Stop top talent from walking away

Your organization offers great benefits. You’ve carefully crafted a supportive, fun company culture. You provide ample employee recognition and numerous opportunities for advancement.

You know you offer job candidates a strong employment value proposition — and yet, time and time again, you keep losing them to other employers. If that scenario sounds disturbingly familiar, the following solutions may help you recruit and retain more top talent:

  • Advertise effectively: When promoting open positions, you want to make them sound enticing — but you also want them to be accurate, so job candidates who won’t be happy in your work environment will find that out before wasting two months of your training time.

A 2014 Glassdoor survey found that 67 percent of employers believe retention rates would be higher if candidates had a clearer picture of what to expect before taking a job.

  • Contact job candidates through the right channels: We’ve shared some thoughts about how to effectively use social media in the recruiting process. With sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, you can publicize open positions — and, at the same time, strengthen your employment brand by sharing photos, quotes and other content.

Personalize your posts as much as possible to form an ongoing connection with potential job candidates. Consider asking current employees to serve as employment value proposition brand ambassadors by posting available job openings to their personal Facebook, Twitter and other accounts.

  • Test your website’s mobile device-friendliness factor: Nearly 90 percent of job seekers planned to use their mobile phone, tablet or other device to search for jobs in the first part of 2015, according to a Glassdoor survey.

If your site wasn’t built using responsive design — which essentially will reformat pages to fit onto smaller screens — or you haven’t built a mobile-specific mini-site, you may be losing job candidates who, after a first look or interview, are missing out on key information about your employment value proposition that might convince them to join your organization.

If you think your employment value proposition is compelling — but aren’t 100 percent sure — find out by asking current employees how they feel about the work environment, perks and other items your organization offers through an anonymous survey. If the workforce members who are benefiting from your programs and incentives aren’t happy with them, chances are, potential hires won’t be, either.

If your research uncovers some areas that could use a little improvement, try boosting employee sentiment with these budget-friendly employee value proposition enhancements, strategies that help encourage employee retention and some of today’s top benefit trends.