By next year, a McKinsey Global Institute study predicted employers in Europe and North America will require 16-18 million more college-educated workers than are going to be available. One in ten roles won’t be filled. That’ll make the challenge of attracting the greatest talent even more difficult.
And you don’t just need to get that top talent. You need to retain it too. The study also revealed that within employees who work in highly complex roles, such as information-and-interaction intensive work of managers and software developers, high talent and high performing employees were 800% more productive.
With such a shortage of talent, employees high expectations and the business’s drive for continued success, how do you hire and retain the talent that will build your future?
Define your message
Employer branding is key. It’s a vital component of effective organisational leadership. You need to attract, engage and retain the talent to drive your business forward, so you need to be as appealing to your current and potential employees as you do to your customers. You also need to be differentiated too. Your employer branding needs to be as strong and unique as your customer-focused branding.
An ‘Employee Value Proposition’ (EVP) will go a long way to helping you define the unique qualities that makes you special to employees. Gartner defines EVP as having five key attributes:
- Opportunity (for career growth and development)
- People (quality of managers and coworkers, senior leader reputation)
- Organisation (market position and social responsibility)
- Work (high interest in job and work/life balance)
- Rewards (compensation, benefits and leave allowance).
If you’re able to list distinguishable and unique responses to these then you’re close to defining a clear and differentiated message around your employee brand. Gartner suggest that if you get it right you can decrease your employee turnover by just under 70% and increase new hire commitment by 30%.
Delivering beyond on-boarding
Most companies admitted to the Harvard Business Review that they mostly focus on the hiring and on-boarding experiences, rather than ongoing people management and the full employee life-cycle. Managing and planning for the long-term is key to developing and enhancing the employee experience. The big-picture impact of driving individual positive and developing career journeys will be on your employer brand.
Employee advocacy in the connected world is also a powerful tool. According to The Drum, 84% of people trust peer-to-peer recommendations over any other form of advertising. Equally, Glassdoor suggests that the majority of candidates read six reviews before forming an opinion about a company and 70% of people now look to reviews before they make career decisions.
Culture doesn’t just happen… it’s alive
“Start-up culture”, to some, has taken on a mythical status. From an employer’s perspective, you can cherry-pick the best elements of start-up culture, but ultimately you have to define culture yourself. You can take all the pieces of culture that you’d like your business to have, but, like a bad-jigsaw, it doesn’t mean all the pieces will fit together. Culture doesn’t just happen, it’s something that’s alive and develops. It comes from actions and is driven by leaders.
If you get it right, you can attract the younger generation of talent. As Deloitte pointed out, 83% of millennials are actively engaged when they believe their organisation fosters an inclusive culture, compared to only 60% of millennials who are actively engaged when their organisation does not foster an inclusive culture.
Frictionless experiences
The culture you cultivate in your business is relative to the employee experience, but can you make their experience frictionless? Technology has driven the digital revolution and businesses have adopted the right approach to meet their customers needs and expectations. However, more often than not, when a business introduces a technological solution for their employees it is selected and deployed based on the needs of the business. The employee’s needs are neglected and the uptake and adoption is low.
Smart use of tech can invigorate individuals, drive value into the business, increase innovation and enable employees to work without barriers. Frictionless productivity will also improve employee experience and also benefit the business culture. Just giving people the power to communicate effectively and seamlessly over smart enterprise-grade business apps that can be used from any location will feel like you’re unifying your workforce. Facilitating the employee’s working life will positively contribute to the story around your employer branding.
Conclusion
Your employer brand, hand in hand with your employee engagement strategy, should be the key tool in attracting and retaining your key talent. Both can be underpinned by technology that can facilitate the employee experience. All of which contributes to how an employee advocate talks about the business.
In the same way people make your business, people are also your greatest marketing channel to other potential employees. So, developing the right employer brand and employee strategy is important, but all of this can be trumped if the employee experience doesn’t match the vision.
To find out more, take a look at some findings from a survey we conducted of an industry cross-section of over 1,000 employees to help understand what today’s workforce are looking for from their employers, in order to help shape your employee engagement strategy. We hope you find the report insightful: Personalisation and the Art of Employee Engagement
