Actionable Strategies on How Organizations Can Retain Their Top Talent

Organizations across the globe are concerned over sky-high attrition and the rising talent scarcity. 

With the ever-increasing skills gap, organizations are being compelled to think of actionable strategies to retain top talent. While high compensation and fancy perks worked as retention strategies in the past, trends like the Great Resignation show that they are no longer enough.

Research now shows that 

• Almost 80% of employees leave their jobs for reasons other than pay. 
• Almost 50% of recruited people leave the organization within two years. 
• One in four new hires will leave in 6 months. 
• Nearly 70% of organizations report that workforce turnover has a negative financial impact because of the high cost of hiring, and training the employee and that they find it challenging to replace staff. 
• Almost 50% of organizations experience regular problems with employee retention.

The workforce of today has entirely different motivators of loyalty. The millennials and Gen Z are now the predominant demographic in the workforce and their demands from enterprises are different. A focus on career progression, development opportunities, flexibility, and opportunities to explore and innovate are demands of the workforce today. One of the most critical influencers in choosing employers and offering loyalty is a clear focus on diversity, inclusion, and equity.

Organizations need to take a two-pronged approach to win the talent wars. The first part of this is to identify what their existing employees want.

Driving employee engagement to solve the attrition challenge

Existing employees also want to feel heard and want to know that their opinion matters. Giving employees a real say in decision-making impacts retention positively as almost 90% of employees say that they will stay with a company that takes and acts on feedback.

Employees also want to feel cognitively and emotionally connected to their work. Developing the capability to proactively identify those that are generally satisfied but not truly connected at work and then engage them meaningfully will also be an important skill to battle attrition.

Ensuring leadership commitment toward company culture also plays a critical role in impacting retention. Employees want to be associated with organizations where the leadership is committed to improving the company culture. 45% of employees, however, are of the impression that leadership is minimally or not at all committed to improving company culture.

Developing robust talent management strategies that drive performance and providing learning and development opportunities to enable professional and personal growth are seen as organizational investments by the employee. These factors are critical contributors to enhancing employee engagement by delivering enablement at work and also improving retention.

However, one of the critical influencers of retention especially amongst top talent is a focus on diversity, inclusion, and equity. For this, organizations not only need to create robust strategies that augment this cause but also ensure that hiring is completely free of any bias.

The second part of the process is focusing on the organizational recruitment strategy. 

Modernizing recruitment strategies to remove bias and hire right

Most organizations, even today, rely on the proverbial gut feel to make hiring decisions. They have not been able to remove bias from the hiring processes. Organizations often end up making the wrong or imperfect hiring decisions by allowing unconscious biases to influence hiring. The best candidate for the job might get overlooked for being culturally different. A male-dominated team might pass over a qualified women employee because they perceive her to come with “baggage” such as family and children or the assumption that they’ll not prioritize their jobs.

Whatever be the situation, unconscious bias almost always successfully influences hiring managers to pick the person who ‘feels’ right for the job because they ‘fit in’. Not because they were the best-qualified individual for the job.

Organizations have to rethink their hiring and recruitment processes and fine-tune them such that they make the best and the right hire for their organization. Making the right hiring decisions directly impacts the culture of the company by ensuring the right cultural fit without compromising on the qualification fit. 

A multi-cultural and diverse work environment automatically feeds into the employee experience and helps in taking diversity and inclusion initiatives further. That apart, employees know that organizational commitment towards these initiatives is more than lip service. Bias-free hiring and improving recruitment processes also help organizations hire committed employees along with the assurance of securing the best talent. 

Fine-tuning the recruitment processes and using AI-driven recruitment platforms give organizations several advantages. With such platforms, organizations can – 

• Make data-science-backed hiring decisions. Source, score, and rank talent to identify the best-fit candidate and make objective and bias-free hiring decisions. 
• Identify and remove resume biases, resume screening biases for gender, age, etc, interview response bias, and video bias from the hiring process. 
• Ensure skill-based shortlisting of candidates where all areas that can introduce biases such as names, emails, etc are masked. Video responses can be masked until they are rated to eliminate video bias and to make the recruitment process further bias-free.
• Screen, score, and rank in real-time with AI. The right hiring and recruitment platform helps in identifying CV relevance and predictive scoring for loyalty and performance.
• Employ technologies such as NLP and AI/ML to score and rank candidates based on the candidate-job fit and use benchmark scoring on the stability index to predict the likelihood of the candidate staying with the organization.
• Employ benchmark scoring on performance predictors based on a supervised ML model to predict the likelihood of the candidate having faster career progression and early promotion probabilities as compared to similar peers. The platform can also help organizations identify data fidelity issues and provide assurance of the authenticity of resumes.

Establishing an AI-based pre-screening process increases the probability of recruiting the best talent by eliminating bias from the hiring process. Using a technology-enabled recruitment platform helps organizations get granular clarity on the quality of the hire. Hiring managers can get the complete breakdown of scores allocated to each attribute to gain clarity on the algorithm recommendations. These recommendations can then be paired with recruiter recommendations to select the best candidate for the job.

By mapping resumes and candidates appropriately to job roles, organizations can ensure happier, better-performing employees. A more diverse workforce, lower rates of attrition, and highly loyal and engaged employees emerge as a consequence of making hiring decisions based on data and eliminating subjectivity from the hiring process. 

Technologies such as AI and data analytics can transform hiring processes and make them more equitable and inclusive. They help organizations disrupt traditional talent recruitment processes, and help them hire faster, while also lowering costs in how they reach, onboard, and retain talent.

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