How does a growing company manage to attract and retain top talent?

With the continuing decline in candidate availability, increase in number of job vacancies and starting salaries at an all-time high (REC) – combined with a Brexit and pandemic fueled skills exodus – the shoe is very much on the foot of candidates looking for a new job. Strong candidates will have a choice of job offers. So how does a growing company manage to attract and retain the most talented?

Pre COVID, it may well have been enough for managers to take their team out once a month for lunch or to redevelop an area of the office as a breakout room and claim that employee welfare is at the heart of everything they do. However, as we’ve moved to more remote ways of working, the perks offered pre-pandemic no longer stand up on their own. Instead, it is vital that organisations are able to not only communicate their purpose and company values, but to imbed them into their everyday ways of working.

Those businesses with a distinctive employer brand, strong employer reputation, employer value proposition and employee experience strategy, actively demonstrated and communicated, have become more attractive to employees than those without. In fact, a strong employer brand can often outperform other decision factors such as salary and benefits when a potential future employee is thinking about the right move for them.

Typically these are developed by internal HR teams to promote the company employee vision, support career pathways and retain the existing team, but should the responsibility fall solely to HR? The process by which an employer brand is arrived at has a number of similarities to the responsibilities of the marketing department when branding the company products or services. The research, identifying unique differentiators, carrying out competitor analysis, defining the target audience, agreeing the communication channels and delivering the messaging across these channels all sound very familiar to your average marketing team.

In a job market where the level of demand for talent, and constricted supply, can actually affect the success of the company growth strategy, getting it right has become critical to the bottom line of any business with growth aspirations. Developing a communication strategy, harnessing the power of various media channels to appeal to the widest target audience, and present a compelling story for any potential recruit will have a positive impact on reaching your recruitment goals.