Talent acquisition and retention is an important part of building a successful company. In general, the more talented your employees, the better your company’s output.

However, attracting and retaining talented employees isn't always easy, and there is lots of competition for the most talented candidates. Luckily, there are many ways to attract, engage, and retain top talent, from offering competitive salaries and growth opportunities to having a strong leadership structure and a healthy work environment.

Read on to discover some more top tips for attracting top candidates and retaining talented employees.

Why is Attracting and Retaining Top Talent Important?

Attracting and retaining employees in a competitive market can be challenging, but perfecting the art of doing so is well worth it! Ultimately, an organization is the sum of its talent. Therefore, the more top talent you hire, the better your company should perform.

While it can be tempting to hire mid-level talent to save on salary costs, this isn’t a good strategy. It will likely cost you instead of benefit you in the long term in terms of both monetary costs and organizational output.

A man and a woman shaking hands in an office setting with three co-workers around them — Hiring and retaining top talent will improve the productivity and output of your organization.

How to Attract and Retain Top Talent

Becoming an employer of choice and reducing your turnover rate are both crucial in the competitive hiring market. The following recruitment strategies to attract and retain talent should help you stand out to candidates and keep current employees satisfied and motivated.

Offer Flexibility

Attracting and retaining talented employees relies on understanding what the top employees are looking for in a work environment. At the moment, workplace flexibility is incredibly important to employees, especially those that know they can easily find another job that offers it.

Workplace flexibility can include work-from-home options, flexible schedules, and even flexibility about tasks employees work on. If offering flexibility, your retention rate should remain the same or increase. Be sure to also promote this flexibility in job postings and interviews to stand out to top candidates.

Provide Highly Competitive Salaries and Benefits

Salaries and benefits are important to all candidates and employees, but more so to the best talent. These highly-qualified employees know what they’re worth and may have been offered more than you want to give (or do give them if they currently work for you.)

Due to this, you must put forward your most competitive salaries and benefits packages. Be ready to negotiate too, with both candidates you offer jobs to and current employees asking for raises or promotions. While offering a higher salary than budgeted for may seem like a negative, the benefits you’ll get from securing these top employees are guaranteed to outweigh that cost.

Salaries and Benefits for Small Businesses

If you’re a smaller company that can’t necessarily compete with larger national or multinational companies, that doesn’t have to be an issue. Many top employees want to work with small businesses specifically because they aren’t large corporations!

In this case, highlight “cost-free” benefits, such as a flat hierarchy, lots of flexibility, freedom for the employee to really own their role, a small close-knit team, and the like. Additionally, highlight how much you offer compared to other small businesses and start-ups in the market.

Promote Growth Opportunities

Top employees won’t stay with your company if there aren’t growth opportunities. Even if staff love working for you, there’ll come a point when they’ll leave if you can expand their role, responsibilities, and salary.

Investing in employee development is crucial in attracting and retaining talented employees, as is hiring internally as much as possible. Employee development opportunities allow the employee to grow new skills, which are often the skills needed to move up in the organization.

Once a vacancy becomes available, you’ll have the ideal candidate to move into that position. You’ll also keep the employee satisfied and engaged by showing them that you value their contribution. Hiring internally also reduces hiring costs and onboarding time, making it a win-win for everybody.

Using Career Growth Programs to Attract Talented Employees

In addition, it will be hard to attract top candidates if they feel you can’t offer them opportunities to advance in their careers. Throughout the hiring process, show how you can help candidates achieve their career goals in the short and long term. For example, highlight growth and development opportunities you offer and that you hire internally as much as possible.

A woman working from home sitting at a table with a laptop and a tablet — Allowing staff to work from home and set their own schedules will help in attracting and retaining talented employees.

Emphasize Company Values and What You Give Back

Top talent can take their pick of where to work and often prefer charitable brands. Therefore, you must emphasize corporate responsibility when hiring. These claims cannot be false though; to retain top hires, they must see this high level of corporate responsibility in action at the organization.

