Employee retention & recruitment tips

Retention and recruitment strategies are important for any business, as retaining your team will help to save time on hours put into recruiting new employees.

Below, we’ve highlighted the best retention and recruitment tips, so you can select the best candidates for your business.

Why are employees leaving?

Exit interviews can provide insight into employees’ experience working with your company, which will help you evaluate whether your employee retention strategies need improving.

Employees may leave for various reasons, but some of the most popular reasons may be:

• Inadequate salary
• Lack of company perks and benefits
• Feeling overworked
• Unsupported by their managers/team
• Limited room for progression within the business
• Want a better work-life balance
• Feeling underappreciated
• Bored within their role
• Dissatisfied with the work culture
• Unhappiness with management

Employee retention strategies

Orientation

As part of your company’s onboarding process, you should teach new employees about the company culture as well as what’s expected from them in their new role. The training and support provided to new starters on their first day can set the tone for how they might find the rest of their experience working at your business.

Mentorship programmes

During orientation, you could pair a new employee with a mentor. Mentorship programmes are a great way to help new starters settle in and get to know other team members.

Needless to say, mentorship programmes don’t have to be limited to only newcomers, your existing staff can benefit from a programme too.

Employee compensation

It is important for employers to regularly review and adjust salaries to ensure that they are fairly compensating their employees. However, if your business cannot afford to offer salary increases to your employees, consider offering another form of competitive compensation. For example, bonuses, health care benefits or cashback schemes, can help to increase your business’s job satisfaction rate.

Perks

Employee perks can make your workplace attract recruits and retain your current staff members. Company perks such as remote work options and flexible work patterns would help to boost morale.

Communication

With hybrid and remote options for businesses, it is essential to maintain positive communication with your team. By enabling an open channel of communication with your employees, they will feel more inclined to approach you with any ideas, questions or concerns they may have. 

Frequent feedback on performance

Hosting more frequent one-on-one meetings instead of only holding annual performance reviews can give you an insight into how your employees are doing. These meetings also allow employees to share any short or long-term career goals that they might have, which helps them visualise their future within the company.

Training and development

Regular feedback on performance can help your staff members identify areas for professional growth. When people upskill, they gain new abilities which benefit your business.

Why not give your employees time to attend conferences and seminars to help with their professional growth? This will help with your employee retention as it shows that you care about their career development.

Recognition and rewards

Everyone wants to feel appreciated for their efforts, which is why employers need to show their appreciation to all employees. Whether that’s setting up formal reward systems or offering incentives, employer gratitude can go a long way.

Work-life balance

A good work-life balance is key to job satisfaction. Separating work life from a personal one can be a challenge when working from home, so it’s important to encourage your employees to set boundaries.

This also includes not expecting your employees to frequently work late. However, if an employee has to do overtime to complete a project, consider granting them time off to compensate.

Flexible work arrangements

Despite many businesses transitioning back to working in the office full-time, it’s important to recognise that some employees may prefer to work remotely permanently or have a hybrid approach. Not offering your team this flexibility may make them resign if they are required to work in the office full-time.

Everyone has different lifestyles and schedules, so allowing employees to have some flexibility around their start and finish times is another way to help with retention.

Encouraging teamwork

Encourage all employees to contribute their ideas and solutions to projects. Promote teamwork by providing opportunities for collaboration and giving everyone the freedom to make decisions.

Celebrate milestones

Recognise and celebrate employee milestones, big and small. Whether it’s acknowledging a work anniversary or congratulating a team on completing a project, mark the milestone together.

Recruitment tips

Planning on growing your team? With an effective recruitment strategy, you will be able to filter out the best candidates for your company.

Hire for potential, not just experience

Only recruiting candidates with years of experience, rather than for their potential as well, can limit your recruitment options. In fact, research has shown that a recruit, even with years of previous experience, will acquire 10 new skills whilst settling into their new role in the first 18 months.

You should look for people who have versatile backgrounds with a passion to learn new skills. This should also be kept in mind as a part of your business’ retention strategy, as many businesses fail to retain their staff due to a lack of career progression opportunities. Therefore, a great way to retain your staff is by promoting them to roles that will encourage and push them.

Ask employee questions

Some businesses fail to ask employees about their experience working for their business before developing programmes. But in order to find new ways to improve the workplace culture, you should ask your employees questions to see what they like and dislike.

Conducting an employee questionnaire can help implement new strategies into your recruitment process, so you can tailor your training and development scheme. If candidates don’t see room for career development, they might shy away from working with your business.

Watch your competitors

With the current economical climate, a salary can easily attract or deter candidates. Keeping an eye on what employee benefits packages your competitors are offering will help you keep up with the market.

Remaining up-to-date on the market standards for salary and benefits and continuously seeking new ways to develop an attractive workplace culture will help you attract and retain employees.