Innovative solutions to recruitment and retention do exist, reports BLR’s Best Practices in HR newsletter, which specializes in finding them. Here are several:
In today’s “talent wars,” recruitment and retention are the biggest battlegrounds. With thousands of trained baby boomers primed to grab their 401(k)s and go, companies are fighting to replace them … or to convince them to stay.
Several great ways to do it were recently reported in BLR’s twice-a-month newsletter, Best Practices in HR. BPHR specializes in reporting innovative ideas and case studies that show how well they work.
One such case study focused on recruitment and involved XOSoft, a Massachusetts IT firm. Its business was exploding, resulting in an immediate need for more tech-savvy personnel. A lot of growth companies face this problem, but XOSoft also found a solution … one that doubled its workforce of 50 in less than a year.
What XOSoft did, according to the BPHR report, was fire up all its recruiting engines. Internally, it temporarily increased a $2,000 referral bonus to $5, 000 to employees who brought in a successful new hire. Then XOSoft contracted with what HR Manager Kathy Krigman called a “specific agency to target competitors,” and lure away their best sales reps.
Finally, they placed employment ads where techies were known to congregate … software sales and disaster recovery websites and blogs. Finally, to retain their shiny new workforce, they conducted feedback surveys at 30, 60, and 90 days after hire and quickly addressed issues the surveys uncovered. As a result, the newly doubled workforce suffered only one resignation, and revenues grew 100 percent.
An Employer of Choice Strategy
Meanwhile, Lowell General Hospital, also in Massachusetts, had its eye on retention. To achieve it, reports Best Practices in HR, LGH instituted a plan to keep its organization an “Employer of Choice.” The plan dropped its already low turnover rate another 5 percent last year in a highly competitive industry. Key elements, according to VP, Human Resources Peter Zarrilla:
–Tracking competitors’ salaries and benefits to keep Lowell’s offers on or above par.
–Allowing employees to use vacation, sickness, or holiday time off for any purpose they wished, and whenever they wished. Workers could even cash in a week of time and pay for the first week of a vacation with the second week.
–Adding three new benefits a year, often worker-paid, but available through the hospital. Two examples: on-site dry cleaning and group discounts on entertainment events.
“You always need to be adding [benefits], says Zarrilla. “An employer of choice strategy is a journey that never ends.”
These ideas exemplify Best Practices in HR’s mission of presenting innovative ideas through case studies. The paper also features reviews of recent legal decisions, a tips section, and a reproducible handout (you can see a sample issue by clicking the link below.), but the accent is clearly on new thinking. So if you’ve got HR issues that defy conventional answers, the solutions you seek, and the case studies that prove them out, might be right here.
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