Roberta Matuson* says that too often organisations losing good people concentrate on improving their hiring practices rather than asking why people leave in the first place.
Recently, I received an invitation to complete a Request for Proposal (RFP).
The email outlining the request was a page long, and that didn’t even include the RFP.
I politely declined. Here’s why.
The sender was complicating what, in my opinion, is a simple matter — are we doing a good job of attracting and retaining talent?
If not, what steps do we need to take to improve in this area.
Instead, they were looking to capture all sorts of metrics around talent management.
Here’s what I wrote back to the person who wanted to refer me for this project.
“I’m going to take a pass, as I don’t do RFP’s.
Followed by: “My goodness…imagine what would happen if they redirected their efforts to implementing best practices and developing their leaders so that people would never want to leave.
I get that it takes considerably less effort to gather data and analyse it until the cows come home, which explains why so many organisations go into analysis paralysis.
Sometimes, it’s hard to get out of our own way.
Let’s say you keep listing the same job posting, and you’re not getting the suitable candidates to respond.
Would you continue to throw good money after bad if you were using a particular advertisement for your products and weren’t gaining much traction? I think not.
You may need to tweak what you’re doing. Or you may need an entirely different recruitment strategy.
If attracting and hiring talent isn’t your area of expertise, then consider getting some outside help.
However, be wary of recruitment sites that promise to find you X number of candidates for the low price of Y.
I’m sure you can pull in bodies on your own. What you need are suitable candidates.
Or perhaps you have a leader who is critical to the organisation. This person is great at a lot of things and not so great at managing people.
You’ve spent hours trying to guide them. Yet, for some reason, you’ve been unable to get this person where you need them to be.
Here’s your reality. If you’ve tried helping this leader, and he’s not getting better, several more months of the same thing aren’t going to change his behaviour.
If this person is so valuable to the organisation, then consider engaging an experienced coach. Do this now.
The labour shortage is here and it isn’t going to go away.
The sooner you take action, the better positioned you’ll be to snag and keep your share of the talent pool.
*Roberta Matuson is President of Matuson Consulting. She can be contacted at [email protected].
This article first appeared at matusonconsulting.com.
