You can have the best product, the strongest brand, the biggest corporation yet none of that matters if you don’t have the people to innovate and maintain your success. In order to avoid unnecessary workforce investments that don’t pay off long-term, incorporate a talent acquisition strategy into your business plan.
Not Waiting for the When, Preparing for It
Too often, businesses say our staff is full why do we need to have a constant focus on finding talent we don’t need? You don’t have to think about talent acquisition every day, but you should have a plan in place for when the occasion for recruiting does arise (and the occasion always arises). People move on to a new venture. They retire. They decide to focus on starting a family. No matter the instance, turnover becomes inevitable in any industry and without a plan in place it can be a struggle to fill in those gaps. As described on The Headhunters blog, “There are more companies and although the talent pool has also grown, the competition for top talent is very stiff. Everyone is looking for that game-changer and when they get them they do everything to keep hold of them.” Therefore, you have to be ready to compete.
Hiring cannot be an afterthought since your guaranteed to need a hiring plan at some point or another. Without taking a more proactive approach, you miss the big picture. As Colin Day describes, “Smart leaders who innovate past their competitors do so by prioritizing talent acquisition as a long term play and not a transaction at the time of need.” Build a recruitment plan into your business’s infrastructure so you aren’t caught off guard. After all — if you are willing to invest in a marketing strategy or sales plan — why wouldn’t you invest in the workforce behind all aspects of your company?
Cut Costs
In the business world, every expense impacts your bottom line. You can avoid the risk of spending money on a bad hire and cut costs by implementing a plan that helps you find the cream of the crop. As Jennifer Plumondon describes, “Using a talent acquisition strategy makes sense because it reduces the risks involved with recruiting bad hires, which, in the end, will lower costs, save time, and boost productivity.”
Upon planning for new hires, you also need to develop a strategy to maintain your workforce. High turnover signals a poor work environment and will only increase your hiring struggle. Also, if you already spent years on developing an employee, you don’t want to lose that investment, because you didn’t maintain the relationship. Employees should enjoy what they do, which leads to my next point.
Building Your Employee Brand
Avoid a mismatched hire by conveying your corporate culture and ensuring that it matches their needs. This all plays into creating a representative employee brand so that you can hire employees that match your same values but also to convey what it’s like to work with your team. People want to feel like their potential employer aligns with their own goals. As this article explains, “It’s not always just about compensation and benefits. This is your opportunity to explain your culture, your values, and how you approach work-life balance.”
Originally published at juliezuckerberg.net.