Tag Archives: retention of talent

Top challenges startups face in recruiting and retaining talent

Posted on by Vaishnavi Srinivasan
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Successful business founders usually attribute their success to having the right team. This is mainly because an early employee may significantly influence a startup’s success narrative.

The journey that the members take together forms a fantastic team. Hiring the appropriate individuals is the first step, though. Faster success may be achieved, especially for startups, by hiring workers that fit the company’s culture and possess the necessary technical abilities.

Reputation and visibility of the business

As a startup, you may have yet to hear of your company. Unlike larger firms, you don’t have a good reputation to rely on when looking for talent. It gets harder and harder to get top talent if no one has ever heard of your company. Candidates taking a chance by joining a startup business they’ve never heard of is risky. As much as we are reluctant to admit it, perception plays a significant role in applicant selection and impressions of employer brands, which is why hiring for your company may be challenging.

Your employer brand and employee value proposition

First and foremost, you must consider what distinguishes you from your major talent rivals—and yes, this also applies to the more well-known athletes. Many applicants will be attracted to your startup’s goal, beliefs, and culture, especially those seeking a challenge or wanting to be a part of something new.

You probably haven’t given building an EVP—a set of standards outlining what applicants may expect from your role as an employer—a lot of attention if you have a small staff, but you should in the present labor market. This will assist you in determining what makes your company a special place to work, which you can subsequently share with candidates and lay the groundwork for candidate perceptions of your employer brand. The EVP will serve as a blueprint for your business’s culture, including how you treat workers and what you expect of them. It’s a helpful tool for setting yourself apart from the opposition and enhancing your employer brand.

Lack of available tech talent

Tech recruiting is now challenging for companies of all kinds, especially startups, due to a worldwide skills shortage. The number of tech graduates coming out of universities each year is limited, and firms are doing all in their power to retain experienced IT professionals. How can you fill positions to expand your company if they don’t exist? As much as we’d all like to, you can’t always afford to hire employees from scratch, and waiting for suitable candidates to find you will delay your expansion ambitions. Since applicants are being snatched up rapidly due to the strong demand for IT skills, many firms are left in a bind.

Contacting unwilling or different prospects

The fact that every startup, so-called “scale-up,” and established business look to the same talent pool to meet recruiting demand explains why many are having trouble finding talent. As a result, when it comes to hiring, businesses need to be innovative and think outside the box. Consider different approaches to enlarging your talent pool, such as deploying paid advertising campaigns to connect with and interest relevant passive prospects in your position, or reconsider your definition of the perfect applicant. While attitudes cannot be learned, skills can. As a result, it could be advantageous for you as a business if you locate people that match your passion and beliefs but who might need some assistance honing their IT skill set.

Increased talent competition

There is a big surge of organizations hiring and looking for the same skills, in addition to a shortage of talent. This is a challenge for startups since you have to make a solid first impression on potential employees who may have never heard of you. The question of remuneration also arises if you are in direct competition with major tech firms, such as Amazon, Google, or Facebook. Due to a lack of financing, startups sometimes cannot offer the same benefits and compensation as these well-known companies. This makes it more challenging to attract talent since you run the danger of being pushed out of the competition.

How to solve the recruiting problem?

Use a platform for recruitment marketing that enables you to centrally manage job ads and applicant responses. Most platforms also measure how frequently job ads are watched and clicked on, allowing you to reduce spending where it is ineffective. Making it a practice to review and analyze statistics can help you identify the sources that yield the most qualified applicants and conversions.

To draw in top candidates, you must hire them swiftly and streamline the recruiting process. To hasten the process, it’s critical to create a recruiting strategy that outlines the precise knowledge and expertise you want in applicants, the money and effort you can commit to the search, the number of candidates needed, and the duration of the interview process. Additionally, everyone on your team has to be informed of this strategy.

Using simple language in the position description is a fantastic place to start. Your job postings should outline the duties, obligations, and credentials you want in an applicant. A project or success story connected to the available position might be highlighted in your description to personalize it even more. Potential candidates should be interested and informed by your job advertisement.

Conclusion

Your recruitment expertise is the key factor influencing how a firm is shaped. By conquering the hiring as mentioned above difficulties, you will be establishing the stringent standards required for your business to remain competitive in the marketplace today.

All of the advice mentioned above leads down to this: while developing recruiting techniques, applicant psychology must be your priority. However, what has worked for others might not be appropriate for handling your unique applicants. As a result, you need to pay special attention to how unique your business is and what sector it works in.

How Can organizational Culture Attract and Retain Talented Employees?

Posted on by Ankita Sanyal
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The constant focus for corporate companies lately has been paying attention to creating, fostering, and sustaining organisational culture, also called corporate culture. It is not P&G alone – all successful companies like IBM, HP, Apple, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, L&T, Tata’s, Wipro, Cognizant, or Infosys – have one underlying factor behind the success, and that is maintaining a workplace culture. Culture is like the DNA of the organisation, unique to itself. Culture has a direct proportional impact on employee attention, retention, performance and satisfaction. The value system of the workplace culture manifests itself through the language they speak, murals on the wall, their building aesthetics and a host of other artefacts. Companies with a strong workplace culture rightly consider it to be very precious. Sometimes more important than a trade secret and in some sense, unique. Organisational members begin to feel a strong bond with the company they are working for. The strong bond transcends material returns given by the organisation, and the employees begin to identify with it. The entire organisation turns into some clan. 

