The need to attract and retain top talent is crucial whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or a small business.
Your employees are arguably a key component to making your company successful. For that reason, it’s imperative to be innovative in your efforts to attract talent in hopes of drawing in the very best.
With that in mind, we’ve curated several ideas for attracting talent to your company. Some are well-known, proven tactics, and some may come as a surprise. Take a look and see which ones you can use as your strategy to attract talent.
1. Offer competitive benefits.
This one may seem obvious, but if you’re wondering how to attract top talent to your company, it’s widely acknowledged as a winning strategy. Review the benefits you offer and make sure they’re of the caliber that would attract an innovator to your company. Are they competitive with what your industry peers are offering? If you’d like a benchmark on the types of benefits are available, this article on 16 types of employee benefits is a good place to start.
Another spin on this is to offer “perks” that don’t cost much but have a high return on investment in terms of employee happiness. For example, you could offer a free book each month to employees who want to continue learning, provide a full or partial stipend for membership to a gym, offer a one-time gift of a FitBit or other fitness tool, or give out swag like shirts, mugs, and stickers.
2. Consider your workplace culture.
The idea of an “open culture” is one that attracts many innovators. For example, Nectafy CEO Lance Cummins says that being transparent about how the leaders at his business run the organization is at the core of the company.
According to Cummins, “Innovative people want to learn and know that they’re free and encouraged to think bigger than their current role. By having an open culture, we’re essentially saying, ‘We see that in you, and we want you to speak up about what we can improve.’”
Learn how to successfully navigate your employees’ tenure, from hiring to retirement and everything in between. Download the Employee Lifecycle Roadmap now.
3. Leverage your brand’s personality.
We love @DrJohnSullivan’s idea of building your company’s brand through using videos and messages. He suggests using “authentic messaging in the form of videos” that aren’t obvious PR creations. Here’s one specific example he used that we gravitated toward:
In some cases, even narrative messaging can quickly send a powerful message that your firm is different, for example, Kayak uses a simple phrase like ‘no stupid meetings’ as part of its job descriptions.
By developing and using your brand’s personality to showcase employment opportunities, you will attract the innovators who can see themselves as part of that brand (and want to improve it!).
4. Don’t put your employees in an 8-5, office-only box.
If you want to know how to attract and retain top talent and innovators, you have to be willing to break the mold in terms of your office structure. That may mean, you start offering opportunities for employees to work remotely, work flexible hours, etc.
It may be a big change to reinvent your office in this nontraditional scheme, but it will pay off in employee happiness and productivity: According to a survey of remote workers done by TinyPulse, 91% say they get more work done outside the office; on a happiness scale of 1-10, remote workers rate themselves on average an 8.1 vs. a 7.4 average for traditional office workers. Check out this infographic to see more differences between remote workers and office workers.
It may be a big change to reinvent your office in this nontraditional scheme, but it will pay off in employee happiness and productivity. Share on X5. Think about the bigger picture when it comes to finding talent.
Attracting talent in 2018 is about more than just finding the right person to “do a job.” Many millennials don’t simply want a paycheck—they want to see how the time and effort they’re putting in is making a difference—whether to a specific client or to the world. While not every company’s mission will impact the world at large, leaders should know and be able to showcase how their companies are making a difference—for good—in their industries, communities, sectors, etc. Playing up these characteristics to prospective employees will help you attract the right people—those who mesh with your mission and want to help promote it.
6. Pick the brains of your high-performing team members.
If you already have employees who embody the type of talent you want to attract more of, you’re in a great position! Ask them what it is about your company that draws them in, and do more of those things. There are endless possibilities to what you can offer to attract talent, but your ultimate goal is find the right kind of talent to help you grow your business. By sourcing information from your best employees on what you’re doing well (and what you could begin doing), you’ll learn a lot, improve employee engagement, and likely get some great ideas you would have never thought of on your own.
There are endless possibilities to what you can offer to attract talent, but your ultimate goal is find the right kind of talent to help you grow your business. Share on XNow, go find the best talent!
This is just a small sample of the many innovative ways to attract talented people to your team. And finding those team members is just the beginning! Once they’re on board, make sure you’re doing the right things to keep them, starting on day 1. Download our free checklist for onboarding new employees to find out what your next steps should be.
