Winning ‘the War to Keep Your Employees’ Requires Re-Recruiting Your Top Talent

If you expect to win The War to Keep Your Employees, you must continually assure that the best offer that a top performing employee receives comes from inside your own firm. In order to assure that, management must periodically approach top talent and recruit them again (re-recruit) just as if they were a new external prospect. Although I coined the term re-recruit more than

20 years ago, it is still an effective retention tool today. Its basic premise is that you must re-energize your best employees every few years either by redesigning their jobs or offering them a new one that is clearly superior to what any external recruiter might offer them. Much like married couples can re-energize their marriage by renewing their vows, managers should periodically change and update what the company has to offer during the re-recruiting process. Re-recruiting is necessary because even if your top performers are loyal and have not actively applied for a new job, they are still constantly being identified, assessed, and contacted by corporate recruiters and by employees seeking out potential employee referrals. Your desirable employees will also be identified indirectly through benchmarking efforts and having their ideas and work viewed and/or read on the Internet and on social media. Why Re-recruiting Is Effective There are many reasons why re-recruiting your own employees is a powerful and proven retention and productivity improvement approach. Those reasons include: Re-recruiting can keep them out of a rut even well-treated top talent will eventually get bored or want a change of pace. Research has shown that entering a rut can occur as frequently as every

18 months, so new opportunities need to be offered frequently. Employees have continual contact with recruiters because the best employees are being contacted as many as five times a week, managers must realize that top talent doesn t need to apply for a job in order to get an external offer. Unfortunately, many managers are na ve and they don t realize that recruiter and referral contacts are continuous because the Internet and social media make finding and communicating with top talent so easy. The process makes internal offers more exciting re recruiting works because it is based on the foundation principle that top performers and innovators want 1) continuous excitement, 2) to be doing the best work of their life, and 3) to have a significant impact. To ensure that that these three things are continually happening, re-recruiting requires that you assign responsibility to both their manager and HR to maintain that excitement. And by sharing the responsibilities, you increase the likelihood that several individuals are making sure that targeted employees periodically receive superior internal offers that meet each of these three factors. Unexpected recognition can be powerful because re-recruiting is not a scheduled event, employees are often surprised and extremely pleased to hear that the firm thinks enough about them to recruit them again without the pressure created by an external offer. Obviously the same exact offer by the firm in response to an external offer would not be viewed as positively. In addition, because it happened once, most employees will assume that they will be periodically re-recruited in the future if they stay. Being first with an offer has an impact if their current firm makes their re-recruiting offer first, the odds are high that the employee will stay because of inertia, coworker and family pressure, and the fact that there is no counteroffer to compare to. Typical internal opportunities are not driven by competition because many employees are taken for granted and the manager is not aware of external competition, when managers do provide an internal offer, it is likely to be as much as

25 percent lower in rewards, excitement, and learning compared to the verbal offer that the employee received from an external recruiter. External recruiters beat internal managers at selling. Even if the internal opportunities received by your top performers are excellent, it is unlikely that they will be sold as effectively as an external recruiter can. Usually internal openings are merely posted and no internal recruiter will proactively contact the employee to tell them how exciting it is and how that employee would be a great fit. Internal offers usually come instead from managers who are not as skilled at selling as trained recruiters are. An external recruiter is likely to continually rave about a potential recruit s talents and potential, while those offering internal opportunities are likely to be more reserved. In addition, external recruiters never mention any downsides at their firm, so your employee will only hear about the rosy side of any new external opportunity. Your job is to assure that the best offer a top performer receives comes first from within your firm, as opposed to from an outside recruiter! Re-recruiting Action Steps The concept of re-recruiting is pretty simple. You apply the tools and strategies of external recruiting to your top current employees. It means that instead of waiting and then having to compete against other offers side by side, a manager proactively makes a compelling internal offer first to his or her top talent. Some action steps: Make re-recruiting a goal start by adopting the premise that unless they are re-recruited, no one will stay at your firm longer than 18-24 months. Drop loyalty from your vocabulary and assume you must continually excite top talent if you are to keep them. Make the best offer will come from the inside the goal for both managers and HR. Make successfully re-recruiting a percentage of top-performing employees each year part of a manager s bonus criteria. Develop a re-recruiting toolkit HR must accept responsibility for developing an effective re-recruiting approach. So HR must work with your external recruiting function to come up with dos and don ts and sample templates for managers to use. This toolkit should also include a list of the possible re-recruiting options (i.e. flexibility, pick your own project,

20 percent time, pick your own leader, etc.) that managers can offer to their re-recruited employees. Also consider putting up an internal online re-recruiting forum to exchange ideas and to share problems. Identify and prioritize re-recruiting targets require managers to identify who they would classify as regrettable turnover within their team. Prioritize those employees and focus your retention efforts on those employees who you would most regret losing. Identify which top performers are at risk of leaving although re-recruiting all top performers might be a good idea, limited resources may force you to focus your retention efforts on only those individuals who have a high risk of leaving in the near future. Recruiters can help by identifying which jobs and job families are being targeted by external recruiters. HR should help by developing a list of precursors or indicators that can help a manager assess whether a targeted individual employee is at risk of leaving. Some of those at-risk indicators may include average length of time in previous jobs, the number of frustration and excitement factors, whether an individual is overdue for a raise or promotion, and whether an employee feels underused. Put together a list of re-recruitment excitement factors provide managers with an updated list of the approved re-recruiting factors that have routinely excited employees during past re-recruiting efforts. This list can guide an individual manager so that they inclu