Retention begins with recruiting and ends with management

Effective recruiting requires strong partnership and ownership between human resources and business leaders. Making the wrong hire creates a great deal of waste. Wasted time, money and talent! Not only does the company experience financial and organizational loss, but the person hired misses potential job opportunities within the same company or with other companies which may have been the right match.

"Hiring Right" requires taking a long term view. Leaders need to be clear about the culture they want to create and the skills they need in the company.

To make a good hiring decision, everyone needs to know what is required. Both the employer and job seeker must ask relevant and meaningful questions. Recruiters are critical to making the successful match between candidates and employers. The most successful recruiters understand both the candidate's and employer's needs and are able to provide the framework and context which allows both parties to exchange information and make good hiring and career decisions.

Now that the right person has been hired, how do we keep them?  Do you have an integrated Talent Management Strategy? Once hired, it is essential to regularly re-recruit employees and continue to match their capabilities to meaningful and challenging work.

After recruiting, the most critical aspect of retaining good people is to ensure that managers are able earn the trust and respect of their teams. People leave managers and when we lose good employees, that creates more waste than making a poor hire.

Managers are essential in the effort to re-recruit employees, but many managers are not prepared to handle this important responsibility. Has your organization prepared the management team to re-recruit employees? How many people focus on this activity? It is easy to focus on recruiting because we pay people to find good hires, but we don't make the same investment in building our manager's ability to re-recruit our existing employees.

Over the next few months, I'll provide more information and recommendations to help increase a manager's ability to "re-recruit" employees and improve retention rates.

Feel free to share your talent management, recruiting and retention best practices with me and connect with me on linkedin.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/codyhorton
 

Cody Horton