Tackling the Great Resignation

Five Hiring and Retention Tips for Telecom Providers

This last year, we’ve spent considerable time speaking to companies about how to secure and find the right talent. There has never been a time where the labor market has been so tilted towards candidates. Most candidates have multiple offers before they even walk into the room to start the interview cycle with your organization. In the past, companies have hired to deselect candidates. The pressure had been on the candidate to make their case for why they believed they were the right candidate for the job. The pandemic and “The Great Resignation” took us to a place where the roles reversed.

Candidates now are looking for companies to sell to them the reasons they should be part of the organization. If you are doing the interviewing, you now should be selling to candidates the moment they start the process. You need to explain why you have a great culture, what are they going to learn, and how are they going to grow in this job. How your company is going to ensure their needs are met. Now more than ever, it is important to be able to have the entire interview team on point about why the company is “the” place to work.

While you must be selling the merits of your workplace to candidates, here are seven tips that you should embrace to hire and retain great talent.

Younger employees believe in crypto and millennial candidates consider it to be incredibly important. Consider using cryptocurrencies as a sign-on bonus. The crypto is sent to the prospective employee's digital wallet, with criteria to stay at the company. If the criteria are not met, the crypto can be repaid.

Tip 1. Get to the Offer Quickly

Once the interview process and candidate selection have taken place, companies need to move incredibly fast to secure their talent. Candidates are not out on the market long. Companies can’t string out hiring for weeks at a time and have candidates talk to multiple interviewers. Candidates today will not go through that and will likely take opportunities at other organizations that are able to get to a hiring decision more quickly.

Tip 2. Think Differently

Employees are expecting more out of their employers than ever before. There are always things you can do to attract candidates to your organization. However, sometimes organizations get stuck in old paradigms and are unwilling to broaden their perspective. Have you done signing bonuses? Have you refreshed your vacation policy so it mirrors industry best practices? One of the items we have been coaching companies on is the use of crypto in staff recruitment. Crypto can be a differentiator for employers. Younger employees believe in crypto and millennial candidates consider it to be incredibly important. Consider using cryptocurrencies as a sign-on bonus. The crypto is sent to the prospective employee's digital wallet, with criteria to stay at the company. If the criteria are not met, the crypto can be repaid. Thinking differently about how you attract candidates for your organization will allow you to break away from your competition.

Tip 3. Invest in Your Talent Acquisition Team

Ensure you have best in class recruiting processes and technologies. It is important that you invest in your Talent Acquisition team. Make sure you have the right organizational structure for TA. Having one recruiter who works on 30 job openings won’t work. You need to ensure that you have the right ratios in your Talent Acquisitions teams to fill the openings. In addition, not all job openings are alike; some jobs take more time to fill than others.

Invest in quality Applicant Tracking Systems so you have the appropriate KPI’s to measure and monitor how your Talent Acquisition team is doing. What is the average time to fill? How many resumés does it take to find a quality candidate for a specific job opening? Remember, what gets measured gets managed.

Tip 4. Consider Remote and Hybrid Work Models

Companies not looking to offer remote or hybrid work options will miss out on about 60% of available candidates currently looking. This is one of the very first questions candidates ask about on their phone screening. And it’s asked before title, salary, or benefits. Some managers are trying to bring employees back to the office even while there is obvious pushback from their teams. By opening a remote or hybrid work option to employees, you will have a broader pool of talent from which to choose.

Tip 5. Ensure Pay and Job Levels are up to Date

If your organization has not done a complete review of pay and job levels, now is the time. Companies are seeing how important this is in attracting and retaining talent. Today, there is more transparency around pay than there has ever been before. If your pay practices are not reflective of what pay in the market currently is, you will have issues hiring for talent. Most companies are spending a great deal of time and resources looking at their pay and job levels to ensure they are market competitive. Make sure you are competitive against your peer companies in pay, bonus, and stock offerings. If you are off on any of those, you’re going to lose out on a hire.

Retaining Talent

If you follow the 5 tips above, you will likely find the right candidates to hire. The next critical step is to ensure you retain the employees you have. Two fundamental things you must do to keep the talent you have are:

Ensure Your Workplace is Non-Toxic

Ensuring employees have psychological safety at work is key to employee engagement and retention. In her book, Dare to Lead, Brené Brown talks about five attributes that poison a company’s corporate culture in the eyes of employees.

1. The organization has a disrespectful culture towards its employees.
2. The organization appears to be non-inclusive toward employees.
3. The organization lacks ethics or is unethical.
4. The company is cutthroat, backstabbing, or overly political.
5. There is behavior occurring that is considered abusive to my employees.

If one or more of these attributes exists in your company culture, you must fix it in order to retain talent. Employees will no longer look the other way if toxicity exist in an organization. If you don’t address an unhealthy culture, you’re at risk for having your employees talk openly about it in ways that won’t be favorable for your organization.

To know if your organization is at risk for any of the five attributes listed above, visit Glassdoor, Buzzfeed, or other social media platforms to see employees pointing out flawed behaviors in companies. You’ll quickly notice whether or not the company has addressed the issue by the number of comments and highlights that follow.

Once the interview process and candidate selection have taken place, companies need to move incredibly fast to secure their talent. Candidates are not out on the market long.

Allow for Learning and Growth

Companies that encourage employees to grow, learn, and upskill in their jobs will keep them longer. Ensure that opportunities exist for your employees to take on tasks or projects that they have not done before. Create opportunities to learn. Don’t let employees get stuck professionally or feel they can’t take a class or get a new certification. The more you invest in them and their opportunities to develop, the more likely it is that you will retain them in the organization.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Jason Walker and Rey Ramirez are co-founders at Thrive HR Consulting, a minority-owned HR advisory that provides value-based HR support for mergers and acquisitions, C-Suite executive coaching, employee relations, DEI and belonging, performance management, employee engagement, and talent acquisition. For more information, please email [email protected] or visit https://thrivehrconsulting.com. Follow them on Twitter @hr_thrive.