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 NEWSRe-recruitment: Keep your people from walking out the door By John Kador January 12, 2001 If you're not aggressively recruiting your current employees, guess what? You're the only person who isn't.
 Re-recruitment is the newest weapon in a company's retention arsenal. These heightened retention efforts will play an increasingly important role as corporate -- and recruitment -- budgets tighten.Top performers are constantly targeted by other companies. Re-recruitment devotees make it their mission to remind top performers why they signed on with the company in the first place. A re-recruitment program carries enormous benefits but is not easy to deploy: It requires that management take a critical look at how and why star employees leave. Honest conversations "Why is it that only 54 percent of companies have retention strategies when 100 percent of them have recruiting strategies?" asks Sharon Jordan-Evans, co-author of Love 'Em or Lose 'Em: Getting Good People to Stay. "It's a fundamental disconnect that guarantees companies will suffer from costly turnovers." The problem, Jordan-Evans says, is symptomatic of how corporate resources focus on the initial sale, or candidate recruitment, to the detriment of ongoing service, or employee re-recruitment. "What attracts us and keeps us are different," she says. Recruiting is part dog-and-pony show. The company puts forth the best side of its work, mission, and corporate culture. That's not enough. Companies often fail to hold on to the hearts, heads, and spirits of top performers. "How can they?" Jordan-Evans asks, "when employers often have little or no clue about what really makes employees stay and what makes them head for the door?" According to Jordan-Evans, the re-recruitment approach is to ask them, "What would it take for another company to lure you away from us?" Few managers -- or employees -- are prepared to deal with this loaded question. Managers often oppose asking employees such candid questions. The answers they might hear could cut both personally and professionally. They also fear putting ideas into employees' heads or dread being unable to respond effectively. "These are symptoms of an industrial-age approach to human resources," Jordan-Evans says. Training for re-recruitment Not every manager fears the direct approach. "We don't want to hide from the reality of the labor market," says Judy Ehrenreich, vice president of human resources at Pacificare Health Systems, in Santa Ana, Calif. "We recognize that every Pacificare employee is a target recruit for another employer, [and] we believe in being adult about the dynamics that are a reality for every employee and every employer," Ehrenreich says. In its Northwest region, Pacificare is experimenting with a re-recruitment training program designed to get front-line supervisors to ask just the right questions. Managers go through a half-day training seminar based on the ideas in Jordan-Evans' Love 'Em or Lose 'Em. The goal is to create opportunities for employees and managers to hold candid conversations which will allow Pacificare to really understand and preempt the hot offers that might lure employees away. Pacificare's re-recruitment training program is less than a year old, but Ehrenreich is confident that it will make a difference in the quality and longevity of the relationships between employees and their managers. "The key part of the training is to prepare managers for re-recruitment conversations so they can shape expectations realistically," she says. Initiating the conversation and then responding to employees' statements effectively and with authority is important. "Managers know what they can offer so that they don't make a commitment they can't deliver. The conversation is about probing what the managers can realistically put energy into," Ehrenreich says. Training for the tough conversation and identifying retention risk are also part of the re-recruitment program at The Hartford Financial Services Group, in Hartford, Conn. When are employees most vulnerable to being recruited away? Hartford managers ask this and other questions such as 'What are the hot areas in which super-skilled employees are most targeted? How does geography enter into the equation?' "Based on this type of [inquiry], The Hartford can put some strategies around those people in particular," says John Madigan, vice president of human resources for The Hartford's 3,500-member IT group. IT managers are also trained to conduct retention risk assessments. A key part of the training, says Madigan, is for managers to recognize that employees in their first year with a company are more of a turnover risk than their more senior colleagues. Re-recruitment role playing Role-playing is an essential part of management re-recruitment training. Diana Barlow, an assistant director at The Hartford's IT financial unit, and other managers conduct mock discussions with trainers. "The trainers walked me through all the steps, trying to understand what about my job is important to me and attempting to retain me," Barlow says. After training, Barlow developed a short list of