Trust and Strong Benefits Are Key Factors In Employee Recruitment & Retention

A PR and marketing agency that specializes in workforce management recently commissioned a survey to determine how best to recruit and retain top talent and what HR marketing strategies are most effective - especially in the event of economic downturn when market fluctuations are a more significant factor affecting retention.

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The survey collected data across a variety of industries ranging from healthcare and hospitality to retail and construction. Despite the spectrum of work environments studied, however, consistent trends emerged revealing some of the elements that employees consider to be most important when assessing their employment situation, including the security of their position within the company, the clarity of the expectations for work output, the supportiveness of the environment, the friendliness of the culture, and whether or not the employee feels cared about in general. 

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With considerations like company culture, values, and transparency becoming top priorities among employees, recruitment and retention efforts must exist even less exclusively within the purview of human resources functions, and extend further into the realms of marketing and public relations. The companies that can best build a cohesive strategy that integrates all of these talent-attraction and workforce-management ideas together will be best positioned to achieve their recruitment and retention goals regardless of outside market forces.

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In order to maximize the effectiveness of marketing efforts designed to attract and retain the talent your company relies on to succeed, some ideas worth considering include:

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• Targeting your audience with precision. By first developing a clear understanding of exactly the type of talent you want to attract, you can then better focus your research into how best to attract those groups, which enables you not only to better design benefits package offerings to suit the needs of that set of desirable employees, but you can also tailor communications and marketing messages/tactics to better reach that audience so you can meet them on their level. 
• Emphasizing positive culture. The best place to start when looking for ways to better highlight the aspects of company culture that are worth showcasing to prospective employees is to get feedback directly from current employees. Ask them what aspects of their job and the company that they value the most, and call as much attention to those aspects as possible. Incidentally, collecting some info at the same time about the aspects of their jobs and the company that employees value least can yield some helpful insights, as well.
• Conducting regular audits of your hiring materials. Too often, hiring material copy, language, design, and/or information becomes outdated long before it is updated. As your company’s brand and culture evolve, it’s important to make sure your hiring materials and talent-facing communications - including job postings and other hiring messages, etc. - remain in line with those changes. 

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With this approach, your company can craft recruitment-centric marketing campaigns that find resonance with the very talent pool that you’re seeking to engage, and can also have the tangential effect of broadening company awareness and improving company reputation, which in turn can help bring in even more quality applicants in a positive feedback loop. 

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You can read more about this topic here. 

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