Every employer dreads receiving a resignation letter.

And in the age of talent shortages, it can seem logical to turn to a counteroffer as a way to retain talent.

But a rapidly scrambled counteroffer is not the way to go. In fact, in the vast majority of cases, counteroffers are poorly put together panicked responses to a misunderstood situation.

This is because legacy management strategy will have you working to formulas that simply don’t work anymore.

The annual review.

Distant and aloof leadership.

Generic feedback and performance management strategies.

These have been proven, again and again, to not work.

Staff retention means putting aside management hubris and adjusting your performance management and reward and recognition scheme to make sure you never get to the point of counteroffering.

The trick is in ignoring all your protective, responsive instincts and leaning on patient, pandemic-proof performance management techniques.

The key to successful staff retention lies in its sustainability.

Sustainability in this regard means packaging performance reviews and staff management strategies that meet the contemporary needs of your people. It doesn’t mean simply offering what other companies are offering, or getting to the point of having to counteroffer to meet a competitive new job package.

Effective talent retention relies on business owners and HR managers reaching beyond the scope of immediate job demands and take-home pay to drill into the soul of why your staff member works, and what they work for.

• This takes analysis of pay, performance reviews, appreciation of workplace mental health, career happiness, personal growth and more.
• Retention of talent requires targeted contract and workflow management. Most important to this is personalising feedback and operational support.
• Taking a one-size-fits-all approach to staff management won’t work. Context, and specificity, is key.

So here are our thoughts on why counteroffers are never the recruitment and retention fix you think they are…and how to manage your staff better to retain the best-in-class talent.

Money isn’t everything.

• “Only 12% of employees resign due to money”

This alone should tell you that throwing more money at a dissatisfied employee will rarely work. Money is important in retention strategies, but it is significantly less important than connection to company purpose, ESG or career growth, for example.

Get some context, and lead with empathy.

Undoubtedly you’ve been where your employee has been - perhaps eager to start a new role and less than satisfied with their current role. So, staff retention strategy should lead with empathy.

If you try and retro-fit a “solution” onto the “problem” of your employee wanting to leave without understanding the reasons behind it, you come across as callous and impersonal, as if you think any action is worthwhile when what your staff member wants is highly specific, nuanced solutions to their unhappiness.

Above all else, your people want to be heard.

So, engage with them, let them speak, and seek context for their career. What do they work for? Why do they like or not like working for you? These aren’t questions to be asked at an annual review or after someone’s handed in their notice. You should be asking it every week, every day if possible.

Don’t knee-jerk a response to someone quitting.

No right-thinking employee is going to take a hastily written email offering more money or a better job title without a formal meeting and a proper discussion.

So do not reply to a resignation letter with a quickfire counteroffer.

Accept the letter, express your dismay if you really want to, but make sure you formalise a proper meeting to discuss how you can improve their experience at your company.

Allow your employee the chance to prepare, and make them aware you’re eager to sit them down to clearly, and professionally, try and retain them for the right reasons.

Focus on employee positives and how they relate to career and company success.

When it comes to career management and support, focus on what you can realistically achieve for your people. Make development plans personal, and make sure any improvement of position, pay and experience focuses on how your employee’s career is valued in the context of your company.

You should not break salary rules to hold onto talent (see Money isn’t everything above) - this is neither sustainable nor fair. You cannot say things like “we were planning on doing X anyway…” after someone shows a willingness to quit because even if you were, it sounds like an excuse.

Summary

Staff retention requires patience and hyper-personal forms of performance management and recognition.

You want to make sure every member of staff feels connected to company purpose, and tangible company context.

Managers are respected more if they are candid, honest and don’t hide. Use performance feedback and continual feedback strategies as a springboard to engage more staff about their happiness and future at your workplace.

If you follow the above advice, you’ll never get to the point of counteroffering. Which is exactly where you want to be.

Evolve are employer branding pioneers within the MedTech, Pharmaceutical, Life Sciences and Healthcare industries.

To read more about our employer branding service, and how it can help your company develop a market-leading employer value proposition to attract, hire and retain the best talent for your business, visit our employer branding page.

This is the second of two blogs focussing on some of the basics of interviewing - this one is aimed at employers on the search for their next star hire.

