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Gary Cattermole is a Director at the award-winning employee research consultancy, The Survey Initiative. Here he explains the employee life cycle and how with careful analysis and planning, HRs can retain their top talent and boost levels of employee engagement.
First up, lets explain the employee life cycle. The cycle has six key stages: attraction, recruitment, onboarding, development, retention and separation. In basic terms, an employee is attracted to an organisation thanks to its brand or reputation. An employee will apply for a position within a company and if successful will go through an onboarding process. A company will then look to develop that employee and retain their top talent over many years, keeping the knowledge and experience within the company. Naturally, there will be a time when the employee either seeks pastures new or retires.
We often say that our biggest asset is our people, so can you imagine the cost benefits, skills and expertise that could be retained in an organisation if we really got to grips with the employee life cycle. If we can pre-empt when an employee might become disengaged, desire a promotion or look elsewhere for a job, we can create effective HR strategies to re-energise engagement and employee satisfaction. By careful management, HR teams can save thousands on recruitment, training and development, as well as keep skills and knowledge within the company. At the moment we know employee engagement levels fall significantly between 2 and 5 years, and with the average hire in the USA only lasting four years[1], industry needs to consider what we can do to keep top talent.
Attraction and recruitment
To get to grips with the employee life cycle, organisations need to analyse why their employees are attracted to their company and why they decided to leave; here “joiners” and “leavers” surveys are essential in discovering the employee’s journey. Once the results of these surveys have been collated, there are normally a few trends that appear. Many may show that the new recruit was excited about joining such a well-reputed company, and although the salary may have been excellent, the experience of working for the company did not live up to expectations. One-to-one interviews are even more insightful at discovering why these expectations were not...