Attracting the Best, Part 1: The Employee Experience

Attracting and retaining top talent starts from the inside out. In this – the first of a two-part series about getting the best employees on board – we look first at five critical elements of your employee experience.

When recruitment is your business, as it is ours, there’s one question that’s central to every conversation we have with our clients: How can we attract the very best candidates for every position?

Our work gives us uniquely valuable insight. Speaking with people every day about changing jobs, we hear why some want to leave their current employer, or why others choose to stay. We also hear what they’re looking for in their next company and job; the things that will attract and keep them performing at their best.

This is the first in a two-part series, focusing first on the employee experience. It makes sense to approach this from the inside out: if a company can’t retain great employees, it won’t be able to recruit great employees either. This was always true, to a certain extent, but it’s even more so now. Between social media generally, and employer-rating sites (like Glassdoor) specifically, word gets around more quickly and widely than ever before. This is great for transparency, of course, but it puts more pressure on employers to make sure that the experience they offer their employees is a good one.

When considering this question, it’s tempting to jump to ‘culture’. While it’s true that corporate culture is part of the equation, it’s a bit of a red herring, for several reasons. First, because it’s subjective: what constitutes a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ culture varies from employee to employee. Secondly, because culture is something that management can influence but not entirely control or create. Culture develops organically within an organisation (or within various parts of an organisation) as a result of day-to-day practices and decisions. Below are the five most controllable elements that influence culture and can create a great employee experience that attracts and retains top performing employees.

Compensation

Compensation and benefits are fundamental to the employee experience. Let’s face it, this is the main reason most employees work in the first place. Not every company can match the highest salaries in the market, and the good news is that no company needs to. Money is usually not the primary factor an employee considers when choosing to take a new job. To successfully recruit great employees, companies just have to be competitive. Above the median range for comparable positions, and offering decent benefits. These benefits can have monetary value like health coverage or a yearly training allowance, but increasingly, non-monetary benefits like flex time and the ability to work from home are equally valuable to many employees (and accessible even to organisations with limited budgets).

Communication

One hallmark of companies that attract and retain the best employees is the quality of communication throughout the organisation. Top performing employees want to know that they can speak openly about opportunities and challenges they see around them, and they want to know that they’ll be heard. Top performers also generally seek out more information about their own performance. Annual performance reviews may still be a necessary formality, but great companies and the managers in them know that ongoing dialogue is the best way to keep their best employees fully engaged.

Trust and Respect

These attributes are flip sides of the same coin. The best employees choose employers who trust them to do their work, and who show respect for them. Micromanagement is the fastest way to undermine a sense of trust; instead, great companies foster an environment in which performance is measured by clear expectations and results, and employees are trusted – and held accountable – to deliver those results. Great companies also encourage respect for results through recognition; bonuses and other perks can be part of the picture, but more often it comes down to simple acknowledgement. Whether verbally or in writing, public or one-to-one, a sincere ‘excellent work, thank you’ carries immense value for employees.

Opportunity to Perform

Getting the right people on the ‘bus’ is only half of the job. The other half is making sure those people are in the right seats. Top performing employees seek out roles where they have the chance to do their best work every day, and to get even better over time. Great companies provide them with this opportunity because they don’t just staff up to fill seats. They think more deeply about the skills and strengths of their current and prospective employees, they take advantage of opportunities to allow them to stretch the boundaries of their role and responsibilities, and in doing so they provide the opportunity for their employees to learn, grow, and develop their knowledge and abilities further.

Connection to Mission

Great employees at all levels of an organisation aren’t generally satisfied with being a ‘cog in the machine’. They want to know how their work connects to the bigger picture. Great companies, and the managers within them, make this connection clear to their people. They’re always looking for opportunities to show how each person’s daily tasks contribute to the mission and purpose of the organisation, helping to move it forward and achieve its goals.

If you’re not already doing so, it pays to keep your fingers on the pulse of employee satisfaction through well-designed surveys (the Gallup Q12, for example), and also by monitoring what people are saying about your organization – on Glassdoor, if nowhere else. Looking to sources of information like this can provide helpful direction about ways in which you can take your employee experience from good … to great.

In the second part of this series on attracting the best and brightest, I’ll focus on the element that some companies overlook entirely (creating great opportunities for companies that put focus there): the candidate experience.