Four Strategies to Retain Top IT Talent
Anyone who hires for tech positions in Chicago knows how difficult it can be to recruit in a highly competitive market. However, once you hire talent, you aren’t exactly home free. Retention is a huge challenge right now, and if you don’t focus on keeping the talent you hire, you’ll find yourself constantly stuck in a vicious cycle of recruiting and hiring.
Cultivate a Culture of Learning
Companies with a learning culture are 92% more likely to innovate, they are more productive and have greater employee engagement than companies without a learning culture. All of those factors lead to improved retention. Encouraging employees to learn and grow shows you care about their future success and breeds loyalty. You can foster a learning culture through simple strategies like cross-training, lunch and learn sessions, sponsorships for employees attending seminars and conferences, and tuition and/or certification reimbursement programs.
Promote Work-Life Balance
IT professionals are some of the most overworked people in your organization. Tech pros know their jobs require long hours and after-hours communication, but they also need work-life balance. Stress from being overworked is the number one cause of burnout, which almost always leads to turnover.
Show your team that you value work-life balance by letting them disengage in their off hours when they are not on call. Set up a buddy program for IT employees to back each other up when one buddy is on PTO, and discourage employees from checking in when they are off. Consider offering scheduling flexibility or remote work opportunities to promote strong balance, as well.
Support Innovation
Every single IT employee on your payroll has at least one valuable idea for new products or new processes. Most companies don’t give their tech pros an outlet to explore those ideas. If you want to improve engagement, let your tech team share their ideas and spend time working on them. Allow them two hours per week to work on their pet projects, and have a formal presentation once per quarter. Not only does this provide a creative outlet for your tech workers and improves engagement, it also gives you access to new innovations that would have otherwise gone unexplored.
Retention Starts With Hiring
Your ability to retain an employee actually starts before that employee is hired. Cultural misalignment is the number one reason why employees leave a new job within the first year. Talented people cannot be happy working for a company if their values do not align and if they don’t feel like they fit in with their colleagues. When hiring tech professionals, it is important to focus on skill alignment, but it is equally important to focus on cultural fit.
CultureFit, a top tech recruiting firm in Chicago, can help you improve retention by connecting you with candidates who are technically qualified and culturally aligned. To learn how we can help you achieve your IT staffing goals, contact CultureFit today.
