People are a company’s most valuable asset. This is something we’ve all known for a long time, and yet companies talk more than they actually do about it.
A few years ago companies started focusing on who has the most advanced technologies in order to create competitive advantage. With time, they realised that practices and processes focusing on technology and machines were something that their competitors could easily copy.
This made them turn their focus on to something that was more difficult to copy, their people. The culture, the working atmosphere, and the purpose they provide their people with is something that can’t be easily copied by their competitors. It is something created by their people for themselves. It can be one of a kind, and it is crucial to retaining people and keep them engaged and motivated. People stay with a company when the company helps them develop a feeling of belonging.
Now, the talent acquisition team within an organisation is responsible for ensuring that the organisation has and will have the best available talents for each specific current or future open position. They invest time, money, and efforts in order to attract talent that meets the company’s needs; talent that adds considerable value to the organisation. On average, a company needs around 42 days to fill an open position. During this period of time, TA specialists search, communicate and assess possible candidates for the position they look to fill. In case that they successfully fill the position, but the new hire decides to leave the company within a short period, that means that the TA team will need to re-invest money, time and efforts to hire a new person. Not a pleasurable situation of course, and this is what makes TA care about the time a new hire spends with the company.
On the other hand, the role of HR is to ensure that employees have the necessary practices, processes, support, benefits, and freedom to perform at their best potential, achieve their personal and organisational goals, and be motivated by the organisation’s overall vision and mission. It is an important and critical role of course, but at the end of the day when an employee will decide to leave the company for another company, HR will only need to process some paperwork for the one who is leaving and some other paperwork for the one who will join.
[Tweet “#talentacquisition spend so long courting hires. Aren’t they best placed to #retain them?”]
Comparing the two roles, talent acquisition teams are expected to be more (negatively) affected if an employee leaves the company. Therefore, the TA team has extra reasons to care even more about the employee retention. They need new hires and all employees to stay with the company for as long as possible, not only because they hired those people because they expected them to provide long-term value, but also because every time someone leaves, their workload increases. You could think of it as “personal interest”.
As TA seems to be more directly affected by the employee retention, maybe it is time to rethink the way organisations split duties and responsibilities, and transfer some of them from HR to Talent Acquisition:
To conclude, employee retention is an issue which keeps employers awake at night. It is something that can create disruption in the way an organisation works, and people leaving the company can result in huge costs for the company.
To avoid such disruptions and costs, it is time to shift responsibilities within the HR department and make accountable for employee retention the HR sub-function that really cares about it and that is directly affected by its consequences. Talent acquisition teams have more reasons to care about employee retention, and maybe it is the time they becomes responsible and gains full control of the practices and process which focus and aim at increasing employees’ retention.
Cover image: Shutterstock
This article first appeared on Undercover Recruiter on the 5th of February, 2018.
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