Creating a positive, inclusive and effective interview is a lesson in balance.

Any employer who’s ever hosted an interview understands this and tries to work with the unique dynamics of an interview to the benefit of both the candidate and the employer.

But the modern hiring market is far from balanced. Within the wider Pharma and Healthcare market, candidates are in short supply employers are clamouring for the same talent from small talent pools, and despite the best efforts of specialists across the HR landscape, the industry remains firmly in candidate-led territory.

A lot of companies are compromising on long-held rules to get talent in the door. Traditional salary bandings are being crushed under the weight of recruitment necessity; counter-offers and counter-counter-offers are completely normalised; candidates for maybe the only time in history truly know their worth, and want to maximise return on placement in a new job.

The power is, seemingly, all in the hands of the candidate. However, the interview is a place for equal power dynamics, and good interviewers use this to their advantage - not by leveraging their brand, power, pay or reward, but by engaging the candidate on what they really want from a job.

When company purpose and company mission are more important than ever to an employee, it's theoretically easier than ever to host a successful interview.

Here’s how!

Do.

Prioritise achievements.

• In specialist industries like MedTech or life science QC it’s not enough to find a candidate with the right skills - you need to know whether a candidate can apply those skills to the immediate benefit of your firm, customer base and business network.
• So, make sure you build an interview strategy around getting the most information possible from a candidate on what they've achieved in the scope of their employment, and how they can apply those material achievements to your enterprise. Try not to focus too much on skills (good candidates will have a lot of them!) but try and find out how they use those skills in work, and which skills are most appropriate for your company.

Offer, and contextualise, flexible work where appropriate.

• Remote work is one of, if not the, most important work “perk” that, post-COVID, has become a make-or-break deal for many candidates.
• While we understand not every job in the medical, technical or wider life sciences field can be remote, this is where contextualising the role comes into play. You need to be able to communicate how, and why, certain roles are based where they are, and how your expectations of employee workflows have changed as a result.
• This provides clarity of role for your potential staffing base and sets the right expectation for the candidate.

Personalise, and contextualise a relevant benefits package.

• As a continuation of the point on contextualised remote work, full remuneration packages need to be relevant and personalised to every candidate where possible.
• Long gone are the days of centralised work perks focused on office-based benefits. Consider the context of work and where work is.
• Would your teams benefit more from perks such as localised childcare benefits to help staff handle the rising cost of childcare or a free gym membership in a location they commute to only twice a week?

Meet the Great Resignation head-on.

• Don’t hide behind the great resignation as the cause of your hiring struggles, or your inability to retain staff. The best employers in the medical faculty have pivoted to meet the effects of the great resignation head-on. Those same employers realise that an interview represents the perfect time to communicate and contextualise everything - the entire brand, recruitment and workforce journey - with candour.
• Your candidates will appreciate an employer who is honest about their purpose in a disrupted working world, and who is clear about their solutions to it.

Don’t.

Forget the basics or the power of empathy.

• Be polite. Be timely. Be welcoming. The basics of hosting a good interview still matter and in our post-pandemic new normal, showing empathy for a candidate's position and journey is vital if you want to secure the trust and respect of the talent in front of you.

Take too long to communicate.

• The most common complaint of employers who fail to hire or lose advocacy from their candidate network is that their recruitment process takes far too long. Don’t wait a month to decide on a candidate. Don’t even wait a week. Pull the trigger within at least 2 to 3 days.

Hold multi-stage interviews beyond two or three stages.

• On the topic of interview time scales, if you are set on putting a candidate through a multi-stage interview, make it very obvious from the first step of your candidate journey (the job advert!) how many stages there are, and reduce the time between each stage.
• Good candidates will not wait for good employment - they are in too much demand and will get a better offer from someone else.

Ignore feedback.

• Lastly, seeking feedback from your candidate is vital in improving your overall interview technique and strategy. This is especially important if you’re consistently bringing candidates to interview and not hiring.

The bottom line.

The candidate journey from referral or job advert should be fast, done with candour, and with empathy.

The companies that forget the basics of good interviewing - timekeeping, good preparation, working quickly to snare the best of the best - will always suffer from poor hiring numbers and, over the long term, poor retention of staff.