Just like married couples can restore energy in their relationship by renewing their vows, managers can strengthen their relationships with employees by applying the process of re-recruiting. It is a term coined more than twenty years ago by a respected consultant in HR and current professor of management at San Francisco State University John Sullivan. In a recent article on ERE.net Sullivan explains that re-recruiting (repeated recruitment) is a simple tool for retaining the best employees.
"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," says Sullivan.
Re-recruiting is particularly effective because even the best talent gets bored at work one day. When such a time comes, you will have a great advantage if you come with an interesting offer first. Managers should count with the fact that these people are getting competitive offers quite frequently, and therefore there is a need to strengthen internal recruitment. Cooperation of HR and managers is essential.
Action steps for HR
- Start from the premise that without re-recruiting your best people will not stay with the company longer than 18-24 months. Make re-recruiting one of the criteria for evaluating the success of managers.
- Create tools for re-recruiting. Get inspired by external recruitment strategies and prepare instructions for managers on how to offer new internal opportunities.
- Ask managers to clearly describe which employees they may do without and which they want to retain.
- Find employees at highest risk of leaving in the near future. Provide managers with indicators to find it out.
- Provide managers with a list of factors that have helped to retain key employees in the company in the past.
- Prepare individual plans to retain specific people. These plans should include your goals, measures of success and the persons responsible for the individual steps of the plan.
- Train managers in how to talk about new job offers with employees and pair them with recruiters to help them.
- Upgrade and enhance the process of re-recruiting with regard to the labor market development. Six moths after the re-recruiting, talk to the employees again to see what works and what does not.
Employees themselves can help you find the indicators of an increased risk that somebody is going to leave. Just regularly ask what they like and dislike about their work.
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