Three Tips to Help You Turn “The Great Resignation” into a Great Opportunity

1. Reassess your company’s culture and values

More and more employees and job seekers are seeking out opportunities where a company’s culture, beliefs, and values align with their own. Culture is not about free lunches, nap rooms, or ping-pong tables, but according to the Harvard Business Review, it is about “behaviors, systems, and practices, all guided by an overarching set of values.”

To assess what kind of company culture you have, examine your leadership, and take steps towards making your employees feel valued. These steps can include allowing more work from home flexibility for those with families or having teammates take a weekly self-care hour where they are not disturbed by their colleagues. Think deeply about what matters to your employees and create systems that allow them to thrive in your workplace.

2. Highlight Purpose

Early warnings about the Great Resignation highlighted how employees are prioritizing roles where they feel a sense of purpose. During the pandemic, many workers had the time to reflect on their life’s purpose and its relation to their work. Millennials and Gen Z are even more likely to tie their work to their life’s purpose.

One step we suggest is including your team in decision-making processes, and this starts with open communication and engagement. Employers and employees can no longer have a purely transactional relationship, and the workforce is now valuing the employee experience as a defining factor of their decision to stay or to leave a company. Getting to know your employees, hearing their stories, and telling your own to build relationships with your teammates is essential in these times.

3. Actively reach out to potential candidates

If you have already been impacted by a wave of resignations, now is the time to seize the opportunity to build the team that aligns with your company’s culture, values, and purpose. While passively waiting for candidates to walk through your doors via online job boards can seem like an attractive recruiting method, it is actually much less time efficient.

Actively reaching out to candidates who align with the qualifications of the role is essential to successfully build the team that embodies your company’s values and mission, and a firm like ECA Partners offers a variety of ways to engage candidates even before they walk through your door.

Once candidates are interested in the role, we also advise that the interview questions that you use align with your company’s values as well. Asking for specific examples of their technical expertise is key for determining their fit for hard factors, such as M&A experience, Project Management experience, and others, but asking candidates directly what they are looking for in their next role, the type of working style they have, and about their communication preferences can help get you started on the right track to recruiting your dream team.

Melissa Chan, Ph.D. is a Project Manager of ECA Partners. She can be reached at [email protected].