Going Through Hiring Hell? Use Tech to Reduce Churn

Hiring has always been one of the greatest challenges facing organizations, but a perfect storm of factors means it’s more important than ever before. As Good to Great author Jim Collins put it, “People are not your most important assets. The right people are. Get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats.” The growing recruitment obstacle places more of an onus on HR and talent leaders to get the best out of people and prevent the high churn rates that set companies on a hamster wheel of recruitment, training, and replacing.

Why is hiring even more critical today?

• First, because the world continues to digitize and virtualize, which means more jobs fall into the Knowledge Worker bucket, so we need more skilled self-starters and team players with strong interpersonal skills and leadership potential.
• Second, political, and economic changes are throwing a curveball at previously standard recruiting techniques and sources; the departure of the UK from the EU, for example, is changing hiring patterns in Britain and across the continent.
• Third, regulations are impacting rules on worker rights, how people work, for how long, and in what capacity.
• Fourth, wage inflation is making it imperative for companies to do everything they can to manage costs and reduce factors that add to overheads, such as employee churn.
• Finally, the pandemic is changing attitudes toward employers and employment, with more people joining the ‘Great Resignation’ or demanding workplace flexibility, commitments to sustainability, and attractive career trajectories.

So, there’s a lot of work to do, but how should organizations start to think about addressing these issues, attracting great people, and keeping them motivated? Of course, there are myriad human factors that include strong leadership, setting enjoyable work, and luring with the carrots of rewards. But technology can help, too, so don’t underrate its ability to calibrate and keep plans on track.

How tech can help

HCM tools can automate finding the right-fit people for the jobs in hand as well as providing the right incentives, upskilling, and providing an environment that people say works for them. But HCM doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and one technique here is to create a pincer operation where HCM and Finance departments work together. This is the theme of a recent research note by Robert Kugel of Ventana Research, entitled Building the Best Team and Reducing Turnover for Organizational Resilience.

By using integrated technology tools, firms can create a single window with a clear vista onto available finances, resources, and value delivered while managing goals, targets, and satisfaction for employees. This goes beyond the old, blunt tools of succession planning and organizational hierarchy planning to sophisticated analysis of skills intelligence and plotting talent mobility.

The trend towards FP&A (financial planning and analysis) is aligned with this. Finance departments can track expenses in real-time and work with HCM to determine ‘flight risk’ people, the cause of departures, and the cost of replacing them. And, for these most uncertain of times, there’s also the ability to track in real-time and reassess plans and progress on a monthly or even more rapid rate rather than waiting for another financial quarter or even year to tick by.

By pooling the view from the CHRO and the office of Finance, we can glean a granular understanding of what’s occurring, employee value delivery, opportunities for reallocation of duties and shifts, and all associated costings and risk factors.

Churn is a particularly potent and disruptive enemy, and as Ventana’s Kugel notes:

“Turnover leads to higher costs because of the direct expense incurred in hiring and typically higher levels of supervision and training as new hires get up to speed. This productivity dip also can sap the competitiveness of the organization. Organizations must ensure that total rewards are market-competitive, but also that all investments in people are having the greatest impact on their engagement and retention.”

We’re still figuring out what’s next in employee retention and motivation in a hybrid-working world. Gartner chief of HR research Brian Kropp has said that “hybrid work will create a permanent increase in employee turnover. Geography has become less of a barrier for people given the ability to work from home, meaning they have far more opportunities in the job market. Meanwhile, hybrid work brings fewer opportunities for workers to build the social connections that are instrumental in keeping them at an organization. Leaders will need to adapt their hiring processes and enhance the employee value proposition to adapt to this competitive job market.”

It’s undoubtedly true that the hybrid working environment demands new tactics and new solutions. We can’t persist with old approaches such as annual reviews or aligning salaries with performance in an all-in-one meeting. Instead, we need to create a deeper understanding of employees, including what they want from us as much as what we want from them. For that, we need to give and receive regular feedback, analyze, and automate. People success templates can help, but we also need to make better use of a new generation of software and cloud services that cut across departments and afford real insights in real-time.