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34 Retaining Top Employees

Backswing: Recruiting for Retention

After visualizing the shot and selecting the right club, it’s time to
take action. That begins with the backswing. Lesser golfers tend
to overlook the importance of the backswing—and their game
suffers as a result.
In retention, the backswing is every recruiting activity we
undertake before hiring a prospect. Two aspects of the recruit-
ment process impact effective retention—how the organization
hires and the impression made during the recruitment process.

Using the Right Hiring Model
The changes in the underlying “employment contract” that we
saw in Chapter 1—particularly the move away from the tradi-
tional “status quo” model, the growth of outsourcing, and the
rise of the free agent—have resulted in a number of alternative
“hiring models.”
In addition to the classic “core employee”—a full-time
employee in a single job—we have alternative hiring models
such as job sharing, flexible working, telecommuting, contract-
ing, etc. An essential element of retention is choosing the best
hiring models to match employee preferences with the tasks to
be performed. Using the wrong hiring models will result in
stressed, unproductive employees and high turnover.
In Chapter 7 we look in detail at the various hiring models
and how and why to use each.

Communicating Consistently
As we saw above, effective retention begins before the employee
joins the organization. It starts with every image, every message,
every impression the organization conveys in the marketplace.
Every potential employee is first a member of the general
public, impacted by the organization’s overall image just like
everyone else, forming impressions and making conscious and
subconscious decisions based on everything he or she sees and
hears about you before and after the hire—not just on your
carefully controlled post-hire “employee communications.”