How to Attract and Retain Top Talent Hiring and retaining the right people for your company must be a top priority if you want to succeed in your field.
By Nick Mascari Edited by Chelsea Brown
Opinions expressed by BIZ Experiences contributors are their own.
The success of your company is largely determined by the quality of your talent. Hiring and retaining the right people for your company must be a top priority if you want to succeed in your field. Even with great vision and killer strategies, you won't go far without the right people in the right seats doing the right things.
The best companies and organizations worldwide ensure that they have the right people for the job even before coming up with strategies. In their list of priorities, the who comes before the what. The future is entirely unpredictable, proven recently by the global pandemic that brought everything to a screeching halt.
Related: 10 Tips for Retaining Top Talent
When facing chaos and uncertainty, the best strategy is to have a team of brilliant people who can easily adapt to any situation and thrive, regardless of what comes next. Still, most companies struggle to attract and retain top talent, because they are ill-equipped to deal with it.
The best way to attract and retain top talent is to create a culture and environment that appeals to them. Your employer brand might be impeccable in that people perceive your company and its values positively. Still, ultimately, the culture and environment you create within the organization will keep your employees.
Related: 5 Companies Tell Us How They Retain Their Best Talent
How to manage your team
With a high-functioning team of A and B players in your organization, the leaders' lives are easier. Managing top talent is quite easy, considering the employees are top achievers aligned with the company's core values. You should appreciate your team's differences and know what to do for each category.
The A players are your star performers. They are ambitious, driven risk-takers, who, in most cases, put their professional lives ahead of everything else and are always looking to move up in the organization. Employers generally like this type of employee. However, they are likely looking for opportunities elsewhere, so ensure there is always room for growth within your organization.
Your B players are your solid, steady performers. They are aligned to your company's core values, and most of them can be coached up to A-level performance. Most companies fail to recognize their B players, even though they do the bulk of the work. While they might not be as fired up as the A players, they get the job done. These employees tend to stay put and typically carry the company history. Ensure you challenge your B players through incentives like promotions and pay raises to help develop them into A players.
C players are under-performing employees who are not aligned with the company's core values. Ideally, they should be screened out during the interview process and should not make it into the organization. If you have C players in your company, they must be decisively coached out. It is in both your best interest and theirs to free them up to pursue other opportunities that might be a better fit for them.
Related: 10 Strategies for Hiring and Retaining New Employees
How to retain top talent
The best way to retain top talent is to invest in coaching and training. Grow your team to reach its potential. If some of your team members are not performing well, get in there and find out what's happening. Are there bottlenecks affecting your employees?
Sometimes, poor performance can be due to a skill gap or miscommunication. You might write off an employee as an under-performer while, in a real sense, they do not know how to perform their role best. Coaching and skill development can be useful in this case to help the employee realize their potential. You can also switch them to a role they're better suited for and would perform better in.
The roles played by each team member should be defined by responsibility, accountability and results. This will make your team's lives better, because they have clear metrics to measure performance. This way, they can keep each other in check and help boost their performance and productivity.
Look at all the roles that need to be played within your organization, and then look at your team members, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses. This way, you can align the right people in the right roles, doing activities that make your customers' lives easier. This goes a long way in improving your brand image and customer loyalty.
