Don’t Lose Your Best Talent

Don’t Lose Your Best Talent

  Is Employee Loyalty a Thing of the Past? Did you know 51 percent of workers who currently have a job are either actively seeking a new job or are open to the idea? People are simply not as loyal to their companies as they used to be. New research from CareerBuilder suggests that by the age of 35, a quarter of workers will have held 5 jobs or more.

There is more competition than ever to find, hire, and keep the best resources that are key to executing successful projects and engagements for your clients. So how do you retain your best talent?

Keeping Employees Engaged Employee engagement is the emotional and functional commitment that an employee has to his or her organization. Employees are more engaged, and loyal to their organization when they feel valued, believe their work matters, and when they feel they have supportive supervisors. 

  • $11 billion is lost annually because of employee turnover.

 

  • Companies with engaged employees outperform those without by up to 202%.

 

  • 71% of all employees are not fully engaged.

  Developing Employees and Planning for the Future The most valuable employees are always considering career opportunities. Existing employees want to know if they have a way to grow and advance within the company. If they don’t see evidence they can move up in the organization, or feel underappreciated, they leave.

Of course, there is a better approach to keeping employees engaged. It takes a combination of such things such as performance management, career management, and succession planning. 

Having a Performance Management and Career Development system in place ensures that top performers get the visibility and recognition they desire, which helps to increase loyalty, reduce turnover, and cut down costs of replacing key employees.   Schedule a Demo Now and Get a $15 Amazon Gift Card    

Goal Setting. Why Bother?

Goal Setting. Why Bother?

Why is it so important that organizations set clear, well developed goals? Many of us see goal setting as a chore we must complete at the beginning of each appraisal cycle without really understanding the impact or importance of the process. If done correctly, goals can motivate employees, help align business processes and improve the overall performance of the company.

How can goals help to align employees and business units with the overall organizational business processes? There needs to be great visibility throughout the goals of the company. If realistic goals are set and there is a vast deal of information sharing during the goal creation process, goals throughout the organization will be consistent. Visibility into the organizational goals enables employees to align their own goals with those of the organization to ensure they are helping support and contribute to the future of the company. Furthermore, this can help clarify the roles of all employees in the company so they are clear in how their performance contributes to the overall success.

Not only is determining a realistic time frame a key factor in monitoring a goal, but also determining how it will be achieved and how it will be measured. In some cases, a particular goal may require several objectives to be adequately monitored. Goals without objectives are essentially meaningless because progress is impossible to measure. It is this level of specificity sets goals and objectives apart.

The bottom line is that goal setting is not just an annual exercise all employees need to go through so they can check off the box in their list of tasks to complete. Goals are critical to the success of a company and when the proper attention and priority are given to the creation of realistic goals, the outcome realized will definitely be well worth the effort invested up-front.

Employee Referrals Foster Strong Relationships in the Workplace

Employee Referrals Foster Strong Relationships in the Workplace

Building an engaged team in your organization requires many different and constant efforts.  Leaders checking in with their team and managing goals as the situations change.  Team members reporting when they see a problem and collaborating with the people involved to find a solution. But even the process of recruiting additional team members through employee referral programs can be a point where you can foster those relationships and everyone’s engagement in the organization’s goals. 

Just like employees are often the closest to see a problem, they’re often connected to people that can help with those problems; engaging them in the search can foster a stronger team bond.  An employee may see firsthand the lack of a skilled marketing person or feel the strain of not enough resources on a project.  But from their past jobs, experiences on their job, volunteer work, or from any part of their social web they may be connected to people that would be a great fit.  Acknowledging the need for additional hands and soliciting team members on the skills, experience, and competencies needed to for those hands gives them a role in the process.  This way, all team members have contributed to shaping the requirements. 

Once the requirements are out there, make sure to engage all team members to help with the search.  Certainly, the team members that provided feedback and helped shaped those requirements should be reached out to help fill this post.  Depending on each person, this may mean forwarding the requisition’s link, thanking them for how their feedback shaped the requirements, or explicitly asking their help in finding people that fit the bill.  Here the point is to keep that momentum of that collaboration going to the search.  Their feedback can highlight not only the skills of that referral, but also how they fit into that position and can uniquely contribute to the team.  This can not only speed the time to finding the best candidate, but also getting that team member up to speed because the team can clearly visualize how they would fit into the team.  And of course, there’s also the oft touted benefit that referrals bring in team members that have and thus will work well together.

Happy Recruiting!

