Five Talent Tactics to Help You Navigate the New World of Work

Attraction Plus: Five Talent Tactics to Help You Navigate the New World of Work

The “Great Resignation” is neither a blip on the radar nor a one-time emergency for organisations looking to hire. From where we stand, it’s the beginning of an entirely new era: one entitled ‘Attraction Plus’.

While businesses have had plenty to contend with throughout the pandemic, a fundamental shift has occurred – employees have gained accelerated influence over their working environment. These raised expectations are not influencing the conversation, but redefining it completely.

New laws of talent attraction are needed. Employees are far more open than ever before to move jobs for professional development and increased purpose. Among UK SMEs, the challenge is particularly acute. Old talent models simply are not cutting it.

The New Laws of Attraction

Businesses need to understand that the laws of talent attraction have changed. Chances are they already know that they will have to work extra hard to attract increasingly-scarce new talent. What they also need to realise is that talent attraction is far from over when a candidate becomes an employee.

It’s time to ditch the negative language and mindset of talent retention. Instead, HR and business leaders need to adopt the mindset of “Attraction Plus”. That the onus on businesses to attract talent is not over simply when the hire has been made. To get to this stage, however, UK employers need to understand why the old models of talent attraction and retention are broken.

The Cost of a Failed Talent Strategy

In our 2021 Personio survey, only a quarter (26%) of HR decision makers in the UK and Ireland said that talent retention is a priority for their organisation over the next 12 months. This was a big worry even then, because it was clear that businesses would soon need to change their focus from one of short-term survival to a winning long-term talent strategy as the UK economy recovered.

Why does this matter? Business leaders should care because losing talent:

• Has a financial cost. Every vacancy costs the average UK employer £3000 and takes an average of nearly a month to fill.
• Has a contagion cost. A high-turnover environment can hurt morale, lower productivity and has a further impact on turnover, especially among the most talented or highly-skilled employees

The New Laws Disrupting Old Talent Models

Talent Attraction has, until recently, been seen as an external strategy, in which the perception of a business is seen as the main driver through which to attract candidates. We see this in the way many employers talk about Employer Value Propositions (EVP) when recruiting, but less so once recruitment is over.

These new laws of Talent Attraction are blurring the lines between internal and external, attraction and retention. Attracting, engaging and retaining is being seen as part of the same strategy – rather than separate ones. Businesses need to move from concepts of attraction and retention towards a model of what we now know as Attraction Plus.

Find out more about the benefits of Attraction Plus and how to implement it in your organisation with our free guide:

Download: The Attraction Plus Whitepaper