Some of the main areas of corporate responsibility employees are interested in are:

Ethical Responsibility: For example, are workers across your supply chain treated ethically and to high welfare standards? Do you source materials ethically and work with ethical partners?
Environmental Responsibility: is the business run sustainably? What sustainability initiatives do you implement? Does the company have environmental goals, and how are you meeting them?
Charitable Responsibility: does the company give back to charitable organizations and the communities it operates in?
Volunteer Opportunities: are there chances for employees to volunteer via the organization?

Talented employees that feel they’re giving back in their role and working towards common charitable goals are also less likely to look for a new position.

Being a Leader in the Industry and Having a Unique Selling Point

You can create a great employer brand and implement a strong recruitment strategy, but if your brand isn’t successful, talented candidates won’t want to work for you.

The most successful brands always appeal to top candidates. These brands include industry leaders and companies with unique selling points and out-of-the-box thinking. In addition, talented candidates will leave a company if it loses its place as an industry leader and their chances for growth diminish.

When attracting and retaining talented employees, don’t forget the importance of your company’s image and output. Working continuously to be the best in your industry is an almost guaranteed way to attract and retain the best talent.

Three people in t-shirts with the word volunteer on them — Emphasizing company values and what you do to give back is appealing to top talent.

Strategies to Attract Talented Employees

Hiring isn’t a one-way street, especially if you want to attract the best of the best. Just as much as they must show you why they’re the optimal candidate, you must show them why you’re the best employer.

The following are some additional tips specific to attracting the most talented employees.

Put Extra Thought into Job Descriptions

Attracting the attention of great candidates begins with your job descriptions. Talented employees are looking for the best roles in a sea of job postings. While some less qualified employees may apply to everything they’re qualified (or semi-qualified) for, that’s not the case with the best candidates on the job market. They’ll only apply to a select few roles, and you want yours to be one of them.

There are many things to keep in mind when writing job descriptions that attract top candidates, including:

Using a job title that’s appealing with words top candidates will look for, like “senior,” “manager,” and “specialist.”
Explaining the responsibilities of the role in-depth.
Mentioning that they can grow in the company and the promotion possibilities if they succeed in the organization.
Highlighting what you offer the candidate, including traditional benefits like vacation time, stock options, and medical plans. Mention added-value benefits like workplace flexibility and career development programs as well, and emphasize your workplace culture.

Being realistic when hiring is crucial too. For example, asking for five years of experience for a role that really requires three will cause talented candidates with five years of experience to avoid it as it’s too low level. Conversely, top talent that the role actually fits will pass it up as they think they don’t have enough experience.

Implement Continuous Recruitment

If you only hire when you have a vacancy, there will only be so many top candidates to select. To increase your pool of talent, implement continuous recruitment. This recruitment strategy focuses on collecting candidate information throughout the year to create a talent pool.

Once you have an opening, you can reach out to the best candidates in that pool to see if they’re interested in the role. In doing this, you don’t limit yourself to those looking for a job within the few weeks you have the vacancy open, increasing your chances of attracting a highly experienced candidate.

Invest in Recruitment Marketing Strategies

As mentioned, you can rely on simply posting a job on various job boards when you have an opening if you want to attract top talent. Along with continuous recruitment, make use of recruitment marketing tactics, including:

Posting on social media to promote job openings and your employer brand.
Running paid digital ads and/or print ads.
Headhunting and attending industry networking events and college job fairs.

Be Aware of Employee Reviews and Feedback

When considering applying for a role, candidates will look online for employee reviews about working for the company. Top candidates are especially likely to do this as they are more selective about where they apply and accept offers. They want to ensure that they aren’t saying yes to a job that provides a negative workplace experience.

Therefore, you must be aware of these reviews and act on them if negative ones occur. The best way to avoid having negative employee reviews is to implement strategies that result in high levels of employee motivation and satisfaction (which is something you should be doing no matter what!) However, if a negative review does occur, absorb the feedback and act on it to avoid the same situation arising again.

