Posts by Liz Richards
Defining careers in today’s workplace
Flexible schedules. Remote positions. Temp and contract work. Careers today, especially in the case of Millennials, are a patchwork of short-term and transactional employment situations. Resumes are less likely to feature one or two long tenures at established organizations and far more likely to feature an array of positions, often concurrent with one another, of…
Employers: Beware the consequences of the overcommitment cycle
If you want to stop turnover and prevent people from quitting, as an employer, you must fight overcommitment syndrome within your ranks. This is the toxic cycle: When an organization is understaffed, the extra work inevitably must fall to someone. Everything is urgent and important. People overextend themselves, committing to too many projects with too…
This is what makes a high-retention manager
Smart employers who want to take control of the resignation wave are dialing into their employer value proposition. What do you have to offer employees in exchange for the great work they do? Are great bosses a benefit of working for you? By now, it’s a cliché to say that people leave bad bosses, but…
It’s true: people are rethinking their priorities when it comes to work
Much has been said about the potential causes of the talent shortages employers are facing in 2021. But what I haven’t seen many people saying is what seems obvious to us and many of our clients at RainmakerThinking: priorities are changing. In the wake of a global pandemic, everyone, including the most dedicated and hard-working…
Finding fit when hiring or promoting from within
If you want to improve your hiring, retention, and talent development efforts, you’ve got to think about fit. The number one cause of success or failure in a new hire or promotion is NOT skills, not work ethic, and not attitude; it is ‘fit.’ Peter Drucker famously said, “culture eats strategy for lunch.” Fit is…
3 tools to help identify hidden talent in your organization
Employers everywhere are scrambling to adjust to the talent shortages they are facing in 2021. Some are realizing the solution to filling open positions is to tap the incredible amount of hidden talent already working for them. When we identify hidden talent in organizations—whether that means at the lower-level, among mid-level managers, or at the…
How to identify the right people for talent development
When we go in to help organizations make the most of their available talent, one of the first things we do is identify the right people for development opportunities. These are people at the second, third, and fourth levels down in an organization—underutilized talent in lower-level positions with a whole lot more to offer. Time…
How to Retain Top Talent: The Prestige Factor
In today’s talent wars, where employees have more negotiating power and are releasing pent up departure demand in droves, how do you gain control of turnover? The problem with entering a bidding war for talent is, in the long-term, it simply isn’t sustainable. Money and other such incentives are simply too efficient—there will always be…
Every manager is a Chief Retention Officer
When people leave their jobs voluntarily it is almost always—at least in part—directly attributable to their relationship (or lack thereof) with their immediate leader, manager, or supervisor: Their manager fails to regularly keep track of what’s going on, but still makes important or sweeping decisions which affect everyone on the team. Their manager fails…
How to structure new employee on-boarding for day one, week one, and the first three months
New hires almost always walk in the door with a spark of excitement. The question is: do you pour water on that spark, or gasoline? If you want to ignite the spark, focus on them from the moment they walk in the door. Day one is the most important day. Then week one. Then months…