STAFF RETENTION: RECRUITING AND RETAINING STAFF AND TEMP WORKERS
You’re a recruitment agency; you need to have a strong supply of temp staff, and find your own staff, which should be a breeze, right? Well, in theory…
Recruiting is one thing, but staff retention can be a completely different issue altogether.
Your vast pool of workers may all have different expectations in terms of what they want and need from the job. Recruiting temps from the outset and following this, retaining them means ensuring they are happy to work with you and your recruitment agency on a recurring basis, which could be a full time job in itself!
All of your staff, permanent within your organisation and your temps and agency workers need to be valued to be hopefully retained. You can use similar approaches with both sets of employees and in the interest of setting you on the right path and giving you a little inspiration, we at New Millennia have collated the following pointers.
Be Socially Active
Social media is a great way to reach the individuals you want to reach in the first place; with targeted social media advertising you can aim your recruiting efforts towards as narrow an audience as you need, based on interests, locations, age, employment – it’s a great tool to utilize.
In another line of social media activity, using your chosen platform or platforms, you can really get your staff involved in your company culture. Getting staff involved online is a great way to boost your friendly company culture and create an inclusive, interactive atmosphere.
Use twitter handles and create hashtags for staff and temps to get on board with and why not have one of your in house staff take over one of the social media channels for an hour?
Offer an attractive working environment
A positive working environment is going to make your staff happier, more productive and of course more likely to stay with your recruitment agency. So for this and so many other reasons, it is worth spending the time and the effort and creating an open, trusting, supportive environment for your workforce. This doesn’t have to mean an overly lively office, but you could have something small like a treat day once a week and get inventive, doughnuts one week and hand massages the next; or a rest and relaxation area for breaks and lunches. You could do something very simple like introduce a ‘buzz board’ where your staff can jot down an accomplishment or quote that speaks to them that day!
Now, your temps aren’t going to be part of the continuous office environment, but why not make sure there are occasions when they know they are welcome to pop in and take part in treat day for example?
Facilitating progression
Allow your staff to see their job as an opportunity for progression and something that can add to their skill set, increasing their value as an employee. Offering training and courses to all departments shows that you value your staff. As far as temps go, if you aren’t offering training for them, or don’t have the facility to do so, you can always make them aware of training going on that could help them progress, via emails and newsletters etc, making your recruitment agency their point of introduction to the training. Create a supportive and encouraging recruitment agency who provides useful content and information to all of your staff and workers.
Strong Communication
Strong communication within your organisation is another great way to encourage an open and flexible environment, ensuring your employees and temps feel comfortable to speak to colleagues, peers and management alike, about whatever they feel they need to. From a management point of view, feedback will flow so improvements can easily be made; those who feel their feedback is listened to are already feeling more valued.
This doesn’t all have to be literal open doors, use your online portals to their ultimate limits or look at peer messaging services like ’Slack’ so temps, who aren’t around your office environment, are able to communicate with everyone they need to and are still involved and up to date with exciting things going on, or aware of events you might be suggesting.
