Human capital is arguably any organization’s most valuable resource. Your people are the face of your company; your competitive advantage. Investing in talent acquisition and retention is just as important as your products or services. While there are a myriad of best of practices out there, these are a few of the vital actions we’ve seen have an impact on talent acquisition and retention in our own organization, as well as in our clients’ organizations.

Create a Better Hiring Process

At Volano, we hire the best programmers in the area. Not only that, our programmers are client facing, meaning they need to not only be great at their craft, but also be able to lead a meeting, help our clients discover and talk through their pain points and above all, make the client feel heard and taken care of. Needless to say, filling a position around here isn’t the easiest.

We realized very early on that quality talent isn’t just waiting around for you. They have jobs, they have offers, they have options. They won’t put up with a lengthy, unorganized hiring process. Soon after we beefed up our own hiring process, we had the opportunity to work with an other organization on their hiring process. The YMCA was experiencing headaches and candidate drop-outs with their software-as-a-service. We brought their vision to life through a custom web application that makes the hiring process flow with ease.

Invest in Technology

Today’s top talent isn’t interested in walking into a cluster of inefficient processes and operations workflows that just don’t flow. While your run of the mill candidate will take what they can get, your rockstars, your innovators, your bottom line impactors want technologies and systems that propel them. By 2025 Millennials will represent 75% of the global workforce. These are the folks for whom an iPhone is considered an extension of their being.

Not only should you invest in technology to attract and retain top talent, but it’s a vital requirement to stay relevant and competitive in today’s business climate. If you’re still depending on email and spreadsheets to get you by, you’ve already fallen behind just about every curve there is, including quality talent acquisitions.

Empower Your Team Through Accountability and Responsibility

It’s a little bit of a buzz term when it comes to workforce retention and leadership – “Create a culture of accountability”. But what does that even mean? Haven’t employees always had to be accountable? Well, the answer is a big fat “No”, they haven’t.

Workforce leadership expert and author, Julie Miller said, “Trying to instill a culture where people are accountable can be difficult. People will not be accountable unless there’s some system in place that encourages it.” That system looks different for every organization, but that’s what we do, we create custom workflow solutions.

Quality talent is optimized in an environment that encourages accountability. Not only that, they know their worth and they won’t pull the weight for everyone. Good talent wants to work with good talent. Keeping everyone accountable in a transparent way with effective systems firstly,  fosters retention and secondly, creates an environment that’s attractive to other great talent. Win-win.

Talent acquisition and retention are just two of the million issues business leaders need to stay on top of. Stop fighting your way through resumes, failing processes and increasing turnover. Instead, invest in improving your hiring process, offer innovative technology as a candidate incentive, and empower your team with tools and processes that encourage accountability.