The ability to attract and retain talent is a critical component of success. You cannot do it alone. All successful businesses need good people, and once you have those good people in place you need to be able to retain them. As a business owner, the ability to leverage other people’s time, energy, and talent to grow your company is critical to your success and your growth plans. You can only accomplish this when you have good people. Having highly talented and committed people will help you leverage your business to greater success. With the demand for highly capable talent being high, it is even more critical than ever that your organization become the employer of choice to attract talent.
Many owners and executives I interact with have never been trained on how to interview and hire talent. Many of these same organizations have no documented onboarding and training programs to retain this talent once hired. They essentially hire warm bodies and throw them into the pool, hoping that they can swim. When they do not swim well, they blame the employee rather than examining their own actions and what part they played in the process.
When I was the COO of a $40 million company with seven locations, we needed to hire top talent in order to perform at the level we had set for ourselves. Whenever we hired someone who did not work out, we always went back to the drawing board and asked some difficult questions to examine what part we played in the candidate not working out. Did we not do a good job interviewing? Did we provide a good onboarding experience and give them the tools to be successful? Did we provide training and support to ensure their success? We always looked in the mirror first to look for our own mistakes and failures in order to improve the process and increase our odds of success.
The process of interviewing, hiring, onboarding, and training is expensive; it is important to get it right. Beyond this, there should a performance improvement and management system in place to assist staff and employees to achieve their goals and encourage greater success within the organization.
- Attracting Talent: Is your company the employer of choice in your industry? Do individuals who are working with your competitors seek you out for employment? The business cannot attract talent if your employees are unhappy or feel that they are being treated poorly. The best tool for hiring talent is your employees’ word of mouth telling others how great your company is.
- Interviewing, Hiring, Onboarding, and Retaining Talent: Part of the interviewing and hiring process is to have good job descriptions that clearly define the roles and responsibilities for each position. This will benefit both you and your employees. To help ensure success of your new hires, you must have a documented onboarding process with a checklist to make sure it is being completed thoroughly. Doing an effective job interviewing, hiring, and onboarding ensures you will not have to repeat the process again in the near future. If you do a good job interviewing, hiring, and onboarding, you will increase the odds of retaining top talent.
- Performance Improvement and Management: We get what we tolerate with employees. The reason employers get average work is because they tolerate average work. Performance improvement and management systems are an ongoing process of meeting with your employees to make sure they understand their roles and responsibilities and they are performing at expected levels. It is an opportunity to show them the opportunities within the organization and help them to be successful, which benefits your organization as well as your employees. The goal of performance management is not to find employees doing things wrong but to assist them in creating even greater success and job satisfaction within your organization.
Interested in learning how to improve your ability to attract, interview, hire and retain top talent? Give us a call. We are experts in business management. 503-312-3145
Leave a Reply