Our key takeaways from Jacqueline Davies’ session on Attracting and retaining the best talent at our Workforce Conference are:
Attracting and retaining the best talent: Key takeaways from Jacqueline Davies’ session at our Workforce Conference
- “Re-think your mind set. Being a good talent magnet is vital if you’re going to stay competitive.”
- “Use data relentlessly – join the dots on your internal data; demographics, health, pay & performance. Use external sources like LinkedIn to help you to analyse which of your workforce are likely to leave, and to map out your competitors.”
- “If you work in HR, my challenge to you is you should be spending at least a quarter of your time getting out of the office gathering talent intelligence. Be talent rather than vacancy led. Get to know the people you want to hire in the future and look in different places.”
- Just how critical the skills shortage is: When Jacqueline wrote her book on talent 10 year three skills were in short supply at the time (engineering, IT and digital) whereas now; former REC CEO, Kevin Green’s insight in his book, Competitive People Strategy shows that in 2019, there are now 75 skills at all levels in short supply. This will grow.
- Jacqueline ended the talk with her tips on talent strategy which is that you should ensure your strategy is focused on the following 5 things:
- The capabilities your firm will need to thrive in five years time.
- Knowing who & where the critical talent is – these are not always the most senior people – they are the roles & people that make the difference.
- Releasing and relocating people to make space for new skills and shape your future business.
- Be open minded on how you create roles can there be more job shares, can there be interim how can you make your workforce more agile?
- Finally, the most vital action is know your people well, who are they, what do they care about, what commitment do they have outside of work, what strengths do they bring with them, what do they aspire to do? And ensure you line managers can build deep, trusted relationships. You can have the best employment proposition in the market but without this the old adage rings true ‘people join organisations but leave managers’…
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