates on paper aren’t exactly what they claim to be.

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One of the biggest and most fundamental responsibilities of the HR department is to do what’s right for the organization. This is achieved not only by protecting the company and brand, but also its employees. In addition to ensuring safety, an automated background check helps talent acquisition teams stay compliant with federal and state laws that apply to the practice of background checks and identity verifications.

3. Be a career development advocate. Sometimes finding the right person for the right job doesn’t always mean looking outside. Our last tip is about fostering a culture of promotion from within. Surprisingly, this is an often-overlooked tactic, and yet it can lead to both company and individual growth.

But even if your ideal candidate may already work at your organization, you still need to make sure they’re the best fit for the role you’re seeking to fill. For, example, do these employees demonstrate an interest to elevate themselves professionally either internally or via social media channels? Determining this can help you save time in identifying people that your organization would like to invest in and develop for a position of leadership.

The next step is to understand how one can attract these “star” employees so that they in turn receive the opportunity to respond swiftly to new or upcoming opportunities. To do this, invest in career planning, specialization and development opportunities, and leadership training, and reassess the benefits you are offering to your employees. Make them feel recognized and respected as professionals. In doing so, you’ll help ensure that they are aligned with your company’s goals while empowering them to chart their growth along with the bottom line of your company.

Once you find that right fit, you will see that you aren’t working harder to find them, just smarter.

Vincenza Caruso-Valente

Vincenza Caruso-Valente
Vincenza Caruso-Valente is general manager, retail and staffing, Sterling. Find her on LinkedIn.

Vincenza Caruso-Valente

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