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The quality and competence of your employees will have a massive impact on your business. A high staff turnover will impact productivity, employee morale and the quality of the work you can produce, not to mention cost your company money in hiring and recruiting.
Ideally, you will want to choose employees who will stay with your company for a long time, or even permanently, so you can develop their skills and benefit from building a team who know the company intimately and handle anything you need. But this is not always achievable or even realistic.
But that doesn’t mean you cannot improve the turnover rate and increase the time people spend at your company; figures show the average time spent working for an employer is around 4 years.
These tips can help you improve your hiring process and company policies, give your employees a better experience, and, in turn, reduce turnover rates.
Define The Job Role
The more people know about the job role they are applying for, the more likely you are to get more suitable applications. If your job description is vague and doesn’t precisely define what they will be expected to do, your uptake rates will be lower. There is a high chance people will leave as soon as they start due to the ambiguity of the job description and the duties not matching their expectations.
Sit down and look at precisely what you need from the employee and what you expect them to do.
Create An Informative Advert
Once you have defined your available position, you can use this information to craft a detailed job advert. You need to be clear, concise, and explicit about the job role and title.
Distinguish between your must-haves, and it would be nice to have requirements as some things can be learned on the job while others are required to be able to carry out the job role, e.g., electrician qualifications.
Talk about what your company has achieved and why they need to work for you; saying you have recently opened two locations is preferable to just saying you are expanding quickly, for example. When writing the advert, use inclusive language and avoid buzzwords such as using “ideal candidate” over terms like young and energetic.
Identify Optimal Sourcing Options
While general job boards can be helpful in creating an influx of applications, if you’re after specific candidates or skills in your employees, you need to be careful about where you advertise. You want to use as many sources as possible directly related to your niche.
For example, you can use existing employees to bring people on board if they know others who would be a good fit and do the job you are hiring for. You can utilise a fashion recruitment agency if you’re looking to staff a luxury fashion store to help you find the perfect employees to sell your items. Alternatively, you can advertise on industry-specific job boards, such as paediatric nurses for new nurses for a children’s hospital or treatment centre. The more options you have to advertise, the easier it will be to find applicants who are exactly what you’re looking for.
Lastly, keeping an eye out on movers and shakers in your industry and network with others to know who is out there can help you attract the right employees and source the people who would benefit your company.
Improve Employee Culture
How you treat your existing employees and your workplace culture are going to influence the quality of the new recruits you attract and how long they remain at your company. If you’re bringing people on board who don’t have the right skills or get the right training, then staff morale will be low, the quality of work won’t be up to scratch, and chances are people are leaving as soon as they are hired.
You need to look at what is and isn’t working for your company right now and make improvements if you hope to employ staff who will stick with you. Address concerns, improve working conditions and benefits if required, and ensure that everyone has access to the training, knowledge and support they need to do their job in a healthy way. The better your workplace culture, the more attractive you will be to potential candidates. Remember, there are ways for people to find out about how your company is performing and treating existing or former employees, and if this information is negative, it will affect your desirability in the job pool.
Improve The Hiring Process
When recruiting, you need to have a streamlined process to ensure that your hiring managers or you are up to speed on finding and choosing the right employees.
Your initial hiring process should be streamlined. You can use technology to help you sift through applications and identify those who have the criteria you’re looking for. By setting parameters, technology can analyse applications and pick out those that match the settings you have in place.
From here, you need to be focused on hiring quickly to get new employees on board faster. Have a straightforward interview process, reduce the number of callbacks you have to whittle down your shortlist and ensure that hiring personnel are looking at the bigger picture, not just the CV and experience. Sometimes, hiring is about personality just as much as experience or qualifications, which needs to be considered.
From here, you need an effective onboarding process that allows the new employees to learn as much about the company as possible, get the training they need and have time to settle in and find their feet to give them a good start.
Finding the right employee for your business isn’t always as easy as it might seem. Retaining said employees can be even harder. The last thing you want is to be throwing good money away constantly training employees. Not only will this be expensive, but it will impact productivity and quality and result in a loss of reputation if you cannot do what your customers expect of you. Focus on improving your company’s image and workplace culture and streamlining your hiring process to help you make better hiring choices to find the right employees and keep them.
