This Week in Talent (13th April)

Hello again TWIT readers,

What a week it has been, and I am not sure if I am alone in this but recently, a single week in our business feels like a lifetime. There are so many constantly moving parts and changing landscapes both internally and externally it’s sometimes difficult to keep up. Although, at least for me, there is a lot to be excited about, not least of which is the fact that Collingwood is 3 wins from 4 games so far! I am already getting way too excited and perhaps even a little ahead of myself regarding their potential success for the rest of this year.

I’ve also experienced this week how cyclical our roles can be sometimes, and things that we thought we built, solved for and were up and running suddenly rear up and need attention all over again. For us this past week it has been onboarding. And it has raised some interesting conversations (and some repeat conversations too) about the importance and value of onboarding in the overall candidate/employee experience. It seems that when we were busy hiring and bringing in groups of 10+ people every fortnight over the past few years, the value proposition was very clear. In recent weeks however, for a variety of reasons it has needed renewed focus and we have used this as an opportunity to refresh the whole process to keep it relevant and scalable.

When you’ve been with a business for a while, I think you can sometimes forget the value of a clear, informative, and connected onboarding process. Now more than ever, retention is a key driver for our businesses achieving their strategic goals and as we all know, an effective onboarding process has a direct link to retention. But it also started me thinking about how else we can positively impact retention within our organisations. With our knowledge and experience, we are in a prime position to be an Advisor to our business leaders on best practices in this area.

I have heard many talent acquisition leaders speak recently of moving our profession towards Talent Advisory, in fact ATC themselves are running a great conference on this next month. So, what does it mean to be a Talent Advisor? I don’t think I have the answer yet, but perhaps there may be some answers in the 2023 State of Talent Acquisition Survey results, so make sure you register for the webinar to find out.

One thing is for certain, we have more value to add to our organisations, including having influence over employee experience. This week I’ve tried to cobble together some interesting thoughts, ideas, and research on some of the things that are causing people to leave organisations and how we, in TA, can positively impact retention for the people that we hire.

Why Effective Onboarding Is Critical To Employee Retention

This article is from December 2022, but I dug it up as I still feel there is a lot of value in the studies that it references. Critically that only 12% of employees strongly agreed that their organisation did a great job of onboarding new hires.

Modern talent acquisition goes beyond hiring

With all the focus on moving to Talent Advisory, I felt this article highlighted some “low hanging fruit” that we in TA can quickly and easily begin to influence. I feel successfully driving change in the areas highlighted in this article would do a lot to move TA into the advisory space.

Turnoffs: Factors Contributing to Employees’ Declining Job Offers or Leaving Organizations

Before we start trying to “fix” things though, do we really know why people decline our job offers or leave our business? This article speaks to a lot of leaders in the tech space however, I feel that the sentiments would ring true for several other industries and sectors.

Major career shake-up as 59 per cent of Aussies ready to quit

Just under 3 in every 5 workers of this LinkedIn study are considering a switch from their current job this year. The surprising angle of this of this study was that even if people are happy in their roles, they are still open to new opportunities for a variety of reasons from remuneration to work-life balance.

TED Talk: 5 hiring tips every company (and job seeker) should know

Talk about Talent Advisory expertise, jeepers! Talent strategy expert Nithya Vaduganathan shares some amazing ideas to help cultivate an inclusive work culture, inspire productivity, and unleash talent hiding in plain sight.