MEANING OF ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

`From a wider perspective, the word ‘culture’ linguistically translates to the universal set which includes knowledge, principles, beliefs, morals, law, custom and other capabilities and habits acquired by particular individuals in a society. Two important aspects of culture are cultural history and mutual phenomenon. Cultural History is the cultural mores of a society that are transgenerational. The second term points towards the cultural ethos and the principles that are shared among the members of society. In other words, unlike one-person specific, culture is a group-specific concept. Organisational culture or company culture is a reflection of the ideologies, values, assumptions, beliefs, expectations, attitudes and norms that weave an organisation together and are shared by its employees. Organisational members tend to internalise cultural policies and practices and like to indoctrinate newcomers into such moves. Some of these practices are thoroughly internalised that no one can question them – they are taken for granted; in other words, they get institutionalised.

UNDERSTANDING ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE:

Corporate culture mainly consists of three distinct levels, namely, common assumptions, shared values and observable values.

  1. OBSERVABLE CULTURE:

    At the surface is the observable culture, it could be considered as the first layer which manifests through symbols such as physical design, dress code, logos, gadget, and murals. It broadly includes unique office stories, traditions and rituals that add up to the history of the success of the organisation.

  2. SHARED VALUES:

    The second level includes shared values. Shared values apply to all organisational members, and no deviation is tolerated. Common uniformity and shared beliefs or mutual values represent a shared culture. Corporate Vision and Mission must be shared by all and must be binding all.

  3. COMMON ASSUMPTIONS:

    The third level is of Common assumptions, the deeper or hidden aspect of organisational culture. These are the taken for granted truths that every organisational member shares as a result of their collective experience. As difficult as it may be to isolate these patterns but doing so helps give a valid explanation of culture invading every aspect of organisational life. The common assumption may surface in an organisational crisis, like for example, the way a senior executive guilty of sexual harassment, is handled or an employee caught indulging in an ethical act is dealt with. How employees stand united to thwart hostile takeover bid and the way employees volunteer for pay cuts to steer the organisation from the financial crisis are also instances of the common assumptions.

ATTRACTION, SUSTENENCE AND RETENTION OF TALENT:

Few strategies that support the cause :

  • SELECTING AND SOCIALISING EMPLOYEES:

The main purpose of the hiring process to hire the right people for the right job. When for a given job, two or more candidates with identical skills and abilities are available final selection is influenced by how well a candidate fits into the organisation. By identifying candidates who can help with the organisational culture selection help sustain culture considerably. Job applicants to look at an organisation from its cultural perspective before seeking entry into it. More than pay and perquisites in an organisation offers, it is the cultural artefacts that often attract or detract job seekers. Along with selecting people with compatible values, companies maintain strong cultural aspects through the effective socialisation of new employees. 

The socialisation of employees is the learning process of every individual to acquire values, expected behaviour, and social knowledge necessary to assume their roles in the organisation.

Pre-arrival, encounter and metamorphosis are the three central stages of employee Socialisation. Pre-arrival is the initial stage that encircles the learning aspect that occurs before a new member joins the organisation. Encounter, the next stage, where the new employee sees what the organisation is and confronts where his/her expectations diverge reality. The last stage is related to lasting changes that take place. The new employee masters and adjusts the skills required for his or her new roles in accordance with his or her work group’s values and norms.

  • PERFORMANCE AND SATISFACTION:

Company culture has a significant impact on performance. Culture has an innate quality of performance enhancement for at least four reasons.

    1. Culture makes strategy implementation
    2.  Organisational wide common goals as employees share common goals
    3. a strong culture creates a high level of motivation because of the mutual values shared by the members
    4. strong culture provides a control mechanism without the prospect of bureaucracy

There is a correlation between organisational culture and employee satisfaction. But individual needs of employees main monetary the relationship between culture and satisfaction. In general, satisfaction will be the highest when there is congruence between individual needs and organisational culture. For instance, an organisation whose culture would be characterised is low in structure, having loose supervision and rewarding employees for higher achievement is more likely to have more satisfied employees if those employees have a higher achievement need and prefer autonomy. Thus, job satisfaction often varies according to employees’ perception of the culture.

  • STRONG COMMITMENT FROM EMPLOYEES:

Culture not only increases their commitment to the organisation but also creates a sense of identity in them. When employees in the values of the company define their work intrinsically rewarding and identified with their fellow workers, motivation is enhanced, and their morale has an automatic boost. The commitment of employees could be picturised as a three phases plan :

    1. Compliance – people confirm to obtain some material benefit.
    2. Identification – the demands of culture are accepted to maintain good relationships with colleagues.
    3. Internalisation – People find that the adoption of cultural values of the organisation produces intrinsic satisfaction because these values are in line with their personal values. In many ways, This is an ideal status as far as the acceptance of organisational values are concerned and if widespread, is indicative of a strong culture.

  • MAINTAINING A STABLE WORKFORCE:

An organisation’s culture is embedded and projected through the minds of its employees. Organisational stories are rarely written down; rituals and celebration do not usually exist in manual, and organisation metaphors are not found in corporate directories. Thus, a stable workforce that communicates and reinforces the dominant beliefs and values is what an organisation seeks. High turnover and downsizing can demolish the organisational culture because the ‘corporate memory’ leaves along with those employees. Organisational culture also weakens during periods of rapid expansion or mergers because it takes time for incoming employees to learn about and accept the dominant corporate values and beliefs. For this reason, some organisations keep their culture intact by keeping a mindful check on their employee growth and turnover ratios.

  • CULTURALLY CONSISTENT REWARDS:

Reward systems strengthen corporate culture when they are consistent and with cultural values. Aggressive cultures might offer more performance-based individual incentives, whereas Paternalistic cultures would more likely offer employee assistance programs, medical insurance, and other fringe benefits that support employees’ well being.

How important is organization culture for any organisation? Is it more important than the monetary aspects? Let is know in the comments below