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We are all well aware that employees are the greatest asset of any company. A company can make progress, innovate, compete, and succeed provided it has a strong and talented workforce. Post-COVID, we all have had to reinvent ourselves in the way we work and in the way we live. Similarly, organizations must focus on hiring the right talent for the right position and on creating a positive employee experience to be able to attract and retain employees.

Head Hunting and Recruitment Consultants,Line Hjorth and Christina Hansson working for ScanCruit International UAE shared tips and insights into how to attract and retain talent post-COVID in a recent webinar organised by ONLYwebinars.com.

Talent is crucial for any organization and there are many challenges that organizations are facing currently:

• 75 % of employers struggle to find the right candidate
• It takes 23 days to hire a new employee and half of them fall through within the first 18 months.
• Hiring the wrong candidate can cost you more than 30% of the individual’s annual salary.
• How to rebuild and restart the employee base post-Covid?

To overcome these challenges let us look at why we need a head hunter to help business owners and entrepreneurs find the right talent quickly and cost-effectively?

1. Ensure higher quality of candidates– As head-hunters have access to a larger talent pool, they can screen and narrow it down for you the right candidate for the position.
2. Lower the risk of a bad hire– Since they are trained professionals who carefully screen applications, the risk of hiring the wrong person is lowered down to a minimum.
3. Create greater profitability– The right employee for the right positions leads to higher profitability as the organizations do not have to repeatedly invest in hiring people.
4. Lower staff turnaround– It is equally important for the candidate to find the right company to work for and it is the responsibility of the head-hunter to ensure that to lower staff turnaround.

For head-hunters to be able to perform well and deliver the output expected by any organization, they require a carefully drafted job description that lays out the roles and responsibilities that the prospective employee will take on. The communication needs to be clear in what is required from them as they need to have an understanding of what an organization is and what kind of employee would be the right fit in terms of attitude and talent.

A high degree of achievement lies in the key to finding the right employee which includes:

• Careful screening of thousands of applications
• Use the skills list as a part of the screening process. More and more companies are adopting screening candidates based on the skills list to find a better match.
• Using DISC analysis (Dominance, Influence, Compliance, and steadiness) to match how the candidate presents themselves, how they respond to challenges, how powerful they can be in influencing others, how well they respond to rules and regulations, and the preferred place of work.
• For Executive positions, holding a cognitive test to measure the candidate’s likelihood of succeeding at the job.
• X-factor which mainly is all about finding the candidate with the right attitude towards working and learning, right cultural fit, is likely to be highly engaged in their job. These are main qualities that do not come across on paper but play a vital role in hiring and retaining the right candidate.

Onboarding is very essential when hiring a new employee. It not only reduces the turnover of employees but also leads to higher workforce compliance as it provides all the essential information required by the new employee. The onboarding process is known to cultivate teamwork as it ensures that the employee is well integrated with the team. A good onboarding process increases productivity by 54% and reduces the risk of employee turnover.87% of employees are less likely to leave a company when they are engaged

Hiring the right candidate is not the end of the process. Investments need to be made to continuously develop tools and acquire necessary resources for the development of employees for them to be motivated and for an organization to retain them. This requires an organization to set clear goals for all its employees for them to get a clear understanding of what is expected. Apart from that, the employees need to be offered professional training for them to progress in their career and develop new skills. There needs to be handholding through mentoring that can be done for new employees to help them settle in the new environment.

The lines of communication need to be open to address any issues that an employee may face or to get feedback. It has become essential during Covid times when the employees are working remotely to have regular check-in to plan the day, connect with other team members.

Some other steps that the organizations can take to settle a new employee is to help them through the relocation process if hiring them involves moving to a new country. They can contribute by guiding them to find the right accommodation, similar social groups, and finding the right family facilities to help them settle quickly. It is very common to come across a buddy system in many organizations where an existing employee has helped a new employee settle in their new work environment and provided guidance. This has led to increased productivity, higher job satisfaction, higher staff retention, and has created a more secure environment for sharing valuable information amongst employees.

It is very important to understand all the steps that the head-hunters need to follow and for the organizations to take to be able to attract and retain talent as the cost of hiring a wrong employee can be fairly large (30% of the annual salary of that employee) along with the time invested in the recruitment process, cost of rehiring, negative influence on the team, loss in the goodwill of the brand and recruitment and training cost.