Hiring and retaining people who are a good fit for your organisation has always been one of the key challenges for managers but today the situation has become acute. Call it The Great Resignation, the Big Quit or Great Reshuffle it’s clear that more employees are questioning their futures, the rewards given for their achievements and what job satisfaction means to them. The answer for employers is clear though: they need to find a new creative spark in talent discovery and inspiration than ever before.

There’s no point hoping and waiting for an organic turnaround in employee sentiment. The days of hanging in for retirement, pension and a long service award are gone and competition in hot knowledge-worker sectors is particularly brutal. In the days of sub-three years average tenure, it’s time to innovate.

Starting points
To start we need to talk about talent acquisition. The most successful companies don’t wait for a post to become free. They are creative in identifying talent, build relationships with the community, create academies and apprenticeship schemes and most critically they make best use of internal talent.

There is a real gap in many HCM systems and that is the absence of knowledge management systems that can be used to audit and update our understanding of the skills and qualifications of our people.

Often times HR work today is passive but the very tough hiring market demands a proactive and self-reliant stance. It requires a new mindset where we no longer consider length of employee tenure as a definitive KPI. Many rewards schemes are still built around retention and poor HR practices are often, incorrectly, equated with staff churn. But in this market we all need to “think differently” and look at how we help employees achieve their chosen career paths… and, that may even include supporting them in their decision to leave!

How can we support you on your career path
It may seem anathema to consider supporting employees as they map out their career path even if that means leaving your company, but the enlightened companies are realising this can become a differentiator. For example, Mexican food chain Chipotle has an employee portal called Cultivate Me and provides educational assistance among other benefits. “Our people deserve to be supported and empowered in every area of their lives,” the company’s website proclaims, but the message is clear. Staff can work for the company while training for another qualification that will likely mean they leave.

Steve Cadigan, founding CHRO of LinkedIn, agrees that it’s wrong to treat retention as a keystone. “They’re going to leave anyway and if you’re only caring about people when they work for you, you’re really missing a big opportunity,” he told an ERP Today webcast.

Organisations need to double down on learning and development programmes, on mentoring and coaching, appropriate compensation schemes, D&I and neurodiversity. More than anything it’s about scanning what we need from people, helping them to help us and, quite simply, caring about the individual rather than the employee.

And so, to the elephant in the room: what if those people with their hard and soft skills then become more attractive to rivals? We need to wish them luck, encourage them to join alumni networks, work out if we could have done things better and hope to work with them again down the road. A certain level of attrition needn’t be a bad thing and it’s healthier to have a work culture based on decent and honest behaviour. Of course, we want to keep our best people and encourage the best from them but sometimes it will be a case of letting go.

We need to move away from a culture of giving employees “golden handcuffs” and towards a more holistic view of the employer-employee social contract. Almost 40 per cent of organisations surveyed by Fosway Group for its Digital Learning Realities Research 2022 report indicated that they would increase commitments to Learning and Development programmes this year. Companies are taking advantage of new opportunities from technology such as AI, AR, VR, social learning and microlearning. Continuous learning must be a given but just 46 per cent of respondents said their current learning platforms are fit for purpose so ask yourself whether your systems support your strategic goals… or just ask whether they excite your people.

More broadly, think about your culture. As Steve Cadigan has said: “You’re not going to be able to out-pay your competitors, you’re not going to able to out-benefit your competitors [but] where you can win is something that costs nothing… on culture [and building] a place where great people want to be.”

Of course, culture is huge and hard to pin down but it starts in little things: as Rachel Jordan, VP of HCM product management at Unit4, has said it could be seen in how the character of the company is reflected in the wording of a job posting. Is your company quirky, serious, detail-orientated or fun? Then let it be known.

These are difficult times for organisations as people revel in their ability to jump between jobs and tasks. But we need to embrace this and accept that we need to rethink and re-engineer what we offer employees and what they want from us.