What are the Different Types of Recruitment and Retention Strategies?

In the world of business, human resources professionals use recruitment and retention strategies to reduce employee turnover and loss of revenues. There are many recruitment and retention strategies that can attract qualified candidates, develop a superior workforce, and keep employees from leaving the company to pursue other, more attractive opportunities. While recruitment and retention activities can vary by company, industry, and candidates, the most successful strategies share common traits.

A solid approach to recruitment and retention strategies is to craft clear job descriptions for the positions that your company will fill. Failure to establish what skills, credentials, and experience are needed to perform critical work for the company can produce disastrous results. By creating a well-written job description and identifying the key characteristics of a successful job candidate, a human resource team can bring in high quality candidates who possess the right skills and experience for the jobs.

Recruiters searching for quality candidates to fill various company openings should be able to seek out candidates from a wide variety of sources. Strong recruitment and retention strategies rely on searching for candidates via traditional internal postings and open advertisements, as well as through social networking and direct referrals from employees and industry associations. Human resources professionals should keep an open mind when using any of these sources to find employees, as job seekers are using a wide range of methods to search for opportunities. Excellent candidates can come from unexpected places and may have varying qualities and skills that benefit the company.

To keep quality job candidates interested during the recruitment phase, the interviewing and hiring process must be efficient. Communication must be handled professionally and incentives and expectations should be clearly stated to candidates. This is a critical time when many job candidates form an impression of the company based on the way the interviewing and hiring process is carried out.

In order to attract and keep good quality candidates, regular communication, employee talent management plans, and benefits are needed to make the workplace a pleasant place to work. The better the incentives offered, the easier it will be for the company to attract good workers and keep them happy. This can be accomplished by encouraging existing employees to focus on the positives of the work environment and giving them a chance to be part of the success of the organization.