Gallup studies show employee engagement is on the rise and, hand-in-hand with this, so are engagement initiatives with many companies going so far as to assess their managers based on how well their employees are engaged. The link between top performing companies and a highly engaged workforce is becoming more and more evident as this trend takes hold.
Who is engaged?
Employee engagement differs between different groups, with managers at the levels at 38.4% and millennials the least engaged at 28.9%. Many factors drive these trends, and for millennials specifically, lack of job opportunities coming out of college or jobs that don’t allow them to feel like a valued and respected member of the team can contribute to this.
What causes employee disengagement?
Whether we like it or not, employees have a life outside of work, and chances are, they care about that life with their family and friends a whole lot more than the 8+ hours a day they spend at the office. That is the life where they are able to create their own goals, set their own priorities, and manage their own work load.
This “dual life” of employees is the root cause of employee disengagement.
What about a lost employee?
A study done by “The Centre for American Progress” shows that the cost of replacing an employee is clustered between 10 percent and 30 percent of an employee’s annual salary.
Consider the real total cost of losing an employee:
Cost of hiring a new person
Cost of onboarding a new person
Lost productivity
Lost engagement
Customer service and errors
Training cost
Cultural impact
Impact on other employees
How can employee disengagement be addressed?
Many ways in which you interact with employees will drive their engagement at work, but this needs to be something addressed and reinforced at all levels of the organization.
Engagement starts at the top.
Mission and vision statements are a way of living.
Create harmony between the “dual lives” of the employees.
Communication is key.
Invest in your employees’ future careers.
Over the next couple of months, we will expand upon these ideas and dive into how specific areas of talent management can have an impact on your overall employee engagement. Some specific topics will include:
How having mobile talent management tools can increase employee engagement
How career paths can encourage and motivate your employees
How development plans can keep employees engaged and promote growth
How promoting your company culture can lead to a more engaged workforce
What is the impact of performance reviews on employee engagement?
Employee: Hey, are we still looking for a project manager for Karen’s team?
Me Recruiter: Yes, we still are. A certified PM that is willing to commute to FAR OFF TOWN has been hard to find.
Employee: Well I know a guy that fits that bill!
Me Recruiter: We are also doing gift cards if they get to interview, and a cash bonus if they get hired. So send them to me!
Employee: Great! I won’t forget to send that resume.
Me Recruiter: Great! I won’t forget to add you to the spreadsheet that’s sitting on my desk.
There are a number of benefits to hiring an employee referral. Including a higher quality of hire, faster application to hire time, lower cost per hire, and a new team member that will work well with your current employees. But often a new, impromptu, or not often used employee referral program can fall through the cracks. Making sure that the employee, their referral, and their appreciation don’t fall through the crack is a combination of preparation and automation.
Getting ready
A successful program requires some simple prior preparation to make sure it’s a clear process.
What are we giving and when?
This conversation can start by defining which positions are most in need of referrals. They may be your hard to staff for positions. They may be positions that benefit most from team members bringing in former team mates that can get up to speed quickly. As you move from defining the positions to that can most benefit from employee referrals, you can define out the rewards.
Typically, rewards are the easiest to convey. Are you giving gift cards, cash, or PTO days? How far in the process does the referral have to get for each reward? A gift card for an interview, cash for 2nd interview, or PTO days for a new hire. As well as do the employees need to submit the resume directly to HR or refer the resume through the Applicant Tracking System.
Next steps
Defining the different rewards and candidate steps will help you define what the process should be for employees and all participants of the hiring team. For this, remember to keep it simple and clear. Make sure the steps for the employee to submit an employee are clear and simple. Make sure the steps for the hiring managers, interviewers, and anyone else who may touch the process are also clear and well documented. For both of these, a short checklist that’s easily distributed, accessible, and redistributed often make sure the new processes will stick.
Tracking referrals
Modern applicant tracking systems will help you track which employees refer a resume in. They can help track when that candidate hits different activities like interview, second interview, offer, and hired. The end result can be consolidated reports on who is owed what level of payout.
If your solution doesn’t support this level of automation, then build these checks into the process. Every time someone is hired, make sure that information is logged to a central point of contact. For the various other candidate activities such as interview or second interview, add that central point of contact to the standard interview forms as an activity. By adding the logging to the process, you can help insure that the information gets to the correct place.
Check-in
Set the schedule of sending out awards. This may be governed by payroll, or by quarterly reviews. Whatever the schedule is, make sure it’s clearly communicated to your employees. Also make sure these schedules include reviews on the quality of hires brought in. Do employees know about the program and the incentives? Are they excited about the incentives? Also, are awards being properly tracked and distributed? Checking these items periodically will help make sure you’ve got a successful program.
The subject of millennials is similar to the subject of technology, they both have changed the workforce in the last decade. As a millennial myself with mostly millennial peers, when I thought about hiring my generation and what we bring to the workforce, I thought about our goals and what motivates us. I can think of a clear difference in motivation compared to other generations. Everything from conversing and how we interact and socialize with our coworkers to our expectations about work was shaped by our upbringing. The millennial mindset is heavily influenced by the growth of technology as well as stress levels from finances and the pressure to compete with your neighbor.
With the growth and expansion of mobile technology, we can see that millennials are a lot more public via social media. Millennials hear about jobs via social media (like Facebook) and also through interactions on Twitter/LinkedIn. Once it is out, millennials search and find it. The next step for most of them is getting hired. Employers assessing the value of the applicant and also the pros and cons they hear in rumor mill about hiring millennials can be quite the challenge.
