How to Attract and Retain Top Talents for the Future of Work

Annie Sprat (Unsplash)

Preface

Understanding what the future of work will be is the bedrock of building a team for the future. Building a team for the future requires putting together a talented group of people willing to work for you in the growing face of technological changes.

However, hiring and retaining top talents is becoming increasingly difficult as people are more inclined to leave their jobs now than ever. Even Silicon Valley companies have a growing shortage of top talent.

Are Silicon Valley companies outgrowing top talents? Not necessarily. It is only because hiring locally in the Bay Area is costly and not very scalable. This also applies to companies stretched far and wide. Hiring top talents in a local area with local competitors is becoming tougher. As said by Turing’s Jonathan Siddharth when he founded Rover,

The secret was our contrarian approach to hiring. When almost every engineering manager and VC in Silicon Valley preached the importance of everyone working from the same office, we took the unpopular stance that we would hire great people, regardless of where they worked from. We didn’t do this to make a point. It was absolutely necessary for us to look beyond Silicon Valley, to keep the quality bar high while keeping our costs low.

-Jonathan Siddharth, Turing CEO

It is necessary to hire from a larger global pool of talent, which means there must be provisions for attracting top talents and engaging and retaining distributed teams. Distributed teams are increasingly becoming a new normal after the Covid-19 pandemic.

Silicon Valley tech leaders when sharing insights on retaining top talent, engaging distributed teams, and succeeding in the post-pandemic new normal at Turing’s Boundaryless, concluded that this is only possible when ‘workers lead the way’. This implies that workers, not employers, will decide what the future of work will be.

There’s nothing more important than recruiting top talent. If the talent insists on hybrid or remote work, most companies will follow”

-Gabe Burke, Managing Director, Cushman & Wakefield

Understanding the essential prerequisites of digital/remote workers

Smart organizations are the ones that listen to the work needs of their employees and try as much as they can to employ the methods that are most favorable to their employees. From the onset, the proposal offered to these employees, in the long run, will determine how much these employees will assist the company’s ambitions.

This is why it is pertinent to listen to existing employees and take a cue from the needs of the growing digital workforce before planning and executing early business strategies.

Gartner Research asserts that employees want the future of work to be just three things: Hybrid, Human, and Equitable. In today’s digital world, employees need their employers to be humans before anything else. Equitability shows that the growing workforce, which is expanding to become a global village, has only increased its propensity for bias and prejudice in the hiring and retaining processes, even with machine learning models. The digital workforce only asks for an objective and equal playground for everyone.

Lastly, the hybrid model (onsite and remote model combination) has likely been on the pen-tip and lips of almost every digital worker since after Covid-19. Most employees and even companies have seen the potential of remote work. But transitioning has not been easy, particularly for small-scaling companies.

Thus, the hybrid model, which combines both the onsite and remote models to ease transitioning and provide a soft landing for companies and employees alike, is one of the requirements of digital workers.

Four crucial strategies to attract and retain top talents

One recurring fatal flaw some companies may have when restrategizing retention and attraction strategies is assuming that top talent retention and attraction revolves around compensation. Although compensation is a significant and critical differentiator, especially for some roles than others, there are some problems that money cannot solve.

Research has proven that the winning organizations are going for solutions other than increasing compensation due to the condition of the present global talent market. These solutions revolve around role benefits, talent sourcing, and role designs against hostile compensation offer from competitors. Also, it is essential to note the success of these four strategies depends mainly on the role and the talent risks involved. This is pertinent to note because many organizations have expressed fear over the large rate of employee turnover due to the non-economic benefits offered by remote and hybrid working patterns.

Source: Gartner

The four strategies are:

• Look towards employees: The existing talent pool can be improved to fill high-demand roles through incentives, retention bonuses, mobility, and accelerated programs. One benefit is that it is easy to implement, reduces time-to-hire, saves resources, and reinforces the idea that the company is committed to its employees. More so, when employees are switching positions, it is necessary to ensure that the switching offer matches or equalizes whatever offer the competition offers, as this is key for the success of this move. On the flip side, this can increase employee turnover, especially among employees that are not favored by this move.

• Redefine and expand the talent pool: To attract top talents, it is necessary to redefine the hiring process in terms of requirements. What defines a qualified candidate can be reformulated to eliminate arbitrary demands like education, location, or even experience sometimes, to get hold of unusual talents that may have otherwise been screened out. Companies can also employ techniques such as probationary employment, employing candidates with adjacent skills, and then reskilling them to meet current skills needs.

• Pay by workload and time: Typically, work done in a workplace is measured in working hours. However, this does not directly represent the efficiency of workers and can be misleading, especially for remote workers. The focus can be shifted to shorter or flexible working hours with fixed workloads with pay adjusted to workload. This goes a long way in increasing productivity and improving employees’ sense of well-being. This is a brilliant way of standing out in the global market.

• Decouple location-based payments and increase compensations: First, it is appropriate to state that compensations do not always have to be financial. Compensations can come in benefit forms of decoupling location-based pay to attract a larger pool of talents, including signing bonuses, rewarding and congratulating tenured employees, and so on. This helps to build the brand image among the employees and expands to the outside world. However, this may be costly to implement and some companies may stand the risk of being financially outfoxed. Nevertheless, incentives should be disbursed with equity to eliminate feelings of unfair treatment between employees.

Final Take

In summary, it is obvious that companies are buckling their seat belts in the race for top global talents. Some companies may be scrambling in this fight and may be caught trying to use financial compensation to attract and retain top talents. This can create a negative cycle of events that may destroy such companies in the long run. Instead, these companies can employ one of the four disruptive measures or a mix of them, which may or may not include financial benefits depending on the company, status and size of the current talent pool, and industry.