questions designed to get her seven-member team to clarify the values they considered most important. She gave her team members a week to think about it and then met with them one by one. The conversations, not surprisingly, centered on issues of career advancement, training and certification, financial security, and work/life balance. The results were often startling. One of Barlow's employees was surprised to find that her values had shifted within the past nine months. Such unacknowledged changes often lead to people leaving because a manager can address only acknowledged problems. Another staffer wanted to be on the top of the challenging assignment list but also wanted flexible work arrangements including leaving the office on time and working from home. The conversations around these issues created more possibilities for worker satisfaction, according to Barlow. "In each case we identified the values that keep people at The Hartford," Barlow says. "For each value we established an action step. For those values that are presently being met, the issue is 'how does The Hartford keep meeting them?' For those values that we are not presently meeting, the issue is what can we do to meet them?" These insights have brought compensation and training changes to the company. The Hartford is compressing the compensation-cycle times: Semi-annual salary reviews may not be sufficient for the most talented employees. The company is also rolling out a corporate university with online access to course work and professional development. Re-recruitment risk But re-recruitment is not without its risks. "Keeping employees in a continuous recruitment mode has a downside," says Kathi Jones, director of employee central (human resources) at Aventail, a provider of extranet services, in Seattle. "There's a threshold you must be sensitive to, because employees who are in perpetual recruitment mode may not get the sense of ownership in the company that is so critical for retention," says the HR director. To Jones, the key to re-recruitment is employee referrals. In response to an aggressive referral program, more than 60 percent of Aventail hires come from other employees. "The main benefit is that referred employees have a vested interest in making things work out," she says. Aventail's retention rate is hovering at approximately 92 percent, Jones says, a figure that may be skewed upward because Aventail is in startup mode, but that rate is higher than the industry retention average of nearly 60 percent. Motivators All successful re-recruitment programs are driven by the reality that what motivates a candidate may radically change after he or she has become an employee. Strategies that fail to recognize this are doomed to fail. "Money and perks matter more in recruitment mode than in retention mode," says Aventail's Jones. "What a candidate really wants to know is, 'Will I love this job?' That's impossible to know in advance, so they concentrate on things they can know: money, stock options, perks, the BMW." But when the candidate gets on board and becomes an employee, the issues that were indefinite -- the work, the career path, the boss -- now come to the fore. And the individual elements of the package that attracted the candidate in the first place decrease in importance to the employee. "If they are not happy with the working conditions, they won't stay for the car or the good pay check," Jones says. "They will look for the next place to land." Re-recruitment works when a company understands what matters most to individual employees, anticipates when an employee is open to lures from another company, and is prepared to customize a response that meets the needs of both the company and the employee. "Customization in re-recruiting is even more critical than in recruiting," Jones says. "Companies need to be constantly asking, 'What rings this person's chimes?' and 'How can we give him or her more of that?'" Role for recruiters Increasingly, companies are giving their in-house recruiters an important role in the re-recruitment mission. "It makes sense because often the recruiter and the employee have forged a good relationship," says Jason Warner, who leads the recruiting team at Bellevue, Wash.-based ECS, an Oracle software consulting unit of CSC. "Why not leverage that relationship? Although the front-line manager is ideally the best [person] to recognize an employee's vulnerability to being recruited, in practice recruiters are often better equipped to leverage the relationship in order to address issues which may prompt the employee to take that recruitment phone call." Creating a foundation for an ongoing relationship between employees and the recruiters who brought them into the company is not easy. At a minimum, it requires companies to rethink the way they compensate recruiters. It also demands a mechanism that, when the facts support it, will enable a recruiter to go to bat for top performers who are thinking of leaving the company. Related article Retaining your most valuable assets John Kador is a free-lance writer in Geneva, Ill. Contact him at jkador@jkador.com.
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