Employee engagement, candidate satisfaction, employer brand affinity and employee satisfaction. These are big concerns for modern organizations. These metrics have huge implications for your ability to hire, motivate and retain the very employees that will determine your success or failure as a business.
Yet few companies have consistent, formal processes for analyzing and managing them. A typical organization may run an annual employee engagement survey. They may evaluate their employer brand cyclically as part of periodic recruiting programs. And sadly, few truly evaluate the experience that all their candidates have while engaging with the employer in the job seeking process.
The fact is that labor supply is tight. Within impacted fields like nursing, engineering, data analysis, operations management, etc., it is like finding a needle in a haystack. Or more appropriately, a needle in someone else’s haystack.
Recruiters are scrambling to get better at finding and hiring candidates that are already employed with other companies. While “poaching” has always been an aspect of every recruiters job, it is currently becoming the dominant mode of filling open positions.
The bureau of labor Statistics reports that there are only 1.5 active candidates for every job in the U.S. That’s not to say “qualified.” That’s just “active.”
So let’s get back to “employee satisfaction.” In an environment where employees are hard to hire and in high demand from other organizations, employers need to take a holistic look at their overall “stickiness.”
That’s right. Hiring and retaining the best employees is now officially a popularity contest. It actually always has been, but today the stakes are too high to ignore it. So how does an HR department thrive in this environment? Here are four keys:
Compete for your employees everyday. Don’t wait for key contributors to leave. Regularly evaluate your work environment, benefits and perks and compare them to your competitors, Revise as necessary. Don’t ignore compensation, but look for areas of intrinsic value like contribution, engagement and social contribution to enhance and improve.
Measure and manage. You can’t manage what you don’t measure, so what are your key hiring and retention metrics? What is your satisfaction score for candidates? How does that compare post-onboarding? The first 90 days of employment are crucial for retention. Where are your strengths and weaknesses in you onboarding process. What’s your overall engagement index? Is it increasing, decreasing or static? What is your employer brand? What are the strengths and weaknesses? Do employees recognize and relate to your brand? The answers to these questions are fundamental to your ability to hire and retain talent.
Be consistent. Would your marketing department measure the success of a campaign once a year? Would your customer service department measure customer satisfaction annually? Would your operations department measure process output with every pass of Haley’s Comet? Nope. They measure these key analytics at the transaction level. Constantly, consistently and religiously. Are your employee satisfaction metrics any less core to hiring, retention and productivity? Are they any less relevant to the success of your company?
Know the facts.
- Companies with engaged employees outperform companies without by 202% (Dale Carnegie)
- 85% of recruiters believe that employer brand is key to their ability to hire top talent (LinkedIn)
- 59% of candidates will tell others not to apply for your jobs after a negative candidate experience
We’ve entered the era of employee satisfaction. With modern tools and the connectedness of the workforce, the time is right for organizations to rethink how they engage with their workforce. By focusing on employee satisfaction and the myriad factors that make it up, organizations can take advantage of a tremendous opportunity to increase retention, boost productivity and hire more effectively.
If you’d like to learn more about how the Survale Employee Satisfaction Platform can power your hiring and retention efforts, click here.
