While it may sound obvious, becoming an employer of choice in 2023, means recognizing the work shifts that have occurred in the past few years and how people’s priorities and expectations of the workplace have changed.
Recent data has highlighted the difficulties that businesses are facing – in both finding the right candidate and then keeping them.
For the 3rd year in a row, a lack of qualified candidates is the biggest hiring barrier for employers. Meanwhile, 50% say they have experienced higher employee turnover than in the previous year.
As a result of continued resignations, employers must make smart decisions that benefit the short and long-term success of the business.
Three key ways stand out to help this problem and become an employer of choice in 2023: a greater focus on internal mobility, hiring candidates for their skills rather than education and experience and using technology to automate the tedious tasks that take up HR’s time.
Internal Mobility – The Subtle Shift in Employer Branding Strategies
Becoming the model employer of choice in 2023 comes from a focus within. The reality is that it can be difficult to find the perfect candidate, at a time when wages are growing and employment is historically low. Due to this, one of the key trends that businesses need to focus on is to increase the retention of existing employees.
To remain competitive in today’s market, employers must prioritize providing greater flexibility to their workers, lay out clear progression pathways, and consider how they can better meet workers’ demands and needs. That is more difficult than it sounds though.
Rethink How You Value Talent
Becoming an employer of choice requires getting the right people aboard, to create the desired culture and ethos. Often organisations are keen to make their DE&I values a reality but are unsure where to start.
The answer is simple: challenge how you currently locate talent to ensure you capture a wide net. This means targeting candidates for their skills rather than just what is on their CVs. The hiring habits opted by most businesses are outdated, and a pivot is needed.
If you look only at the cover of a candidate, how can you not expect them to do the same?
By adopting a skills-first approach to talent acquisition, you widen the overall talent pool by increasing the number of actually qualified candidates and improve diversity by finding talent in previously unexplored areas.
The long-term benefit of this is that you chart advancement paths for employees based on less biased, fairer objective data.
At a time when more public profiles are speaking out about perceived reduced productivity due to remote work, automation tools, and generative AI products, these advancement paths are more important than ever. For employees working from home, it might feel like it is harder to receive recognition as there may be less direct contact with their manager or teammates, and more work is completed in silos or small working groups. The best way to address this is for employees to speak to their manager and set out careful and meaningful goals.
Successful goal-setting entails ensuring that they are challenging yet realistic and, most importantly, specific for effective measurement and tracking of an individual’s progress. Additionally, considering personal or growth objectives alongside performance-related goals can be highly motivating, signaling the company’s investment in the employee’s future growth.
Effective goal-setting becomes even more critical in a remote work setup. It offers employees a clear roadmap for their tasks, especially when direct guidance from managers or colleagues is limited. It serves as the foundation for discussions related to promotions or salary raises, providing objective and agreed-upon criteria, as opposed to potentially subjective virtual indicators. Performance management often receives insufficient attention in organizations, yet its significance for both employees and employers cannot be underestimated. Hence, a thoughtful reassessment of your current approach is a valuable investment of time and effort.
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Automating the Monotonous
Time spent on the human side of hiring is rarely time wasted. However, time spent on completely tedious and repetitive tasks certainly is and historically has been. The three biggest areas that HR professionals want to see improved in the industry are speed, streamlined communications, and a better candidate experience. Many HR professionals are therefore responding to the shrinking talent pool by putting a greater emphasis on the technology they use and transforming it into a modern workplace.
Rather than seeing technology as the root evil in hiring, it’s the opposite.
It is removing the time spent on little-value tasks, allowing HR to spend greater time on the more impactful parts of their job. Technology, specifically AI-powered automation or robotic assistance can streamline the most complex workflows and processes by taking on these repetitive tasks. From virtual interviews, job-matching technologies, or standardized game-based assessments, technology can offer greater flexibility for both candidates and recruiters.
Imagine this, say the business has identified a qualified candidate.
The talent team can set up parameters with their automation technology that will automatically invite the candidate to the next step of the process. This will seamlessly self-schedule, use OnDemand interviews and assessments, pairing perfectly with an ever-present human touch to deliver a quick and seamless experience that benefits both sides.
Making assumptions about how hiring and employment will look like over the next few years is simply futile. Only in 2020 did our entire form of work upend itself into what we know now. However, businesses can future-proof their long-term employment by taking an agile hiring approach that puts the candidate at the heart of it.
Whether that’s prioritizing their skills, onboarding automation technology to ensure all tedious but necessary tasks in the process are completed, and once an employee, leveraging their skills and helping them grow into a role that is best for them.