Attracting the employees you already have.

With the state of the talent market in Australia right now, organisations of all forms are finding it increasingly challenging to find and retain great employees.

Not only is unemployment low across most sectors, but the sheer volume and presence of job ads across our web browsers makes those without strategic talent branding campaigns very hard to stand out.

I believe that it’s vitally important to develop a well-rounded approach to sourcing talent to your organisation, and continuously iterate this proposition to ensure you tap into available candidates.

Yet with the market conditions in play in Australia, there’s never been more risk of turnover as employers offering lucrative salaries, short-circuited selection processes and of course, in many sectors, a complete work from home approach - it’s never been easier for your employees to be enticed to jump to a shiny new opportunity.

Increase internal mobility

Speaking generally here, organisations who manage to develop robust, creative, and effective external branding campaigns and sourcing strategies at best hope to hire external talent for, say, 50-60% of their roles, and in my experience often looking to increase internal mobility.

Attract and retain

In today's employment market two things are happening. We’re having to work harder to attract and engage new talent, but also having to work doubly hard to engage and retain talent we’ve already hired.

There are plenty of tactics being used by organisations to lure applicants to join (have you seen the salaries being offered for Baristas in capital cities!?). While many of these tactics aren’t sustainable, the market dynamics are creating pressure to focus on retention more than ever.

Two-speed strategy

Most employers, particularly those who have an established Talent Acquisition model in place, put significant effort into crafting advertisements, setting up well designed external jobs pages with high-cost applicant tracking systems, creating campaigns to reach external candidates to cast a wide net and spark interest in external talent looking to make a move.

Yet so little comparative effort is put into how to attract your employees to stay in their role or consider that next role internally, that the external sourcing strategies often seem lobsided.

The concept of attracting the team you already have is about creating an employee experience complete with a great culture, career pathway options, and a personalised approach to supporting the expectations of your employees. This applies to organisations of all sizes in all industries. It isn’t and shouldn’t be a reaction to the Australian talent market conditions and should be a talent strategy that is sustained into a post-COVID-recovery environment.

One thing common amongst organisations already doing this well is they are confidently focusing on enhancing their employee experience. Furthermore, they are demonstrating pathways and opportunities for people to not only find new opportunities within the business, but also providing clarity about how they could be supported to grow into different careers altogether.

World-class employee experience

Anyone who has tried to improve internal mobility will know there can be a constant battle to reduce the risk associated with unplanned loss of talent while looking to influence hiring leaders, and People and Culture functions to help improve readiness across the organisation to reduce the reliance on external hiring.

If you were designing a world class employee experience, you’d have making opportunities easy to find and easy to be “considered for” high on the list. Being confident to explore development opportunities here is critical.

Your employees know your organisation, presumably have been well onboarded and ready to perform and contribute ideas, they represent your external talent brand well in the market, and all going to plan they are adding to your culture and climate.

Work-life fabric

Pathways, new levels of autonomy and flexibility, and time built into to the work-life fabric to allow employees to thrive in both personal and work lives are the new normal across many sectors, with a focused view of what makes a company culture and climate thrive being genuinely brought into the employee value proposition.

Another benefit of a focused internal attraction and engagement strategy is it encourages you to think the process or service design of your internal talent acquisition process.

I’ve seen this time and time again, where internal hiring happens concurrently to external sourcing, and internal candidates are put through what often seems like an arbitrary interview process comparing them to external candidates. It’s almost designed for internals to fail.

Focusing on proactively encouraging internal mobility can reduce the trepidation many employees will face in their careers when going through an internal selection process.

Why not use this process to constructively focus on picking up the skills, knowledge, and attributes needed to reach their own career goals?

?Technology and digital

As both the internal and external sourcing strategies differ for each audience, so do the channels required to communicate those opportunities. Internal job boards aren’t the only way. Increasingly the emerging talent who are generally a younger generation, will communicate via social forums to seek out information and network.

The trend I am seeing with outstanding Graduate Programs is that they communicate about their onboarding, and mentorship and learning opportunities through bite size digital communications. On the other hand, organisations with large dispersed blue-collar workforces must embrace and automate video-to-mobile media to share roster or assignment information with their staff, and career opportunities with their contractors and team members around the country.

?The world economic forum suggests that 50% of the global workforce will need to be reskilled by 2025.

?COVID-related pressure reducing talent mobility across Australia and from overseas has only accelerated the need for new roles and new skills to perform those roles.

Strategically then it makes sense to place the onus on reskilling and thinking about career pathway planning into the hands of employees, empowering them to understand what’s required to get them ready for their next move.

?Technology helps

....and there are some great tech systems out there, such as Reejig for example, who can help target your reskilling programs based on live intelligence.

Thus giving you actionable data on skills gaps and reskilling and upskilling opportunities within your workforce.

At the Recruitment-team level, this type of insight is extremely useful both simultaneously finding willing talent internally, but also helping determine what skill gaps require closing through external sourcing, should there be an immediate need.

?But it’s not all about the tech

Within a Talent Acquisition solution I recently led for a customer; we increased their internal mobility 19-56% over an 12 month period through a focused effort on simplifying the internal hiring process.

By implementing a focused internal-first advertising campaign approach, whilst simultaneous removing the shackles from the selection process, we enabled leaders to make hiring decisions without external candidate benchmarking and promoting internal proactive career conversations to drive mobility.

Attracting your employees should not be at the cost of your external sourcing strategy but held in balance through sedulous articulation of your value proposition for each role and business function to your employees and build a robust strategy to ensure they are given the opportunity to understand the career opportunities, expectations, benefits, and culture within each team, and have a clear and transparent view of the selection process required to be successful.

What's next

In a future article, I will dive into specific detail and specific tactics to reduce friction to the internal appointment process, and how some of our customers are leveraging various amazing platforms to empower employees to proactively seek their own unique internal career plans, it's certainly a topic which I am asked about frequently when designing Talent Acquisition Solutions.

I’d love to hear what you think are the best means to attract the employees you already have.

What are the areas of friction you see in your organisation? How courageous are leaders in your organisation in helping hiring managers free up their thinking to enable hiring based on mobility and development not just skills? How applicable are these concepts in your industry?

Nick Ferry

Customer Solutions Manager

[email protected]

?