Small Business Leaders: Now Is the Time to Rethink Your Talent Management Practices

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Retention

By Steve Saah, Executive Director of Finance and Accounting Permanent Placement, Robert Half

Here’s some news from the labor market that’s both good and bad for small business leaders and other employers seeking to retain valued talent. A Robert Half survey found that only 35% of workers plan to look for a new job before the end of this year. In a similar survey our company conducted last year, that figure was significantly higher for the same period in 2023 — 49%.

The upside for small businesses is that retaining talent should be a little easier, at least for the near term. The downside? With fewer professionals actively on the job hunt, hiring is likely to become that much harder. Eighty-eight percent of hiring managers at small businesses already face challenges finding skilled candidates, according to research conducted for Robert Half’s latest Demand for Skilled Talent report.

These findings help to underscore why it’s important for small business leaders to start their evolution toward a holistic approach to talent management. Making this shift will enable them to recruit, develop and retain in-demand professionals more effectively.

As I explained in a recent post, moving away from traditional (i.e., reactive) hiring practices is a critical step toward positioning your firm for future success. But how do you start this journey? Addressing the following four questions is a solid starting point. They require you to “look in the mirror” and evaluate your current strategies for attracting top talent.

4 Questions for Small Business Leaders About Their Current Approaches to Talent Attraction and Retention

What are you doing now to elevate and differentiate your employer brand?
Does your company offer jobs, or careers?
Are you hitting the right notes in your pitches to potential hires?
What are you doing to maintain a pipeline of talent?

If you were a professional with in-demand skills and experience, would you want to work for your small business? It’s easy for you to say “yes” because you’re already on the inside, and you know what makes your company a great place to work. But what if you were on the outside, looking in?

Think about your website, for example. What would a potential employee find there beyond all the basic information they might expect? Do you also feature:

Details about your organization’s history, company culture, and mission and values?

Links to news and resources that help highlight your firm’s expertise and accomplishments?

Team bios and photos, which help to show the human side of your business?

Career opportunities available at your small business? (More on this later.)

And what about your social media presence? How are you using sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram to promote your organization, engage with clients and the community, and attract potential hires? Social media is an ideal forum for sharing news about your firm, your team’s thought leadership, and images and video that offer insight into what it’s like to work at your small business.

If you’re not doing these things well, or at all, you’re missing a prime opportunity to showcase why people would want to be part of your firm.

When you advertise an available position at your small business, how do you describe the opportunity? Are you using the listing to emphasize why a talented professional would want to join your organization, or are you just jumping straight into the requirements for the role?

Most leading employers today make the point to create job ads that focus on the candidate first. Often, they address potential applicants as “you,” and seek to engage them by sharing details about benefits and perks, the corporate culture, the company’s values, and more.

The best job descriptions also typically provide a snapshot view of what the person would do in the role, using dynamic verbs to create a sense of energy (e.g., collaborate, coordinate, analyze). The most effective descriptions also highlight professional development and learning opportunities for employees to help candidates understand how joining the firm could be a career-building or growth opportunity versus just “finding a job.”

As noted earlier, our workplace research shows that fewer professionals in the U.S. are inclined to look for a new job in the second half of 2024. But what might entice workers sitting on the sidelines to consider making a move?

Robert Half’s research helps shed some light here. We learned from our workplace research that professionals looking for a job now, or planning to do so soon, are seeking at least one of the following:

A higher salary (52%)

Better benefits and perks (46%)

A higher-level position and/or more senior title (32%)

A job with more remote flexibility than their current employer offers (21%)

So, as you seek to elevate the profile of your small business and create job descriptions that can help potential hires visualize being part of your team, be sure to communicate that you offer competitive compensation, benefits and perks. (Consulting resources like Robert Half’s latest Salary Guide can help confirm that you are in line with market trends.)

As for remote flexibility, don’t dismiss its importance. Thirty-eight percent of professionals who told us they don’t plan to look for a new job anytime soon said they are staying put because their current position offers a level of flexibility they don’t want to lose.

If you aren’t offering flexible work arrangements, and promoting them, you could be missing the mark with a significant percentage of potential applicants for your available jobs. You could possibly risk losing your current team members, too.

Taking a more holistic approach to talent management includes becoming more adept at anticipating hiring needs for your small business so you can avoid being reactive — and potentially making poor hiring decisions while under pressure.

Many leading employers go to great lengths to maintain a robust pipeline of talent so that they always have options when they need to staff a role. For example, they:

Grow talent from within through various strategies like upskilling and succession planning.

Seek out high-potential talent at colleges and universities and offer them internships and other work opportunities that can position them for full-time jobs at the firm once they graduate

Engage contract professionals to meet short-term needs for specialized skills, or to help keep important work moving forward as the business searches for permanent hires

Forge relationships with reputable recruiters who can help the business develop and deploy different talent solutions to meet changing demands

The tips outlined in this post can help you modernize your talent management strategies so that your small business can stand out as an employer of choice and become more strategic and proactive with its hiring and staffing practices.

In the next installment of this series, we’ll take a closer look at how embracing flexible work and nontraditional staffing models can help your firm increase its competitive edge when recruiting skilled talent.

Follow Steve Saah on LinkedIn.

The original version of this article appeared on the CPA Practice Advisor website.

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