Benefits of Employee Retention for Recruiters

It’s no secret that recruiters are often left scrambling to find the best fit for their clients, as the top candidates are few and far between. Although recruiters now have more tools than ever to filter top-of-the-cream candidates, it’s certainly not cheaper than retaining trophy employees.

In fact, as per the survey by Job Openings and Labor Turnover (JOLTS), 4.0 million employees quit by the end of February in 2023. Here the role of recruitment and employee retention programs comes into play. An effective employee retention program can help you, the recruiter, in more ways than one.

Here are a few benefits you can enjoy with well-thought-out employee retention initiatives.

5 Benefits of Employee Retention Programs For Recruiting

Let’s look at these powerful benefits of implementing an employee engagement and retention program.

Retention of Top Performers Leads to Low Hiring Costs

Hiring new employees is not a task anymore; it’s getting lucked out on star performers that’s rare. Strong retention programs can help recruiters retain their top performers, saving money and time that would be spent recruiting and training new employees.

A high employee attrition is concerning for recruiters for so many reasons. For one, it means employees are leaving faster than they are getting hired. This means the recruiters require twice (or more) the cost of hiring to fill that one vacancy along with the cost of continuous training programs. According to a report from 2020, the average cost of training new employees can cost between $924-$1678 per employee, depending on the number of candidates recruited.

Even so, it still doesn’t guarantee if the new candidates could fit in the shoes of former top performers.

So, if you can retain your employees, you can save the cost of recruitment and onboarding training. Besides leaving, employees that stay but are quiet quitting instead can also prove costly for organizations long-term.

Access to Valuable Networks

When you successfully retain employees, they become valuable resources for finding potential and equally excellent candidates. Retained employees are likely to recommend qualified professionals to recruiters or recommend an organization to their own networks of former colleagues, friends, industry peers, and other connections.

Top-performing employees’ recommendations are even more valuable since they are likely to have connections with similarly high-performing individuals. Tapping into such networks allows recruiters to discover potential candidates who are not actively searching for a job change but are still open to considering new positions. Now, this candidate segment may not be available through other recruitment channels.

Promotes a Positive Brand Image to Attract Talent

Sometimes, no matter how many best practices recruiters employ, they can’t seem to find candidates for specific positions. In truth, it may not have to do anything with their hiring process but the company itself.

If you’re recruiting for an organization infamous for its employee attrition for various reasons, you might struggle to lock in even decent candidate profiles. It’s because every candidate wants to work with a business known to value its employees. A positive brand image gives recruiters a hiring edge.

So, strong employee retention programs help companies boost their image and be considered as desirable workplaces that can help recruiters attract higher quality candidates. A high retention rate establishes positive word-of-mouth from current employees, which works as an employee value proposition and plays a big part in helping you score the top talent.

Saves Recruiters Their Time

Hiring for a single position can take hours for recruiters. Think of the waste of resources if this happens every few months. Thus, having robust employee engagement and retention strategies saves recruiters time and makes the recruitment process more effective.

Not to mention, onboarding and training new employees to adjust to existing processes is time-consuming, leading to inefficiency and gaps in the system.

Enhanced Succession Planning

As a recruiter, one should be open to the possibilities of a potential hire from different sources, especially for leadership roles. One example is succession planning.

It is the process of identifying existing employees with the potential to fill key leadership roles within an organization.

When recruiters successfully retain employees, they can identify top performers ready to move up in the organization and take on more responsibility in the future.

Employee Retention Strategies You Can Leverage as a Recruiter

Employee retention starts with an effective hiring process.

So, now that you are familiar with the benefits of recruiting and employee retention programs, let’s look at the employee retention strategies and examples you can employ as a recruiter.

Gather Employee Feedback

Employees only remain with an organization if they are satisfied with their experience. After several complaints from employees, if a company doesn’t take action, they are bound to look for a company that does care.

You can catch this discontent in time and intervene as a recruiter by using surveys to collect customer feedback and intimate the organization on all grave issues employees face.

Look for Potential, Not Experienced Employees

If you only focus on the years of experience a person has in a role, you may miss out on some budding talent as a recruiter.

Understandably, it can be tempting to focus on candidates with higher numbers of years in the industry while recruiting, but it doesn’t always mean a quality hire.

Hiring for potential gives you candidates with the right skills, aptitude, attitude, and work ethic to succeed in the role, irrespective of the lack of a long track record. Some other additional benefits are:

• Recruiters can cast a wider net when searching for candidates based on skills and capability.
• Candidates with experience require higher pay compared to fresher talent.

Evaluate Your Hiring Process for Improvement

You wouldn’t expect a marketer to launch marketing campaigns but never track them, would you?

Similarly, you should also track the performance and results of your hiring process as a recruiter to see if it requires improvement to hire quality candidates that don’t add to attrition.

Here are some things you can do to keep track of your hiring process:

• Consistently analyze recruitment metrics such as applicant-to-interview ratio, time and cost-per-hire, etc. For example, if the time-to-hire is longer than it should be, recruiters can reevaluate their screening process to reduce delays.
• Collect feedback from selected candidates on the recruitment process to find improvement opportunities.
• You can streamline and automate your recruiting process with applicant tracking systems (ATS) and other tools.

Ensure the Job Descriptions Are Elaborate

One of the best practices you can leverage to ensure you hire effectively is creating elaborate and clear job descriptions. Doing so can help you attract a larger pool of qualified candidates and increase the likelihood of finding the right fit for the role.

An accurate and elaborate job description helps candidates set clear expectations and see the accurate representation of the role they are trying for. Providing details around allowed work arrangements – remote, hybrid or in-office is also helpful for setting expectations.

This way, you don’t hire employees who may switch because they have different expectations of the role and their responsibilities.

Make Employees Stick With Effective Recruitment

With the knowledge of how to benefit from employee retention and recruitment programs and what employee retention strategies to leverage as a recruiter, seeing high retention rates won’t be a far-fetched dream for you.

You can start by identifying departments with high attrition rates, launch employee feedback surveys to understand the root cause, and implement your employee retention initiatives.

Effective strategizing and an efficient recruiting process will ensure you have top-performing employees with high levels of job satisfaction to make them stay.

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