What are the pros and cons about hiring millennials?
Pros:
New blood
Bring energy and excitement to their role
Flexible working remote or in the office
Create or want to be a part of an active company culture
Hardworking
Cons:
They are harder to retain because they job hop more frequently
More demanding on flexibility on job
More demanding for work/life balance
Want more recognition from higher ups
They get bored easily and need to be kept stimulated
Sometimes carry a sense of entitlement and aren’t willing to work hard and “pay their dues”
So with all of that, how do companies maintain millennials if they are constantly hopping from one venture to the next? Or getting bored easily and carrying a sense of entitlement since they aren’t willing to “pay their dues?”
First, we need to understand their frustration. A majority of millennials attend college and come out of it with no work experience in order for them to start using their degree. Or are competing for entry level positions with people who have been out of school for far longer than them. Most entry level jobs that they see postings on LinkedIn, Indeed, etc. have a minimum requirement of 3 years or less. But realistically, the employer prefers the applicant with at least a couple years under their belt, which already is creating a disadvantage for them. Anthony Carnevale, a director and research professor for Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce says, “the bar is higher today. They’re (Millennials are) the first generation that needs to have a college degree and experience to compete, before they even enter the workforce.” (Newsweek) Compare this to previous generations making enough to support a family off a high school/GRE diploma.
Most millennials are viewed as hopping from one job to the next and demanding too much on salary when realistically a good amount of them are being laid off for company purposes or are not being paid enough to pay off their student loans or debt and living expenses, both which create this need to search for a new job elsewhere. People shouldn’t assume it is the norm, according to Business Week’s Richard Florida, “the average for the under 30 group is 1.5 years between job changes,” and I’ve been in my job a little over two years and have several friends who have been in their jobs even longer. People cannot always trust the stereotype.
Besides the stereotype of job hopping there is the stereotype of being lazy, but Millennials do want to pay their dues but they want to see the value coming from what they are doing. They want to see an end goal. And having performance or learning programs once they are hired excite them and encourage them to keep working harder. They see a light at the end of the tunnel to keep working harder. That’s the messaging companies should give as well when hiring, to be realistic in what the work day includes but also certain potential positive outcomes for working the lower pay job.
Millennials can be a powerful resource for companies who take the time to get to know them, share opportunities, and value their excited and energetic attitudes about work. They have new ideas and are eager to prove their worth to the organization – not to just be another piece of the corporate framework, but to be valued for who they are and the ideas they bring. Be prepared to offer them the salary, support, and culture they need and they can be among your hardest working employees. And if you don’t, you become a large part of a millennial’ need to job hop.
The Brilliant HR Talent Management Platform offers tools that will help streamline your recruiting and hiring processes, from posting jobs and screening candidates to providing a smooth onboarding experience for new employees and hiring managers.
The recruitment process is the process of hiring the right people in the right place, at the right time. This is a critical activity which allows companies to conduct proper and effective workforce planning. This process is important because it involves all stakeholders, to make sure they are well equipped with the appropriate knowledge and skill
set to hire. Where there are several well-known candidate sources to look for future employees like the company website, job boards, vendors etc., this blog we will instead focus on the internal employee transfer employment.
Saratoga Institute reports that, the average cost of finding and hiring someone from outside the company is 1.7 times more than an internal hire ($8,676 vs. $15,008). What’s more, in the Business Times research shows that between 40% and 60% of external hires aren’t successful, compared to only 25% for internal hires are unsuccessful. This is good news for employees who typically leave firms due to lack of career opportunities, yet its bad news for job seekers who may have fewer jobs to apply for as internal hiring rises. According to Business Times article
Advantages of Staffing Internally:
Money: Rather than going through the whole recruitment cycle from scratch and paying investment money in different sources to find the right qualified external applicants; internal staffing allows you to easily find the right nominees for the position.
Culture Fit: When you promote or transfer an internal employee, you know that he/she already fits in with the corporate culture, which is something that is often a risk with external candidates; for example many candidates can say the right things in the interview but that does not mean that they can fit as part of the team. So as an employer you already know the work ethics of your employees which reduces this risk factor when hiring external candidates.
Motivation: Motivation is key because it allows companies to retain their talent and reduce turnover. When employees know the career path that they can achieve as a result of hard work then they are tempted to stay and work harder resulting in a happier staff and higher revenue generation.
Time: As we know time is money. So rather than spending time in publishing an open vacancy in different sources and going through the whole interview process and waiting for the new hire to submit his resignation from the other company and join yours; you can reduce the recruitment time in half by hiring internally.
How is that Accomplished?
Finding the right people internally starts by having the right tools that allows you to assess employees on relevant competencies and skills. Running their gap analysis and create career plans for them while giving your employees the relevant training programs to help them grow. Allowing the employee to have access to update his/her competencies and skills profile gives your organization the ability to always have up-to-date information for future leaders’ planning.
Few other important items to take into consideration while performing internal transfers are:
Make sure your internal transfer policy is clear and followed consistently.
Give internal employees clear feedback if you select someone else so they don’t look elsewhere because of miscommunication.
Make sure their current manager is a part of the process.
Don’t make them feel like their current job is in jeopardy because they applied to a different one.
The recruitment process is one the key building blocks that helps define a company’s workforce level of competitiveness in the market and generate revenue. There are many benefits to hiring internally for vacant positions, however, doing this efficiently requires a full well planned and organized process of identifying top performers, their level of qualification and the development options.
