Spanish
By Dominic Trillo, Sales and Client Success Manager at Meta4
Engagement management has become one of the main issues and challenges for CEOs and HR managers, as it is a key factor that directly affects business results. The report, “El barómetro de Compromiso” in Spanish on measuring engagement by tatum and Meta4 revealed that employee disengagement starts three years after joining the company, as sometimes initial expectations are not met.
Keys to Avoid Post-Recruitment Disengagement
The problem of post-recruitment disengagement is rather interesting; one of the main reasons for this demotivation is that often managers aren’t able to transmit the company’s messages, values and culture to their employees. During recruitment interviews, candidates only see the points of view of one, or at most, two people—the recruiter and the manager interviewing them. So if corporate messages transmitted in this early stage are not aligned with the ones received after hire, then the candidates will see that their expectations aren’t met and become disappointed.
How can we tackle this disengagement? One way is to make sure that employee engagement maintained in the long term would be, in the first place, to attract and hire people based on the company’s values, culture and business goals. Once they have joined the company, we then develop their skills and nurture their wellbeing.
The “State of the Global Workplace” study conducted by Gallup upholds this tenet: If in the first place, you focus on attracting the right people and do it with the right messages aligned with the organization, you will have much less trouble achieving employee engagement and performance.
What elements do we need to put into place in order to bring in ideal candidates who are engaged with the company?
For the recruitment process to be right, it is essential to have a corporate website that allows the company to reinforce its employer brand. Candidates should also experience a fluid process when applying for a job published on the corporate website, with clear messages on all of the company’s characteristics: tone of messages, colours, corporate resources and images. Indeed the employment page should truthfully reflect the company’s internal and external positioning. Furthermore these company jobsites or career opportunities pages require an integrated HR technology system which enables candidate information to be exploited and integrated into other HR processes of the company such as recruitment, training and development plans or compensation.
Nevertheless, what you most need to focus on in order to promote engagement during this first stage is the much ignored issue of the reasons for engagement itself. What is our goal as a company? What is our mission? What is our real purpose? Most companies are focused on developing their business activity and when hiring employees they just concentrate on “selling” jobs. Yet this is a mistake because organizations need to transmit what they believe in and find people who relate to their values, as this is what will really determine engagement with an organization over time.
If we analyse the jobsite of successful companies like Apple or Google, we find that they have something in common: their communication focuses on the reasons why rather than the what.
The use of technology in recruitment processes is a key element because it can help us attract candidates with the right values. As mentioned earlier, this is crucial for hiring those people who are really aligned with our company’s values. This set of beliefs will lay down the ground for the different behaviours and competencies of each company and this is what really drives performance.
Once the ideal candidate has been brought in, we must make sure to keep up their level of engagement. For this, it is essential that the transition between the company’s recruitment process and onboarding is ideal.
Similarly, it is also important to define mutually agreed objectives and set up training and development plans to ensure the person fits the job properly to be able to contribute to achieving business goals.
An integrated technology solution makes it very easy for the manager to identify the candidate’s strengths and determine the HR actions needed to help the candidate achieve his or her goals. Furthermore, the solution helps the candidate—now an employee—to control their own roadmap within the system by providing visibility over his or her career development plans.
