The year 2020 has hit hard every single business on this planet. Even as the Covid-19 pandemic rages and shows no signs of ebbing, businesses small to large are encountering immense hardships when it comes to attracting, hiring and retaining employees this year. Nearly 60 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits, at the time of writing this article. Not to mention the number of businesses that’ve filed for bankruptcy or shut shop altogether.
At the same time, this doesn’t explicitly imply that hiring has come to a grinding halt altogether. Instead, businesses of every size across the US and around the world are adapting their hiring processes while striving to retail available talent. And they achieve it in simplest possible ways that nobody possibly ever imagined earlier.
Therefore, here’re some amazing tips for hiring and retaining staff in 2020 and beyond.
Tips To Hire & Retain Staff In 2020 And Beyond
These tips are currently in use around the world. Businesses are adapting their needs in line with the challenges of social distancing, reluctance to relocate and other issues the pandemic continues to create. These amazing tips for hiring and retention in 2020 could help your business too.
Hire Through LinkedIn
Every business organization is aware of the huge cost of hiring. There’re direct and indirect costs whenever you wish to hire someone for any vacancy. These include cost of posting ads on a superb job board, shortlisting suitable applicants, interviewing, recruitment and training, to say the least.
And we’re all aware that wrong hiring can sometimes irreparably damage a business.
In 2020, LinkedIn is the best way to hire. In fact, LinkedIn accounts for at least one hire every 10 seconds in the world, which is an impressive figure by any standards. When you hire through LinkedIn, it’s possible to check and verify the applicant’s credentials almost instantly. You can gauge the jobseeker’s profile from the references and projects they’ve done prior to applying at your organization.
Consider Work From Home Jobs
The Covid-19 pandemic is causing an unprecedented spurt in the number of organizations offering work from home jobs. Understandably, not every business process is online. However, shifting as many processes online has clearly given a lifeline to many businesses that would otherwise have floundered and failed during this global crises.
Therefore, one of the amazing ways to attract superb talent is by shifting a lot of your processes online and recruiting telecommute or home-based employees either on full-time or part-time basis. Telecommuting or work from home jobs means you can attract the best talent from across the country.
Given the number of jobseekers in the country, caused by high unemployment, you would most likely find highly skilled and qualified employees by providing work from home facilities.
Provide Online Training
The absence of training is often cited among the top reasons for staff attrition. That’s understandable, because no employee regardless of their position and responsibilities wants to lag over their peers in other organizations.
Nowadays, there’re countless online training courses available for almost every skill. And they’re reasonably priced too- meaning they won’t burn the proverbial hole in the pocket of your business. Look for such training programs and provide them to employees.
Online training has two benefits for your business. First, it helps retain staff by developing a sense of loyalty and cutting down time between joining and full productivity. Secondly, it helps your organization to effectively buffer and counter any competition against stealing a march in the market.
Look for Freelancers
America is home to the single largest freelance workforce in the world with close to 53 million freelancers working on online as well as offline jobs. There would definitely be processes within your organization that don’t really require full-time employees. In such cases, you can outsource the work from freelancers and those looking for side-gigs.
Freelance work is available on single project or assignment, short, mid and long term contract basis. And you can specify the exact skills you’re looking from a freelancer to find the best talent for your business.
An advantage of hiring freelancers is that it doesn’t lengthen your payroll while avoiding the prospect of tasking existing staff with additional responsibilities. Freelancers can work alone or in collaboration with an existing staff member to fetch best results for your business.
Provide Flexible Working Hours
Flexible working hours are one of the greatest attractions of working from home. It allows your staff to enjoy their personal life while giving their best to work. Researches and studies worldwide prove conclusively that work from home or remote employees enjoy an overall better and happier lifestyle compared over their office going counterparts.
Therefore, one of the best ways to attract and retain workers during the pandemic in 2020 and beyond is providing flexible work hours. This also enables your business to be online round the clock and increases productivity at a time when most organizations are witnessing colossal losses.
Understandably, not every process would merit flexible working hours. In such cases, you can identify where such timings and possible and where they aren’t. In such instances, you’ll have to synchronize working hours to ensure there’re no delays due to different work schedules and patterns within the organization.
In Conclusion
Though 2020 has brought about challenges never seen earlier in recent decades, it’s still possible for both businesses and employees to survive and thrive. All it requires is adapting to newer working conditions and the grit to do so.
Author Bio: Mitali Roy is a passionate blogger whose career revolves around writing, which she fondly calls "the art of words." Writing about career and business is what she enjoys the most.
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