Recent environmental pressures impacted traditional working arrangements and showed more workplace flexibility is often possible. At the same time, many employees’ expectations about how, when, and where they choose to work have also evolved – and it is an employees’ market. Recruitment and retention are reflections of different sides of the same employee value proposition coin. Organizations that fail to reinvent their approach to attracting and retaining talent by focusing on candidate and employee experience risk turnover, vacancies, and lost opportunities that can negatively impact the bottom line. The increased burden placed on HR to quickly attract, assess, and hire talent in large volumes due to the “Great Resignation” may be driving down their perceived effectiveness in enabling recruiting. Having a talent acquisition (TA) strategy that is up to date with the current context of the labor market is more critical than ever. However, a recent McLean & Company study reveals that just 38% of organizations report having a documented TA strategy.
The emergency work-from-home measures of 2020 and 2021 began to challenge skepticism around the feasibility of remote work. Over the past year, organizations have embraced and leveraged it to their benefit. This is hardly surprising – when given the option between remote and onsite work, employees will often elect to work remotely. This trend is beneficial for organizations whose roles can primarily be conducted remotely, but the reverse is true for organizations that do not have the option to offer remote work. In an environment where remote work is highly desirable for most employees, organizations that do not have the option to offer remote work will have to find creative solutions to attract and retain talent. Organizations that fail to adapt to the new talent landscape risk losing talent and being left behind.
Organizations that require employees to be onsite are making up for their inability to offer remote work by offering higher compensation. They also place greater focus on retaining talent in critical roles due to the higher degree of difficulty they face attracting new talent. Increasing base pay was the most common approach, which is a positive trend given that doing so was positively associated with employee experience. Organizations that took actions were better off than those that did not. Taking no action to improve attraction and/or retention was negatively associated with employee experience. Organizations that operate primarily onsite are taking more significant actions to offset their talent recruitment and retention challenges (e.g. they are 20% more likely to increase base pay). However, industry analysis reveals that remote-capable organizations are 16% more likely to revisit their employee value proposition (EVP). This suggests that although primarily onsite organizations have done more to address their talent challenges, they are doing far less in communicating their efforts to potential candidates.
Remote work has been shown to have an immensely positive impact on attraction and retention for jobs that can be performed remotely. Organizations that are revisiting their EVP are 10% more likely to report that remote work has had a positive impact on attraction for jobs that can be performed remotely.
Efforts to address talent challenges will yield limited results if they are not communicated externally to candidates as well as internally. Reshaping the EVP to highlight the ways in which the organization has adapted to recent environmental pressures can resonate profoundly with candidates in the new world of work, especially for organizations that cannot offer remote work.
Organizations whose HR departments are not providing a great employee experience are 34% more likely to agree that retention for non-remote jobs has been negatively impacted. Organizations whose HR departments are not providing a great candidate experience are 23% more likely to agree that attraction for non-remote jobs has been negatively impacted. HR’s ability to provide a great employee and candidate experience is correlated with organizational performance and workforce productivity.
However, providing a great candidate experience ranked 12th out of 12 top organizational priorities. The gap in priorities suggests that while organizations are recruiting for more positions, not much weight is placed on how candidates experience the talent acquisition process. Talent challenges will not be resolved through retention alone. Organizations must prioritize candidate experience as much as they do employee experience to attract top talent in a market that is more candidate-driven than ever.
So, what is the best technology available today to deliver a world-class candidate experience and a best-in-class employee experience? The best solution in the marketplace to deliver a world-class candidate and employee experience is through Intellective’s Employee Experience Pack. The Employee Experience Pack makes it easy to capture data and information across the organization and deliver it in an easy-to-consume manner without your employees having to search all over creation or call a help desk to find what they need. You can also customize their experience based on generational demographics, department, geographic location, and a whole host of other factors.
Intellective’s Employee Service Pack allowed a Fortune 500 organization to completely transform their difficult to use intranet into a simple, compelling, and engaging intranet in ten (10) weeks, saving them millions of dollars in implementation services.
