Attracting and Retaining Top Talents: Best Practices and Pitfalls

Attracting and Retaining Top Talents: Best Practices and Pitfalls

No doubt, a team comprising the best minds and skills set will consistently outperform another with less qualified employees. But how do you build and retain the best talents on your team? To small business owners and startups, this might seem like a costly undertaking. But many times, the benefits of building and keeping a team of high-performers far outweighs the compensations you can offer such employees.

What you must realize is that almost everyone, including top talents, is constantly looking for opportunities where their worth and skill are well appreciated, and they’re engaged productively. Creating a system or work atmosphere that satisfies these simple and ideal requirements makes it very easy to attract and retain top talents in your company.

In this post, we discuss some strategies that highly productive companies, including startups and small business owners, use to recruit and retain top talents on their teams. We hope you’ll find them helpful for building your dream team as well.

1. Build an Exciting Workplace that is Focused on Great Work

Attracting top talents isn’t always about offering the highest pays and best benefits. Other factors like creating an ideal work culture also come top of the list. You want to make this priority too. To attract the best performers to your company, you must first build a business that is centered around some great work.

Top talents do not just want to get paid; they are interested in doing great stuff. This is one mistake that a lot of companies, especially SMBs, make when hiring new talents. After onboarding top talents, it's important you engage them with productive and exciting work. So many employees today are looking to quit their current jobs because they feel under-engaged in their current roles. Employees are quitting their jobs in record numbers, and many are doing so because of a lack of engagement.

2. Encourage Independence and Innovation

As you focus on bringing in the best people, it would be great to also pay as much attention to retaining existing employees. Encouraging those you already have to work independently and cultivating a habit of delegating without constantly looking over their shoulders are great strategies for creating innovative work. Just be sure to spell out the dos and don'ts.

A highly productive employee will do great work, whether you’re supervising them closely or not. In fact, almost all employees love to work in roles where they have the opportunity to express their creativity and try out new ideas, as opposed to being boxed into stereotypes. You can project this as one of your strengths in your job ads and when interviewing candidates.

3. Make Sure You Hire in Line With Your Company Goals

Attracting top talents has a lot to do with your business goals. As you hire new employees, it’s essential to let them understand what your business is doing and how exactly they come in. This is important if you’re looking to reduce your turnover rate. Unless employees understand how they fit in, you can be sure that they’ll leave before long.

But first, you need to define your goals and objectives, define the job descriptions for the roles you’re looking to fill. And possibly, get the applicants to understand your work culture in the job ads and interview stage. It would be great to make sure that these reflect in the job adverts. It is easy to see that you can still hire great talents that don't fit in your company or work culture. You sure would want to avoid making that mistake.

4. Develop Your Employees Potential

Top-performing employees place a premium on ongoing development and education. Investing in these will not only attract the best people to your team but will — in the long run — impact your business positively. HR ought to make this particular point a part of the company's employee development policy. Competitive firms are known for building great talents, and not just attracting them.

When employees understand that they have an opportunity to grow while on the job, there’s a tendency for them to stick around longer, and guess who benefits from that? The company does. Also, understand that it costs less to advance the skills of your employees than to deal with the cost of recruiting and training new talents all the time.

5. Recognize and Reward Great Performance

One of the biggest pitfalls HR should avoid is ignoring great work and high-performing talents. The saying goes that when you acknowledge greatness, you encourage it. When staff goes out of their way to do innovative work, it is in the best interest of employers to recognize and reward such feats, as often as possible.

No employee wants to work in an environment where they’re not appreciated. In like manner, the best talents deserve the best compensation, attractive benefits packages, and excellent working conditions. As you work on the points already highlighted, you should also pay great attention to compensation. After all, money is the number one motivation for many people, and they’ll likely leave when they find the next best pay.

6. Flexible Working Conditions

Does your work policy allow remote work? What’s your position on work/life balance? Can an employee take time off work to pick up their kids from school or attend to an emergency without going through a rigorous approval process? These are privileges, but they can be the perks that give your company an edge over other companies.

Great talents will appreciate these and would make sure that they are giving back to the company as well. In other words, employees are motivated to do their best work when the working conditions are favorable and flexible.

Wrapping Up

The key takeaway here is ensuring that employees are productively engaged and compensated. Clearly, attracting and retaining top talents is even easier than you thought it was. These tricks will do the work, but HR executives and small business owners must be willing to commit to them. Before long, you’ll be able to assemble a team of top talents.