In a tight labor market, characterized by both low unemployment and increased mobility for workers, retention becomes the main method of building and maintaining a highly productive staff. If you can't keep your best employees, HR becomes little more than a treadmill engine.
And that's the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario includes a steady decline in your team’s overall talent level, marked by near continuous recruitment, complete with all the annoyance and distraction that entails.
This post was written by guest blogger, Jessica Fender. She is an independent blogger, and marketing consultant who has been featured on Next Avenue and Addicted2Success. You can connect with Jessica on Twitter (@fender_jess).
It’s been weeks or even months since you applied for the job that you wanted so much, but no one even bothered to write you a simple reply email and thank you for your interest. What happened? You’re a great candidate and your resume was superb, so why did you only get a standardized rejection email?
Social media has become imperative to attracting the best job candidates. Young, tech-savvy prospects spend most of their lives online. If you're not plugged into their world, you're likely going to miss out on some interesting talent.
Beyond its growing influence, social media provides unique recruiting opportunities compared to more traditional methods. The underlying concept of the sector - connectivity - allows an interaction with potential hires that normally doesn't come until late in the recruitment process.
You've got your dream job. All that work during the search process has paid off: The constant refining of your resume, the interview practice, the obsessive research to find the perfect position at the perfect company.
You got the gig...now you just have to keep it.
Situations change over time. You might feel comfortable now, but decisions outside your control could impact your position. Companies sell out to competitors. Management regimes change. Customer tastes evolve, and some firms are too slow to adapt.
You can become one of the best employees in your office, but it won't do your career any good if no one knows about your contribution.
Without wider recognition, you’re like one of those hip garage bands that's every critic's favorite, but no one else has ever heard of. Or the black-and-white, foreign-language indie movie that moves everyone who sees it to tears, but plays mostly to empty theaters for several weeks before becoming unwatched filler on a streaming service.
A job interview provides an employer with the best chance at getting to know a candidate. Hopefully, it gives the candidate a chance to learn about you too; your culture and the opportunities you can provide.
It’s like a first date. If it gets weighed down by uncomfortable silences or a sudden swerve into a tense topic, a second meeting becomes very unlikely. For that reason, it's important to provide a pleasant experience for the candidate.
A bad hire often prompts a wave of regret and self-doubt, culminating in the inescapable question: How could we have seen this coming?
Many times, you can't. Sometimes bad hires come about as the result of an unforeseeable mismatch, a combination of factors that couldn't be predicted. But often enough, you can see warning signs ahead of time. In order to learn from the mistake and avoid a similar error in the future, it’s important to review what when wrong.
You can’t make a career on your own. Even the legendary entrepreneurs who started billion-dollar enterprises in their garages needed help at various points on their road to success. Investors. Mentors. Partners.
If the Mark Zuckerbergs and Steve Jobs of the world needed assistance to make their way, you shouldn’t hesitate to seek whatever guidance you can. An obvious choice for your starting point: Your current boss.
Losing a job can be traumatic. Just like a breakup or dramatic incident, it can lead to buried emotion and long-lasting psychological pain.
Unfortunately, it's also something that every prospective employer will want to know about. It will come up in every interview and isn’t something you can bury and forget about. Unfortunately, to get another job, you’ll have to recount the details of how you lost your last one.
Effectively managing employees involves taking on a lot of roles. Sometimes you need the organization of a master administrator. Sometimes you need the inspirational acumen of a charismatic leader. Other times you need the psychological subtlety of a therapist.
The therapy part comes up most when it's time to deliver feedback. You need to get the message across: There are things the worker needs to improve. But you want to deliver the message with as much tact and encouragement as possible.