How to evolve your workforce mobility strategy to attract & retain top talent

It’s not news to you that workforce mobility is a driving force behind talent recruitment and retention. But rising employee expectations means it’s only getting harder to impress potential candidates and reward your top talent with the right opportunities to stay.

To engage the best of the best long term, you need to evolve your program continually. Otherwise, you’ll be left with a shrinking talent pool that reduces your competitive advantage.

While getting results isn’t easy, there are proven actions you can take to help you conquer this challenge and achieve your employee attraction, recruitment and retention goals.

Here are a few tips to get prospective talent to pay attention and your best employees to remain with your organization for years to come:

Prioritize employee experience

When you welcome new recruits to your organization or move existing employees from one location to another, they don’t see all the hard work you do to coordinate and manage everything behind the scenes. They simply judge the process by their experience. And this experience can impact their organizational perceptions, choice to accept or decline an offer, productivity on the job and decision to stay or leave. For new recruits, this may be their very first impression of your company.

With such huge stakes, it’s critical to ensure the investment you make in your mobile employees pays off. So putting time into creating a positive workforce mobility experience needs to be a priority—even though this may seem impossible to fit into your already jam-packed schedule.

An excellent first step is to gather insights about how your employees feel at each stage of the relocation journey. Begin by conducting surveys and interviews about one part of your program, like pre-departure. This will help pinpoint what your employees like and dislike about existing processes and provide the information you need to make incremental changes.

Over time, you’ll transform shortfalls in each part of your relocation journey into exceptional moments that make the overall experience better. And this will help drive recruiting success, plus increased happiness and retention among your employees.

Mine data to uncover attraction and retention drivers

You’re probably already conducting qualitative interviews and surveys with your new recruits and mobile employees. And this is a great start. But to take your data analysis to the next level, an internal or external data scientist can be a tremendous asset.

To uncover clues about what’s working or not working in your existing strategy, ask questions like these:

• How may offers are declined because of the lack of financial support offered for a relocation or assignment?
• What is the promotional rate of new hires that go through a relocation program?
• What is the attrition rate when employees don’t go through a relocation program?
• Do internal employees stay at the company longer when they’re selected to go on assignment, or are they prone to leave as soon as the assignment ends?
• What is the job acceptance rate when a relocation package is included versus excluded?

A data scientist can correlate information to find answers to these questions and more. This will not only help to outwit your competition but bolster your mobility strategy too. By replacing intuition-based recommendations with evidence-backed approaches, you’ll persuade the right employees to work with your organization and remain long term.

Advance diversity and inclusion efforts

Today’s employees want reassurance their organization will provide equal opportunities to everyone, no matter their race, gender, age, disability or sexual orientation.

That means to attract and retain top talent, employees need to see themselves represented within your workforce mobility program as well as in corporate leadership positions. Otherwise, they’ll think advancing their skills or attaining higher levels within the organization won’t be within their reach.

To enhance diversity and inclusion efforts within workforce mobility, start by reviewing your existing candidate selection process. Determine aspects that inadvertently preclude certain individuals from participating in your program. Then, work with key stakeholders to revamp your approach. This will ensure there is a fair and equitable way for all qualified employees to access these opportunities.

You should also review your policies and benefits for outdated approaches that may favor specific individuals versus others. By making updates to meet the needs of a diverse workforce, you’ll ensure all employees feel valued. And this small change will have a significant impact on attracting top talent or preventing existing hires from seeking opportunities elsewhere.