Candidate Retention
Having examined the Employee Value Proposition and active sourcing strategies, we now come to the third component of TRM: candidate retention. The essence of the idea is quite simple. You usually only meet good people once in life, which is why employers
- PDF / 489,510 Bytes
- 17 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 95 Downloads / 232 Views
Candidate Retention
Having examined the Employee Value Proposition and active sourcing strategies, we now come to the third component of TRM: candidate retention. The essence of the idea is quite simple. You usually only meet good people once in life, which is why employers should make every effort to hold onto any promising candidates they meet and deem suitable for their company. I will use an example to further explain this idea. A student has enjoyed an internship at a company, and was found to be a talented, motivated, socially involved person. The company would like to employ this student straight away, but he/she “unfortunately” needs to complete his/her studies. In this case, candidate retention would mean actively maintaining contact with this person so as to secure them at the company once his/her studies are over. But this is just one example to help clarify the concept. Below, I will examine how these candidates are selected, where they come from, how a relationship can be actively maintained, and how to keep track of things. As already seen in the previous approaches, the idea sounds simple on paper, but raises a number of questions in practice. The aim of this chapter is to offer more clarity, inspiration and guidance.
7.1
The Candidate Retention Cycle
In the 1990s, and certainly by the early 2000s, more and more businesses started keeping a database of applicants who, although not deemed suitable for the position applied for, were still of potential interest. The applicants would be sent a friendly letter saying “We’re sorry, but you don’t meet the necessary criteria for this position. With your permission, however, we would like to store your application for future reference. We’ll be in contact as soon as we have found a suitable position for you,” or something similar. We know what happens next: virtually nothing. I was able to provide conclusive evidence of this in 2005 when I conducted my own study using fake, but high-quality applications. Most databases became data cemeteries, fob-off pools containing a countless number of B-grade applicants. The companies completely lost track of the information, and totally forgot about the A. Trost, Talent Relationship Management, Management for Professionals, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-54557-3_7, # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014
91
92 Fig. 7.1 The candidate retention cycle
7
Candidate Retention
Talent pool nomination Planning measures
Relationship management measures
Documentation
Job offer
Application process
candidates. Recruiters stopped trusting this data because, apart from some outdated applications, they had no concrete details about the candidates. This failed approach marked the first step towards candidate retention—an attempt to ensure good applicants were not forgotten. At least efforts were now being made to not completely discard people whose applications had been submitted, and whose interest in the company had been noted. What this approach obviously lacked, however, was the required level of focus on the really good appli
Data Loading...
