Step 2: Shift your marketing spend. How much of your marketing budget are you spending to tell your story to attract talent? My guess is very little. I have spent endless hours exploring corporate career sites and company job boards and few of them show any effort to attract talent. Instead, the marketing is often re-constituted sales material that, from a potential employee’s perspective, is redundant and uninspiring. Revamp it! Show prospective employees you understand who they are and what they want. Use videos, social media and testimonials to tell the stories of employees who are just like them. Show community. Show opportunity. Show your culture. Maximize social media. Yes, create a TikTok video! If you don’t know how to do this, find someone who does and put your marketing resources behind it. Step 3: Remove barriers. Try this: grab your smartphone and log on to your company website and look for your career site. Is it easy to find? Next, look at your job openings. Do they look cool? Would a Gen Z be inspired to apply? Remember, 90 percent of job seekers look for jobs from their mobile devices. Next, try applying using your mobile phone. Not easy? That’s a problem because the vast majority of employees in the first 10 years of their careers are applying for jobs using their mobile devices. Keep going—did you fill out the employment application? Hard, right? Having to search for the names, phone numbers and addresses of previous employers and educational institutions, and then having to populate the application fields using your smartphone is close to impossible. Simplify your application and keep revising it until it’s easy to complete. Don’t forget to capture candidates who start job applications. If they bailed before completion, it’s likely not because they are uninterested but because your application was too hard to complete. They still may be interested in the position. Step 4: Use your imagination. Wages are going up—fast. To remain competitive, many employers are paying more for talent than they budgeted and then they are facing internal inequities with their existing talent pool. Yes, pay is important, but so are other things. Young workers want to do well, but they also want to do good. How can you help them do that? Most young workers would take less pay for more time off. They want to travel—how can you help them do that? Who wouldn’t want a leased car or a holiday vacation rental as a perk? Stop thinking only about pay and look for innovative and creative perks and benefits that can attract and inspire the talent you want. Step 5: Focus on flexibility. It’s no surprise that, after more than a year of working from home, employees want to maintain some form of flexibility. Those who cannot work from home want that flexibility, too. Survey after survey show that employees will be more loyal, more engaged and will even accept less pay in exchange for more workplace flexibility. Not sure how to do that? Ask your employees for ideas on how you can create and maintain a flexible workplace, regardless of job role. Yes, 2022 looks like it’s going to be challenging from a hiring and retaining standpoint. With empathy, creativity and imagination, you can make it the best year yet. Claudia St. John, SPHR, SHRMSCP is president of Affinity HR Group, PPAI’s affiliated human resources partner, which specializes in providing human resources assistance to associations, including PPAI and its member companies. www.affinityHRgroup.com. Showprospective employees you understand who they are andwhat they want. Use videos, socialmedia and testimonials to tell the stories of employeeswho are just like them. | JANUARY 2022 | 65 THINK
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