Reality HR has recently won the national Working Mums Top Employer Award for Talent Attraction and Managing Director of Reality HR, Laura Davis, provides some useful tips on how to attract top performers to your business and the need to develop a strategy for long-term staff retention.
Understanding the attributes that motivate and inspire candidates to invest their talent in a company is essential and some of the most common attributes that top performers look for in a new employer are:
1. Value Association – Top performers will choose to work for a company if there is a strong alignment between their personal values and the company’s corporate values. You should promote the values on which your company is built, for example, customer service, creativity, innovation or thought leadership.
2. A Powerful Value Proposition – Top performers will want to know what sets your company apart, what kind of culture is promoted (team work or competitiveness), how is achievement recognised and rewarded and what challenges are available to high achievers. The remuneration package, work/life balance initiatives and company stability will also be key factors.
3. Positive Reputation – The most popular companies have a strong brand recognition and reputation for excellence but, remember, you do not have to be a big company to have a strong brand!
4. Development Opportunities – The opportunity to develop personally and professionally is crucial to high achieving professionals, so do you offer ongoing training and development, and are there clear pathways to growth and promotion?
Once you have talented new recruits on board, what can you do to ensure that they stay with your company in the long-term? If your company has high labour turnover, this needs to be researched to find out the reasons why staff are leaving and then a staff retention plan needs to be developed and implemented. This plan will need to address the common causes of dissatisfaction across the workforce or specific to particular sections of the company. The employer may need to tackle several work-related areas to improve motivation and retention and often retention initiatives focus on, for example, recruitment, induction and flexible working.
Indeed flexible working has attracted a lot of media attention in recent months and it is the basis on which Reality HR has grown over the last 10 years. We created a Reality HR Flexible Working Hour’s model giving all team members the flexibility to manage their working lives around their family commitments. The business has grown significantly over the years and provides an outsourced HR function to more than 70 clients across the South. We now have a team of 15 highly qualified and very loyal HR specialists who give above and beyond the call of duty, often dealing with client emergencies in the evenings or at weekends from home. As a result, we do not have any issues relating to staff retention.
