Page 32 - Retaining Top Employees

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20 Retaining Top Employees

Retention Begins with Presence and Image
Effective retention begins before the hire—in your recruit-
ment literature,of course,but also in corporate and product
literature,advertisements (for recruitment and for sales),press releas-
es,product branding,company image,management reputation,and a
myriad of other messages that your organization puts out into the
marketplace about what it is,what it does,and how it does it.
As we’ll see later,these signals act as filters in two ways: they deter-
mine the type of person who applies to work for your organization
and they set the bar for later decisions by the employee about
whether or not to stay with your organization and for how long.
long known about customers, that it’s much cheaper and easier
to keep and develop current customers than to find new ones.
The “war for talent” approach emphasizes that employee reten-
tion can’t just start months or years after a person joins the
organization, because the employee’s perceptions of the organi-
zation are massively influenced by the following aspects:

• what he or she saw and heard before joining the organi-
zation,
• how he or she was treated right at the outset of the rela-
tionship, and only then
• how he or she is treated on an ongoing basis.
In other words, starting to work on retention a year or two
after a person joins the organization (a typical response in the
“employee turnover = employee retention” mindset), when
the possibility or probability of the employee leaving has
become obvious or acute, is much too late. Even starting to
work on retention as soon as a person joins the organization is
still too late.
Becoming an Employer of Choice
Finally, in our survey of current trends in employee retention,
we come to the concept of “employer of choice.” It’s basically a
variation of the “war for talent” approach.
In its raw form, the aggressive “war for talent” approach to
employee retention has proved somewhat too strong for many