Attracting and retaining the right talent

Forming a team of the right talents is a challenge for every company and manager. Superior talents boost productivity, bringing more value in everything they do. Moreover, bringing the right talent to the right team increases employee engagement and reduces turnover. In this article, we will focus on the best ways to attract and retain the right talent for your team.

Why finding the right executive marketing talent is so important:

According to a study conducted by Herman Aguinis and Ernest O’Boyle Jr. in “The best and the rest: Revisiting the norm of normality in individual performance,” superior talent is up to eight times more productive than the average worker. 

This study gathered information from over 600,000 researchers, politicians, athletes, and entertainers. They found out that the highest performers were 400 percent more efficient. Following this discovery, another study focused on various businesses. It showed that the productivity gap rises depending on the job’s complexity, rising up to 800 percent more productivity for the right talent than the average employee.

How to spot talents?

Each talent is unique. There are as many as there are people on Earth. Among the specificities that characterize a talented individual, some are more obvious than others:

• ability to adapt, flexibility,
• performance, intellectual capacities,
• commitment and sense of responsibility,
• ability to inspire.

If certain tools make it possible to identify these talents, such as assessment tests or evaluation interviews, intuition is often the best way to find talents. The most important thing to keep in mind is to assess if the talent will fit well within the team and company, as it will either enhance their capacities and improve the whole team spirit, or on the opposition discourage both the talent and their coworkers.

How to manage talents

What makes a company attractive to talents and young graduates is the employment security and fulfillment they can find there, as well as the opportunity for career development. Bad management can lead to a lack of motivation and a higher employee turnover.

Talent management is carried out on several levels for a company:

• Identify/detect: find the right talent outside your company and hire them, or identify existing employees with broader skills than those for which they were hired.
• Attract/retain: develop a strategy to attract the identified talent to your company, or make them stay if they are already hired in another position within the company.
• Conjugate/develop: place your new talent in the right place, highlight their accomplishments and promote collaborative work to inspire others.

The advantages of optimal talent management

If it goes without saying that talent is neither definitive nor fixed – it fluctuates and is strongly linked to motivation and challenges, then it is clear that the company should not be content to simply identify talents, but properly implement a global approach over the medium to long term. Optimal talent management helps to:

• Limit the costs associated with repetitive recruitments and sterile training of employees who will not stay in the company, inducing high turnover.
• Optimize the flexibility of the company by letting employees improve their skills, even if it is not their main job.
• Strengthen collective intelligence and collaboration by allowing the transversality of knowledge and skills.
• Stand out from the competition with a work atmosphere promoting employee initiatives, where everyone can improve and learn from each other.

Communication is key to forging a good relationship with talents:

Communication is often the basis of many relationships, including between a company and its employees. To attract the right talents, good communication with the candidates is the key to success.

If a candidate thinks about joining your company, chances are they will look you up on the web. This is the first opinion they will have of you: what is your online presence? What tone do you use? What is your company’s culture? To put all the chances on your side, develop your employer brand through attractive messages and concrete actions, especially on social media. LinkedIn, in particular, is an essential step in the recruitment process. According to a 2015 Forrester Research study, people are more likely to want to join a business after 8 contacts with elements of their employer brand.

from Feedster https://www.feedster.com/business/attracting-and-retaining-the-right-talent/