Tracking Hiring Milestones and Recruiting KPIs – Part 1

Tracking Hiring Milestones and Recruiting KPIs – Part 1

Knowing what to measure and when to measure it helps define your HR team as a crucial addition to the company’s success.  Gone are the days of simply posting job opportunities on your company website, and hoping for the best. Building a strategy, being smarter about where you are finding candidates, and knowing how effective your recruiters are will determine the future of your organization’s talent. When it comes to recruiting, there are dozens of metrics that you could report on, but we have picked out just the top five most commonly used to focus on in Part 1 of this post, with another five coming in Part 2.

 

1 – Time to Start

 

Time to Start refers to the amount of time it takes to bring a new hire on board from the moment that you first publicize the open position.

 

It is important to distinguish that this means the time until a new hire’s first day on the job, not the day they accept the offer. This is probably the most important recruiting metric to focus on as it relies on the efficiency of the recruiters and the sourcing channels used, but also determines the success of your overall recruiting strategy. Job vacancies within an organization can mean a loss of productivity until that position is filled, so the longer the time to hire, the longer your organization is lacking in that area.

 

Of course, the time to fill is going to vary based on the job level and perhaps the skill set that is required. As time goes on, however, HR should be able to determine an average time frame across all positions and work towards reducing that time.

 

2 – Retention Rate

 

Employee retention is an important metric for many reasons. Not only does it show how successful your recruiting efforts are in finding qualified candidates, but is also a great indicator of the overall health of an organization. For now, we will focus on what the retention rate can tell us about recruiting efforts.

 

If your organization has a hard time retaining people for longer than a year after their hire date, you may be hiring the wrong type of candidate. Once you have determined the cost per hire for each position, it’s no wonder that the retention rate is such an important metric. Your company could be bleeding money with this unnecessary turnover. The cost of replacing an employee can be upwards of two times their salary! (Article from the Center for American Progress)

 

So, as with any problem, the first step is to identify whether or not your organization has a reasonable retention rate based on your industry’s standards as this can vary widely by industry.

 

Then, rather than trying to look at retention rates for all positions across all levels of the organization, it will be more insightful to analyze by sections. For example, you can look at the turnover rate for a specific role. If one role is causing turnover every year, maybe you need to take a look at the responsibilities of that role. Are there unrealistic expectations or unattainable goals? Another way to look at the data is turnover by pay grade or even by department. In this way, you can determine if the retention problem is company-wide, if it’s in a certain department because of a bad manager, etc.

 

Ultimately, measuring the retention rate will allow you to pinpoint whether or not the issue is a recruiting one. To quote an article from Forbes, “The best recruitment strategy is a solid retention strategy and this has to start at the top.”

 

3 – Applicant Satisfaction

 

While related to the employee retention rate, it is important to look at applicant satisfaction on its own to ensure that your recruiting efforts are placing applicants into positions where they feel they can grow and excel.

 

The best way to measure this is simply to have a standardized new hire survey, and then use performance reviews as another chance for employees to express how satisfied or dissatisfied they are with their job. Surveys can include questions on the hiring process, on-boarding, and overall job satisfaction. These metrics will help you determine how positive an applicant’s experience is from the moment a recruiter reaches out to them. This allows a company to take a step back and look at their processes from an outsider’s perspective, and shed some light on how they are portraying their organization to applicants versus what they experience when they are hired.

 

In today’s social world, this firsthand experience and testimonial is as important to a company’s reputation and messaging as any other marketing effort. The real goal is highlighting where a change needs to occur internally.

 

Is there an opportunity for more training for not just the interview process, but the competencies of employees? Is there a reason for employee dissatisfaction with the company that can be fixed to help retain top talent? It may be as simple as the job descriptions need to be revised. But it may be the job, the role, or the company direction that may need to be refocused, clarified or redirected. These are just some of the insights that can be gained by using applicant satisfaction company’s self-reflection.

 

 

4 – Sourcing Channel

Sourcing channel or source of hire simply refers to the efficacy of the different job boards or media a company uses to publicize its current job openings. The reason for tracking this metric is simple – there are hundreds of options for sourcing candidates, but depending on your industry or your specific organization, certain sources will prove to be more effective or provide higher quality candidates than others.

 

Talk about sourcing channels comes up often when thinking about Big Data – gathering the information above, you are able to combine this data to see the big picture and support your sourcing choices. As noted by David Bernstein on HR.com, “Big Data analysis also enables the employer to measure the effectiveness of their recruitment campaigns in real time and make necessary adjustments—sooner rather than later—to improve performance.” Not only do we need to take a look at what we’ve done in the past that worked, but what are we doing now that isn’t working? And how might we shift our resources towards more effective sources?

