How Recruiters Can Hire Talent That Joins & Stays

Joining & Attrition Scenario These Days

Businesses are hiring vigorously these days as they've realized that they need good talent to scale business, reduce the time to complete projects and grow the company. But at the same time, they are not able to convince candidates to accept the offer or retain them for long.

COVID-19 pandemic has changed the recruiting landscape. Companies have figured out how to create the systems and workflows so people can work from home and companies can recruit from anywhere.

You would think that with a wide geography to recruit from and a lot of talent in marketing, finding people to fill positions would be easy. But that's not the case.

Before the pandemic, the joining ratio was 70-80% (as reported in the RippleHire circle). Post-pandemic, these ratios have plummeted to 15-55%. If you have strong employer branding, you might enjoy 40-55% joining, but if your employer branding is weak then you can expect lower than 40% joining ratio.

When companies get the joining right, the attrition rate starts creating problems. A study by Gartner found that an organization could face a turnover rate as high as 24% in 2022 and the years to come.That means a company with 25,000 employees would need to prepare for 10,000 departures, plus filling up new positions.

As people experienced working from home during the pandemic, they are reluctant to return to office now that they've tasted flexibility, and autonomy. Many people who were otherwise okay with going to the office are now looking to change their expertise in fields that don't require them to come to the office every day.

Who Gets The Blame?

In most organizations, getting the candidates to join and retaining those candidates are responsibilities of two different departments, mainly the recruitment team and talent management team. These teams look at their metric, and analyze data in silos. Recruitment and retaining are two different problems but they have the same goal — to get talent to work with your company for a long time.

Both teams end up blaming each other for not being able to build a strong talent pool that can compete with any competitor in their market.

So let's explore some of the strategies that recruiters can adopt to hire talent that joins as well as stays with the company for long.

Analyze Your Sourcing Channels

When you hire 100,500, or 1000 people per week you can't rely on just one channel or even the company's brand name to attract resumes from candidates. So if you have multiple sources of getting the suitable candidate, you are on the right track.

But do you know how your recruiting channels are performing in getting candidates that accept the offer and stay in your company? Do you know which recruiting channels are most effective in hiring for critical roles?

Simply analyzing the number of candidates from each channel can be deceptive in showing which sources are most effective in delivering high-quality hires to the business. One needs to look deeper and check which sources get you the candidates that join AND stay for long.

If candidates from a particular source fail to join, underperform or leave within the first few months, you might be over-relying on a source that looks good only by the volume of candidates. A channel which gets you 10 candidates but 5 out of them join is better than a source that gets you 100 candidates but only 10 out of them join the company.

Analyze each source wrt. Joining ratio and retention rate and just by the volume of candidates.

Build Referral Programs

If you've analyzed (or if you do in future) the sources of candidate applications that join the company and stay with it, you would have realized that candidates who come through referrals have the highest joining rate and lowest attrition rates.

That's a great thing! But the pitfall happens when companies try to get referrals without any strategy in place. Simply shooting an email to employees asking them to refer or requesting them to introduce their talented friends to recruiters while you chit-chat in the hallway is not enough. What's worse is a well-prepared plan for referral that's not supported by technology but by paper, spreadsheets and memory of the recruiter.

These things would work when a company is hiring 1-2 people but not at a scale where you hire 100-500 people per month and have 1000+ people referring their friends.

Employees get motivated to refer when there are incentives for it, when they can be assured that their contribution will be valued, and when it's easy to know the status of a referral. Our customers typically see a 10-12 percent increase in the offer to joining ratio through employee referrals as compared to other sources of hiring.

Checkout this post to find out how you can avoid the possible problems you might face when getting referrals from existing employees.

We hope this post will help you in creating fresh strategy or tweaking your existing strategies to hire people that accept your offer letter, join, stay in the company for long and add value to your business.

Gather Qualitative Data

To gather insights that data can't reveal, ask questions from candidates around their decision to switch from their current role to your company.

Ask about their motivation to join, what are they looking forward to in their new role, are there any deal-breakers, how excited are they to take up the new job etc.

Answers to these questions will help you craft an overall experience and messaging that will resonate with your candidates. Let's say they are excited to work with you because of the bonus policies you have, then you should highlight those in your job postings.

Create The Right Offer Experience

Make sure the candidates fully understand what to expect when working for your company. Most employee expectations fall into one of these categories:

1) Responsibilities: Mentions the specific tasks as a part of their position. If the role requires aggressive work — whether it's on the floor of a retail store or in the office of a bank — you should be very clear about it right from the start.

2) Working hours: Let the candidate know if they are expected to work fixed hours, fixed timings every day or would it be more dynamic based on the day to day needs of the company.

3) Leadership: Inform the candidates on what to expect in terms of mentorship, supervision, team etc.

Show Career Development Journey

Ensure that the candidates feel that their value is being recognised and that they will be joining a company that is equally invested in their development as they would be expected to for the company.

One would be naive to think that employees are solely responsible for their own career development. Companies are expected to offer career pathways, training opportunities, and more because ultimately an employee is going to add value to the business only.

Highlight your commitment to career growth in the first touch point with any candidate — your job posting. Don’t bury course reimbursement, coaching or training in your benefits. Put all the career development paths you provide in the main section of your listing.

When you show that you're ready to make an investment in a long-term hire, the right candidate who's looking for a long-term position will recognize that and apply.

Build & Showcase a Successful Internal Mobility Program

Attracting talent and getting them to join is a difficult task. And once you have someone on board, the last thing you want is for them to leave.

That's where an internal mobility program can come into picture to help you.

Internal mobility refers to staff members moving within the same organization (both vertically and laterally) to take advantage of new career and development chances. This includes job exchanges, work shadowing, mentorships, cross-team or additional projects, promotions, demotions, and new positions.

By fostering their ability to take on new responsibilities and keeping them motivated and productive, a strong internal mobility program may help you keep your staff.

Here are some quick tips to help you create a successful internal mobility program:

1) Focus on people at all levels, not just the middle management or the senior folks

2) Communicate transparently

3) Give feedback on performance

4) Recommend training or shadow opportunities

Internal hiring makes your organization agile and more adaptable. You’ll be able to quickly respond to hiring challenges, leverage skills and save cost on recruitment. Checkout our handbook on internal mobility to know more about the topic.

Detect & Prevent Recruitment Fraud

A lot of time, effort and money is lost when an organization faces recruitment fraud. At 5% frauds per 500-1000 positions in a month, a company is at risk of admitting 25-50 fraudulent hires.

That leads to talent who wastes your time and you could not retain at all — adds no value and steals the chance of hiring an actually qualified person. But one can't rely on human judgment to make the basic checks before hiring people when you have to scan 100s of resumes every day.

Find out in detail how innovative technology can solve damaging recruitment frauds.