Switch your attention to retention (not recruitment)
I’m working with some very exciting leaders at the moment. People who have the courage to change the way their business, or even their entire industry, works.
Take construction, manufacturing or healthcare - they are such diverse industries yet they’re all experiencing similar challenges in attracting and retaining the workforce they need. An aging demographic compounds that challenge, as these same leaders know it will only become harder and more urgent in the coming years. If they can’t find a way to attract a younger and broader workforce, ultimately they know it will get to the point that their business can no longer operate.
How often do you hear or use a message like, “we need to recruit and retain the right people”? “Recruit and retain” has almost become a word, no longer even a phrase: recruitandretain blurs into one idea when there are two distinct and important ones worthy of some reflection.
What I tell these leaders is that they’re better off focusing on retention, not recruitment. Actively recruiting for the people you know you want to attract sounds logical. The logic falls down though when all that effort brings in new people, only to find they’ve gone again within a few short months.
If you bring new people into a business that hasn’t adapted to retain even the people it already has, you can’t expect it’ll magically have the kind of appeal that will have all these newbies committing to you for the long haul.
The temptation is strong and I get that. Running an exciting, high profile recruitment campaign feels like you’re doing something and you’re seeing results quickly. You’ve recruited 20 newbies and the diversity of these people is much closer to the kind of workforce you know you want in the future. Excellent! Well done. It feels great, tangible and worthy of a happy newsletter.
But if no-one is monitoring the length of time those people stay, then you won’t realise until it’s too late that the problem is actually worse, not better, after all that time, energy and money you poured into the attraction campaign.
Do you measure the length of service of your leavers? Do you compare that to the length of service of your workforce? If your leavers are disproportionately leaving ‘early’ then it’s the wake up call you need to switch your attention to retention, not recruitment. It’s an incredibly simple analysis that can make a huge difference to where you put your focus and get longer term results.
Focusing on retention can be hard work and doesn’t generate the kind of happy newsletter stories you might like. No one celebrates because somebody didn’t leave.
You can celebrate the impact that your retention strategy has had though. You can talk about how a new work schedule has given people the opportunity to pick up their daughter from school or join a sports team. Or how the training you’ve given to an experienced person has made their job more interesting and taken the pressure (and excessive hours) off the only other person who had that skill previously.
Over time, the attention on retention will give you the lasting results you really want. The stories will build and be told well beyond the readership of your initial happy newsletter. Friends and family will notice the changes in your people, it will spark conversations and recruitment will start to take care of itself.