Always Be Authentic

While having negative employee reviews isn’t optimal, never write fake positive reviews or ask current employees to write positive reviews to offset the bad ones.

Additionally, you can often reply to feedback. Replying to say that you’re sorry that the employee had the experience, you’ve listened, and made adjustments is a good form of damage control. Again, only say such a thing if it’s the truth and their concerns have been fixed.

Use a Recruitment Agency

If attracting top talent seems overwhelming, working with a recruitment agency could be the answer. Ideally, choose to work with a boutique recruitment agency that specializes in your industry. These agencies have many industry contacts and a pool of talented candidates with experience in your sector.

If you operate in the publishing or medical communications industry, Lynne Palmer can help you with all your recruitment needs. Get in touch with our team today to discuss your recruiting needs and goals.

A man and a woman shaking hands at an industry event — Don’t underestimate recruitment marketing tactics like headhunting and attending industry events.

Strategies to Retain Talented Employees

Once you’ve attracted top employees and they’ve accepted the job offer, you need to focus on retaining them. Some additional advice on retaining these talented employees is discussed below.

Have a Strong Leadership Structure

Great leadership and management in a company are a must for both attracting and retaining talented employees. It’s especially crucial for retaining talent as bad management is a primary cause of high turnover rates. When discussing leadership, you need to look at all levels of the organization, from junior employees training entry-level staff and interns to VPs and CEOs.

Training Strong Leaders

Those in high-up positions should focus on training up-and-coming managers. This tactic ensures that those new to leadership roles have the best start and are more likely to have a positive influence on the company once in a leadership role. The training can then be passed on to the next set of new managers, creating a cycle of great managerial training and leadership staff.

Managerial training includes training on how to engage, motivate, and inspire employees. You must also teach managers how to effectively problem solve and deal with conflict.

Create a Healthy Team Environment

Employees can have managers they enjoy working with, but if they don’t get on with co-workers or the work environment isn’t collaborative, retaining employees will be challenging.

Employees that don’t enjoy the work environment may:

Quit, increasing your turnover rate.
Not give you referrals, making finding top talent more difficult
Leave negative reviews on workplace feedback platforms, like Glassdoor, making attracting top talent more difficult.

As with other workplace issues, the most talented employees are the most likely to leave due to these problems as they know they can find a new job relatively easily.

Hiring and Leadership’s Role in the Work Environment

It’s important to mention that creating a great team environment is dependent on leadership and strong hiring practices.

You must always weigh up on-paper fit with culture fit when hiring. A candidate may look outstanding on paper, but if they won’t work well with your existing team, you could have trouble retaining that employee and your current staff. If your existing team is filled with top talent, you don’t want to lose them due to one bad hire that throws the work environment off.

Leadership also needs to create a culture of collaboration and inclusivity and promote team bonding. Additionally, make it easy for staff to come to management with issues relating to other employees and resolve these in a way that benefits all parties. If it seems as though one certain employee is an issue, consider letting them go (if you can do so legally) to help with overall employee retention strategies.

A woman leading a work meeting — Promoting strong leadership and a healthy work environment are top retention strategies.

Have Strategies to Address Burnout

Even in a great work environment, employees can become burnt out. Due to this, you need strategies that spot those at risk of burning out and deal with it to keep employees motivated and engaged. The most talented employees are often the ones most likely to burn out, especially if you put a larger workload on them and/or don’t challenge them enough, making these anti-burnout strategies crucial.

Some strategies to reduce employee burnout include:

Ensuring employees stick to work hours as much as possible.
Not approving overtime requests frequently.
Offering flexibility.
Not micromanaging.
Encouraging staff to take time for themselves and avoid working during time off.
Having an open-door policy where employees can discuss stressors and concerns.
Listening to these concerns and coming up with solutions!

If employees work from home, burnout may be more likely, so implementing anti-burnout strategies for remote employees is a must.

In Conclusion

This article should have given you insight into attracting and retaining talented employees. By implementing this advice, you’re much more likely to attract top talent and keep these hires within your organization long term.

Tips for Attracting and Retaining Talented Employees