Your hiring strategy means nothing if you suck at retaining top talent. If you’ve been following along with our mini series, you should be equipped with everything you need to know about How to Hire Better. If you need to catch up, check out our series playlist.
Now that you can successfully hire top talent in today’s market, it’s time to learn how to keep them. In this final episode of the series, Kurt and Amy discuss how to continue to attract the team you’ve built to keep them for the long haul.
- Keep Selling the Dream
- Be Proactive and Flexible
- Live Your Reality
Retaining top talent means you continually attract and give them reason to stay. You have to understand and fulfill their hierarchy of needs. Many people focus on attracting talent at the beginning of the process, but forget to continue these efforts once they’ve “sealed the deal.”
The team should be happy, fulfilled and productive if you’re doing things right. When you’ve achieved this with your team, trust that most will stay with you for the long haul.
“Selling the Dream” means defining a clear mission, vision, and values and giving your team purpose and meaning through them. When people have purpose and they know their work is meaningful, they’re much more likely to stick around.
Forgive the clichés, but “actions speak louder than words” and “practice what you preach” are relevant sayings here. You can’t just say what you think your people want to hear and expect that to be enough. You have to proactively live out your values. Show them your passion and lead by example – it’s contagious.
Always take care of your people. Do the right thing by offering competitive benefits, salary structure, and encourage a healthy work-life balance as a priority.
When you offer equity to your team, you’re giving them some skin in the game. This makes the success of the business a vested interest for everyone in the company, rather than just caring about their individual paycheck that they can get anywhere. Equity is your most valuable currency in hiring and retaining top talent.
Far too often, the company mission and vision is sold during the hiring process, but it’s never even mentioned again once the new hire is on board. Your mission and core values must be authentic and practiced by everyone, starting with the leadership team.
A strong company culture isn’t just important for better business outcomes – it’s also a powerful tool to keep your team together and engaged long term.
How to Hire Better
Part 1 – Aligning Your Business & Talent Strategies
Part 2 – Setting the Foundation
Part 3 – Recruiting the Right Talent
Part 4 – Designing an Effective Recruiting Process
Part 5 – Retaining Top Talent in Today’s Market
