Finders, keepers – attracting and retaining top talent

By Karen Browne, Chief Operating Officer of PeopleScout

Attracting and acquiring talent is one of the greatest challenges facing organizations today. But once you’ve found them, you’ve got to keep them…

As the war for talent heats up, an often-overlooked aspect of the recruitment process is the importance and impact of employee retention. And it’s not just for the obvious reason – that every employee you retain is one less you need to acquire. More importantly, if you can spend less time and money on recruitment, HR can really focus on what’s important – the job of motivating and engaging with staff.

The benefits of employee retention are impressive. Not only is the cost of recruiting significantly reduced, but also productivity is heightened due to the increase in employee tenure. Furthermore, because high levels of turnover lead to difficulty in delivering excellent customer service, retention directly increases profitability.

Talent attracts talent; it’s that simple. HRM asked Karen Browne, COO at recruitment specialist PeopleScout, why employee retention is so often unrecognized as vital to the survival and growth of business.

“Because the supply has been steady, poor performance in employee retention has really not impacted the bottom line,” Browne explains. However, she outlines how a number of demographic and economic factors – the retirement of the boomers, the fall in the US birth rate over the last 20 years, and the buoyancy of the global economy that allows foreign students better opportunities to return home after study than in the past – have driven a shortage in US workers. The result, Browne argues, is that “companies that excel at maximizing retention of employees are going to gain significant advantage over their competitors.”

A complicating factor is the changing nature of today’s younger employees, who are much more selective about staying in jobs than their parents. Given this attitude, how can companies retain young talent? “I’m not of the opinion that younger employees aren’t loyal,” says Browne, “but they need to understand the significance of their contribution to the overall goals of the company. If it doesn’t resonate as meaningful, they’re going to find something better to do with their time.”

The place to start engaging talent is in the very recruitment process itself. “Managers used to have piles of resumes sitting on their desks – now they have them in their inboxes,” Browne says. “There’s no prioritization of talent, and more importantly there is no human engagement.” She suggests that smart companies leverage technology to support the repetitive, low-impact administrative functions, so they can then optimize engagement with the best few candidates.

Browne advocates a more proactive approach – for example PeopleScout offers a ‘click or call’ service, whereby anyone responding to recruitment advertising, whether initially by web or phone, is screened by a live telephone recruiter, who can quickly schedule qualified candidates to interview. “Companies that can prioritize candidates, and quickly move those who are qualified to the next step in the process, are going to be positioned for excellence,” she says. “Everyone else will be dealing with leftovers.”

But once you’ve made the hires – how best to keep them? When it comes to staff turnover, solid metrics are required. Companies must determine when, where and why attrition occurs. Browne highlights PeopleScout’s experience conducting exit interviews for its clients, which include some of the largest employers in America, to illustrate how such insight can lead to better retention strategies. “The two biggest drivers of attrition are a lack of flexibility in work schedules, and unfortunately, employees’ dissatisfaction with their immediate supervisors.”

Browne posits that this insight is useful only if “businesses devote resources to change.” She illustrates this with an example of a company’s screening process that required applicants to be “available from 7:00AM to midnight, seven days a week, with 16 weeks compulsory training”. As Browne puts it: “I don’t know where these people are.”

As an alternative, PeopleScout has implemented flexible scheduling and dedicated one full time call center employee to coordinate the agents’ schedules and accommodate their needs. “This allows our more than 350 agents to change their schedules on a weekly basis. This annualized cost is around $45,000, but what it has done in terms of improving retention and employee satisfaction is significant.”

Browne also speaks of the importance of developing incentive programs that specifically address business drivers that impact the bottom line. For example, PeopleScout chooses an employee with perfect attendance and pays their rent or their mortgage for the month. “If you compare $1000 or $1200 each month to the cost of a 10 percent deviation in attendance, it’s a very simple value proposition.”

Regarding the other issue Browne identifies from exit interviews – employee dissatisfaction with their supervisors – the answer is an organized program of communicating with employees and asking standardized questions. PeopleScout offers a service called ‘New Hire Care’, which includes follow-up calls to new hires on a regular basis during their first several months of employment. The data gathered is helpful in identifying potential employee dissatisfaction. “This really gives management an opportunity to take the temperature of its employees, understand their experience, and improve retention strategies,” Browne says.

Of course, executing these strategies takes time and resources, two things often in short supply in busy HR departments. Browne makes the case for using companies such as hers: “Leaders have to concentrate on where and how they deploy their resources,” she says. “If HR departments try to do everything they’re going to be overwhelmed. They can get stuck in the more administrative tasks, keeping them away from the thoughtful, strategic work that really affects the bottom line.” The outsourcing of tasks like exit interviews and new hire care removes the low-impact tactical work and lets HR focus its expertise where it should be: on keeping talent happy and engaged.

Accountability is key to the way Browne sees companies engaging their employees, from managers downwards. “You really need to understand your baseline, and then clearly communicate goals for improvement,” says Browne. “You then need to motivate management to align actions with those goals.” And management must be accountable for meeting these objectives. “You evaluate the training manager not just on their ability to conduct training, but on whether, after 30 days of employment, the employees they trained are competent in the skill set.”

“We have to get away from ‘busy’ work and really identify where and how much we want to move the needle, and who’s managing that task.” And as Browne puts it: “You only need to move the needle a little to make a significant impact in terms of dollars.”

Karen Browne is Chief Operating Officer of PeopleScout. Browne has more than 16 years of experience in operational management at the executive level across various industries. Her expertise in process management, staff development and leadership has proven critical in building the organizational infrastructure to support PeopleScout’s significant growth.