 

5 – Quality of Hire

 

It will take some time to determine the quality of a new hire, but the longer the employee is at the company, the easier it will be to establish. This should take into account not only performance ratings, but also their potential. Over time, you will be able to see a trend in their performance reviews, and determine their overall worth to the organization. This metric can then be linked to the sourcing channels to help determine where the highest quality candidates originated from, as well as the time to hire so recruiters can get a sense of how long it takes to find the right candidate.

 

The formula for Quality of Hire should be comprised of recruitment-focused quality measures and post-hire contribution / performance quality. The factors that contribute the data for each side of this metric can differ from one organization to the next. Deltek’s Quality of Hire report plots recruitment efficacy and directly correlates this to post-hire performance appraisal scores.

 

Quality of hire may sound rather subjective and difficult to determine, but nevertheless is one of the most important metrics. Because the cost per hire and retention rate are constantly scrutinized, it is important to find quality hires that are going to stay with your company for a long time, thus diminishing the need for another costly hire down the road.

Because of its organizational impact, quality of hire is a more important metric to track than time to fill or cost per hire.

 

For more recruiting KPIs, keep an eye out for Part 2 of this blog post coming soon!

 

You may also find our Top 10 Recruiting Metrics Cheat Sheet to be helpful in your efforts to streamline your recruiting plans in 2017. 

  

How Development Plans can keep Employees Engaged and Promote Growth

How Development Plans can keep Employees Engaged and Promote Growth

Employee engagement and retention are two of the hottest topics in HR right now.   It is currently estimated that 70% of employees are not engaged, and we have to stop and ask ourselves why.

Traditionally, employee engagement programs have been developed by HR departments to survey employees, and create strategic employee engagement programs to reduce attrition.  This a great first step; however a recent Gallup study shows that the top reason an employee leaves a company is due to their relationship with their manager.  This highlights the fact that employee engagement starts with the manager, and companies need to provide additional strategies to their managers to assist them in engaging their team.

One of the most overlooked opportunities to increase engagement is to create a development plan for employees during their performance review. We all know the traditional performance review process.  Employees will have a meeting with their manager to discuss the results of their previous year’s performance, and learn their new goals for the next review.  A lot of time will be spent with managers detailing expectations; however how much time does the manager spend listening to the employee and understanding their personal goals and desired career path?

Managers need to balance corporate goals with an employee’s personal development goals to ensure the company’s success.  Once the manager fully understands the employee’s career goals, they need to work together to create a development plan that will not only assist the company in reaching their growth goals, but also includes training and development for the employee to reach their personal goals.  By tracking development plan progress during the performance review process, there will be a scheduled time during every review cycle to ensure that managers are actively engaging their employees as engaged employees will be key to a company’s continued growth.

What is the impact of performance reviews on employee engagement?

What is the impact of performance reviews on employee engagement?

Performance reviews, if done correctly, can lead towards a high-performance culture.  By giving employees a common purpose, clear expectations, capability, and commitment and building this culture across the organization, employees have a clear insight into where the company is headed, their role in making this happen, what it will take to happen, and what’s in it for them if it does.

An employee’s direct manager has the most insight into and employee’s day to day performance and are most involved in performance reviews, making them a key player when it comes to driving employee engagement.  Some ways they can use the performance review to help foster a more engaged workforce include a focus on performance views and showing employees show they contribute to the overall success of the company.

LinkedIn shares that managers who received feedback on their strengths showed 8.9% greater profitability.  Regular feedback to these managers, specifically focusing on their strengths, contribute to this increase – and to a lower turnover rate (14.9% lower).  From this study and many others like it, a great point is raised that your performance review should not only point out and lead to discussions about where an employee is struggling, but should also highlight and work on developing an employee’s strengths.

Just be careful – if your performance review process is viewed as your employees as unfair or lacking value, the results can be negative.  Holding off on providing employees with feedback until the review cycle and not giving them meaningful feedback in a timely manner is one example, while another is giving seemingly arbitrary ratings that aren’t in line with the feedback you’ve been giving your employees throughout the year.  Make sure that your managers are trained in how to get the most of the performance review instead of forcing them to comply to a bell curve.  We’ve compiled a list of reasons why employees might not see value in the performance review and what you can do to combat these ideas and increase engagement.  We also can offer alternatives to some practices that contribute to these negative perceptions.

While performance reviews are often looking at measuring how an employee has done in the past, remember that they can also be a good tool to motivate employees towards continuing to do well or to improve in the future.  Take the opportunity to provide meaningful (and timely) feedback to your employees and combine these with training opportunities when needed to help make sure your employees are seeing the value and to keep them engaged.