Talent attraction has proven to be a big challenge for recruiters in 2018 and the struggle is looking to continue into the new year. In this blog, we look at building a robust strategy for attracting talented consultants and staff into your business.
Why A Talent Attraction Strategy Matters
Finding the right talent for your own recruitment business has become increasingly difficult in recent years. Whilst recruiting graduates has long been an option for the recruitment industry, it’s easy to hire someone who isn’t a good fit for the industry.
Research suggests that a bad hire can cost a UK company on average £15,000 in training, time and a dip in productivity. As a result, with upcoming challenges such as Brexit and the uncertainty of the market, it’s vital that you find someone who fits your business in their ability and attitude.
In this blog article, we’ll look at ways you can attract and retain more talent to your own business in 2019.
A bad hire can cost a UK company on average £15,000 in training
Optimise Your Job Adverts
When we originally wrote an article about Google’s entry into the jobs space back in July last year, it was only in the testing stage in the US. However, due to its success in that market, Google for Jobs is now up and running the UK too. Due to the dominance of the search engine and its success in the US market, it is a must-have for any recruitment agency wanting to get their job postings noticed.
To show you how it works, if we type in “Developer jobs near me”, you can obviously see that Google acts as an aggregator of relevant job listings.
How to Structure Your Job Adverts
Title: this should be short and simple, avoiding buzzwords & internal language.
Job Spec: This section should include the most important aspects of the role and should not feature everything. You’ll quickly know whether they are qualified for the role once they have applied.
Person Spec: This should be a combination of the essential and desirable but be careful not to seem too demanding here. Consider what is truly an essential aspect of a candidate’s personality/attitude.
Rewards & Benefits: A big part of a company’s appeal comes from their rewards and benefits. Do you have any structures for rewarding your employees, including individual and team incentives? Do you have policies that enable flexible working or holiday schemes? Or, do you invest heavily in the training and development of your staff?
Your Company: Keep this section short and to the point. Candidates will always research your company and form their own opinion.
Next Steps: Detail how they can apply for the position.
Culture
Every business has a culture, whether they’re aware of it or not. It’s become an important part of a job seeker’s journey and should always feature on a job advert as well as informing part of the selection process.
With millennials soon to make up 35% of the global workforce by 2020, attracting and retaining candidates from this talent pool will require a strong company identity and culture. Ensuring that your next employee has values aligned with your business’s culture is critical.
This is something that you need to plan and document and not just think about.
- Document your values – these should not be more than 10
- Involve your staff in the process of creating these
- Make them a part of your reviews, employee of the month schemes and selection process
- If your current employees aren’t exhibiting these, make it easier for them too. Check the communication channels and structures that you have.
Our values, which are proudly displayed in our office.
Benefits
As well as a value-led culture, benefits are a good way to ensure that you can attract the best talent.
- Start by assessing whether your current benefits package is working. You can find this out by completing an anonymous employee engagement survey
- Does your commission structure meet the industry standard? You can read more on these in our commission structures blog
- Do you offer simple benefits such as holiday carry over or flexible working?
- Could you offer an early finish on a Friday? Or birthdays as an extra day off?
Small changes such as these are simple fixes that can persuade a potential candidate to apply to your company and encourage them to stay. However, whilst you can have a good culture and benefits package, a lot of candidates are looking for good training and the potential for progression.
Training
An investment in progression and development opportunities for your employees is a major part of what attracts highly skilled talent. Whilst you might already have some form of training opportunities available, you should consider ways that you can structure and improve on these based on the needs of your staff.
You can start by asking your staff for their feedback as part of an employee engagement survey or their quarterly reviews.
Find out the professional goals of your employees and consider ways you can make that happen, through professional certifications or as part of an allocated learning & development budget.
Another useful way to improve on your training offering is to create a structured onboarding/training process for new hires. Many companies now offer an internal training academy and whilst you don’t have to go to this extent, you already have the knowledge to create some form of this.
Some tips to improve training opportunities:
- Create professional development plans for your employees
- Structure your onboarding process and incorporate your company values/practices
- Allocate a training/development budget for the year
- Add the opportunities for progression/training to your job adverts
- Offer subscriptions to online training content, such as TRN World
- Allow time every week or month that permits your employees to work on some form of training
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