How can businesses win the talent challenge?

How do businesses look to attract and retain new talent?

However, what is more surprising – and perhaps more worrying – is the way businesses are choosing to respond to that challenge. When it comes to attracting and retaining new talent, 74% of business leaders said they looked to offer better terms and conditions, while 57% give employees a say in how they work, 56% offer a career path, and 55% offer higher pay. Less than half (46%) saw training as a way to find and keep the right people.

The reluctance to invest in training, along with an apparently ambivalent attitude towards increasing wages, seems to contradict the importance that many of these same businesses place on skills, retention and training. Instead, many more of them choose to go for the relatively low-cost option of improving working conditions.

While this is no doubt still a popular move with employees and is likely to see improved results when it comes to retention, it also suggests that the lack of focus on training could leave businesses unable to shape their workforce with the skills they need for the future.

How do high and low-growth firms differ when it comes to their attitude towards talent?

That differing emphasis on skills is even more telling when comparing the actions of high and low-growth firms. The Inside the Minds report found that those businesses with higher growth recognise the challenge of up-skilling staff to a greater extent than those with lower growth. They understand better the benefits of a more skilled workforce – with staff who are more engaged, more productive and more willing to stick around.

High-growth firms are also more likely to engage with their employees in the search for new ideas. The results show that while 61% of high-growth firms turn to formal internal strategy days as a source of innovation, fewer than half of the low-growth businesses (49%) seek inspiration from employees in the same way.

So while there’s no doubt that identifying, recruiting and retaining the best staff with the right skills is a challenge – and may have been for some time – it’s one that, with the right approach, can be overcome by all businesses. By balancing up the relatively cheap and fast fixes, such as improving working conditions, with longer-term plans to invest in staff training, wages and employee engagement, businesses stand a much better chance of winning the talent challenge.

This post was written by Howard Sears, Partner at Price Bailey. If you would like more information on this article, please contact Howard using the form below.