Recruiting is a major concern among HR professionals and business owners. But what you may not know is the process doesn’t end when the applicant signs the offer letter. Talent management is about not just attracting the best in brightest in your field, but retaining them as well – and therein lies the challenge.
Turnover is a costly problem that every business has to face. It costs companies time, money and resources every time an employee leaves. in fact, the higher-ranked the employee and the longer he or she was with the company, the more costly finding a replacement can be.
Recent studies have shown that it’s not uncommon for employees to be actively seeking other jobs even while they’re working for you. In fact, it may be downright probable.
Job searching is high
If you were to ask a random sampling of managers and executives how many of their employees are currently looking for new jobs, chances are the estimates would all be much lower than the actual figures. This has been verified by Indeed’s recent Talent Attraction Study, which surveyed more than 8,000 adults in the workforce.
Shockingly, results found that 71 percent of respondents were actively seeking employment – even though they already had a job. Popular job-searching channels cited by survey-takers included online job boards and social media sites, further demonstrating the increasingly important role that emerging online technology plays in HR and recruiting efforts.
What’s driving employees away?
These startling figures may lead employers to panic, wondering what it is that’s driving employees to seek new opportunities. One of the major points of contention in the workforce is the perception of inadequate training. This is becoming an even larger concern as employers begin looking for new skill sets that may not have even existed years ago.
According to the Society for Human Resource Management, a recent Harris Poll-conducted study found that 33 percent of employees surveyed felt their current skills level was below where it should be for their current job. What’s more, 36 percent are concerned about their ability to learn new skills through their employers’ professional development programs, and 36 percent also believed that their current training level would make it difficult to obtain a promotion.
But some recruiters have interpreted this a different way:
“No one is passive about their career in 2015,” Indeed chief economist Tara M. Sinclair told SHRM. “While the industry has traditionally believed employed candidates are passive and not actively looking for new jobs, many employers have already moved on from this notion and dubbed it an antiquated way of thinking.”