By:
Anne Hamill
Managing Director
Design Director

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The recession is over – stop the stampede!
Career Management as a Retention Strategy
 

Good news - the recession is nearing its end.  Bad news – your key people may be poised to leave, no longer fearing the position of being last in (potentially first out) at a new organisation. In fact, in a survey of 18,000 employees in European firms, 1 in 4 indicated that they plan to leave in the next 12 months.

So how do you make staying more attractive? How do you help your employees develop the skills and strategies they need to advance their career internally, without having to leave?

Talent is a top commodity in today's workplace. While it used to be that a company would advance over their competition by producing a better product, now organisations are recognizing the value of the talented minds and skills behind that creative process.

As a Talent Manager or  HR Director,  you're juggling the demands and frustrations of both directors and employees. Directors are urging you to recruit and retain high-potential talent, while those talented employees feel like their gifts are being wasted or overlooked because of the lack of openings while the recession lasted.  They are looking to be promoted, and they are prepared to move on.

These ambitious individuals are being told that moving to a new company every two or three years is the way to build a successful career – “You can’t afford to stand still”. In fact one of the most common questions we are asked when running career workshops is “How long can I afford to stay with one company?’  And it seems easy enough to move to another organisation, with online job boards and other quick ways to shop around.

The lure to change jobs is difficult to combat, especially when employees don’t see the high price tag of leaving. They may not appreciate the significance of the fact that every time they start in a new company, they're starting from scratch – no one knows who they are, what they can do or how they work. They don't know the subtleties of how the organisation operates, their track record is meaningless in a new environment, and they have lost the network of people with whom they trade favours to get things done.

At the same time, the benefits of staying, as well as any internal opportunities, can be largely invisible. If you want to retain talented people, you need to re-educate employees about career success.  They need to understand exactly how to drive an internal career and find or create opportunities that will take them forward.

In our interviews of "high fliers," all top performers in their careers, we saw concrete evidence that moving around every 2-3 years is not the way to get ahead. Most of these successful people stayed in one organisation for 8-12 years.

That's not to say they stayed in the same job; not at all. They moved up, they moved sideways, they moved diagonally. Some of these moves were planned strategically; but the majority were spontaneous seizing of unexpected opportunities – but opportunities they had helped to create.

These top performers all affirmed that internal promotions are based on networking and reputation—and you can't easily take those with you when you go.

So 3 questions to ask yourself are:

• “Do our talented people know the facts about how to drive a successful internal career?”
• “Do they understand the invisible career assets they hold, which they will lose if they leave?”
• “Do they have the skills and tactics to source a range of internal opportunities – or are they waiting for HR to do it for them?”

Once employees understand the benefits of staying and the price of leaving, they need the tools to be proactive and build their own successful careers.  This is where career management training is vital, as your talented people need to know this – that if you want to drive a successful internal career, you need to :

1. Become crystal clear about your strengths and how to convey these in both informal and formal situations.  This involves analysis to get a clear sense of direction, a knowledge of when you can drip feed information about what you are looking for, and practice in using informal situations – not just interviews – to put across what you are good at, and where you are going.
2. Quantify your achievements – collect hard figures that back up your stories of successful product launches, an improvement in customer satisfaction, savings made as a result of your work.  Having hard figures at your fingertips is vital to solidify your reputation and help you move up.
3. Build and nurture good relationships — drop in on people to have a face-to-face conversation instead of sending an email; be generous in doing favours and getting involved in initiatives outside your area, show interest in catching up with past colleagues, and helping them. 
4. Put the word out – find ways of letting people know about your successes and what you're looking for in future opportunities. This combination of actively building your network by doing favours and letting others know the kind of help you need, is a key tactic that successful people use.  Doing this consistently will throw up unexpected career opportunities that they might never otherwise have discovered.

Our evidence, based on the analysis of over 3000 job moves of successful people, is that 35% of their job opportunities come because they are invited to apply based on their reputation – so doing great work and building your reputation is the key skill you need!  A further 20% come from their network, and a further 12% come from using their initiative to find, create or negotiate positions.  By mid career, these three tactics are often the only source of job opportunities.

Equipping people with facts about careers, and the tactics of those who have navigated a fast track internal career is a great way of keeping good people – because it enables good people to find, negotiate and create jobs that keep them in the organisation.  It has other benefits as well.  In one company, adding a career management element to a high potential programme helped the company to double its internal fill rate at senior levels. While at one stage they were looking outside the company to fill 70% of all vacancies, after this programme was introduced, more than 50% of positions were filled internally.

Programme participants got clearer about the opportunities they were looking for, and became proactive in seeking them out. They even advocated for each other, if they heard about an opening that matched what one of their colleagues was after.

As a talent manager, you are uniquely poised to help employees discover the richness of opportunity that exists within your organisation. This will benefit these talented individuals so they don't risk moving somewhere new and having to start again. And it will benefit Directors who will spend far less time—your time—and money on recruitment. Everybody wins—you've stopped the stampede.

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