With the war for talent raging, companies need to ensure their arsenals are loaded with an overall employment package that wins top talent. Discover why it’s not just about the “Benjamins” when it comes to attracting, hiring and retaining the best people for your organization.

The struggle for talent just got really real. Not only is HR challenged with rewarding top talent, but with new and emerging workforce trends, like understanding AI and Big Data and candidate experiences, recruiting and retention just got way more complicated.

Employment projections from years past have already come to life where the labor demands are outstripping supply. Making it increasingly difficult for companies and their recruiters to attract great talent. And as the job market heats up, it seems that organizations of all sizes and statures can’t get to candidates fast enough.

Why You Can No Longer Buy Great Talent

According to a recent Labor Market Outlook report from Indeed, labor shortages are being felt across a multitude of industries due a number of factors; including:

• Aging and/or retiring work population
• Skills mismatch
• Misalignment of interest

Even in the most ideal recruiting scenarios, where the right candidate is engaged and sitting in front of you, if you don’t have a grasp on what motivates them (or someone like them) to take the job, than consider your talent acquisition strategy DOA. Getting to know the candidate persona and their goals on a more intimate level is the first step in acquiring great talent. To help paint the picture of today's recruiting and candidate landscape, consider how to incorporate the following hiring trends and best practices into your organization's talent acquisition strategy. 

Millennials Value Life Beyond Work

There are a lot of assumptions made about Millennials, but a little known truth about the newly named largest employable workforce is that they place a high emphasis on work and family life. Meaning their time is not up for negotiation.

In fact, a recent White House Economic Study found that roughly half of the Millennials surveyed reported it was important for them to live near friends and family; which compared to their Baby Boomer counterparts is up by twenty percent.

Money Doesn’t Buy Happiness or Talent

The Society of Human Resource Management released the Employee Job Satisfaction and Engagement report revealing two very important findings:

• Pay is important, but work culture can mean more
• When forming a compensation and benefits strategy, be flexible

Chapter 2 of the eBook: Why You Can't Buy Great Talent discusses why attracting and retaining top talent is no longer about dangling dollar bills. It’s about finding the right carrot for the right candidate; including knowing how to cultivate your human capital garden. 

Overly Complex Hiring Processes are Driving Candidates Away

Another way to quickly and easily drive away top talent is to lose them in your hiring process. It’s been reported that the average opening sat unfilled for 28.1 days in 2016, up from 19.3 days in 2001-2003. If you’re part of a company with 5,000 or more employees you might want to sit down for this next fact. Enterprise-level organizations experienced an average hiring rate of 58.1 working days! 

Hiring managers across the country are taking far too long to process, interview and decide on their next employee. As a result, the good ones are getting scooped up by those companies with well-developed and fine-tuned talent acquisition strategies. From the application procedure to on-boarding, have you considered what your hiring process says about what it's like to work at your organization?

Employee Retention Across All Workers is Essential

Consider this, 6.1 million individuals in the U.S. are categorized as remote workers; this includes full-time and part-time workers. By 2020, it is projected that nearly half of the workforce population will be freelance. For every contractor, contingent worker and temporary employee hired by your company, each are leaving a trail of sweet or sour bread crumbs behind them.

Best practices state that you should revisit your talent acquisition strategy on an on-going basis (at least annually) to ensure it meets the latest workforce trends, recruiting technologies and hiring landscape. However, most organizations either fail to meet this goal or to objectively assess the strategy. If you are sick of seeing dollar signs flying out the window over recruiting costs or timely fill times, take the time to really understand what is motivating your ideal employee population.