Retention is the New Recruiting: Strategies to Build and Keep a High-performing Workforce

BY Mary Pieper | July 12, 2024

The hiring environment is on the cusp of change, with rates of decline beginning to slow down, according to monitoring done by Workday. “We might be at a kind of inflection point where hiring starts to stabilize,” said Greg Anderson, Workday’s principal product marketing manager. Anderson spoke at a From Day One webinar titled, “Retention Is the New Recruiting: Strategies to Build and Keep a High Performing Workforce.”

Voluntary turnover decreased dramatically in 2023, with employees staying longer in their given roles, says Anderson. “This is driving a lot of value to their position and to the organization. But also resulting in a lot of pent-up demand, particularly from your high performers who are being asked to do more,” he said.

Decreased internal mobility means companies and employees “haven’t seen some of the internal growth that they’ve been looking for,” Anderson said. This could lead employees to leave a company for another employer, but it could also be “a really great opportunity for your organization, depending on how you choose to navigate some of these challenges,” he added.

“There is a lot of bottled-up employee energy, knowledge and experience in your workforce, and that’s a huge asset,” Anderson said. “This is a real opportunity to take advantage of this window and really invest in talent.”

How to Make Retention the New Recruiting

Greg Anderson, pictured, led the webinar with colleague Phil Willburn (company photo)

The Workday platform allows employers to solve the challenge of quickly finding and matching talent to potential opportunities. Around 70-75% of job openings can be filled with internal talent, Anderson says.

Phil Willburn, VP of people analytics at Workday, says tuning up your internal mobility engine is a key to turning retention into the new recruiting. “If you haven’t put any love or attention on this, especially when it comes to using automated tools, and streamlining the match, matching with skills, there’s a lot of opportunities there to make it much easier for your employees to find great opportunities and retain the best employees,” he said.

Listening is also crucial, says Willburn. During the pandemic, “we were concerned about our employees’ needs, we were reaching out, we were caring for them, we were trying to see what they need to be productive,” he said. “And then after the pandemic, companies stopped listening as intently.”

Employees respond well when employers listen deeply to their needs and take action to improve their on-the-job experience, says Willburn.

How Workday Boosted Internal Mobility

Workday employers were looking for growth during the Great Resignation several years ago, but “they did feel like they were stuck a little bit,” Willburn said. Company leaders decided to make it easier to advance within the organization. Still, they had to address some pain points along the way.

Some team members felt lost trying to navigate the promotion process and wanted more transparency and the company achieved this by posting every available role on a Workday Talent Marketplace and Career Hub that all employees could access.

Some Workday employees “wanted opportunities to stretch themselves and get exposed to new things without necessarily taking a new role internally,” Willburn said. And so, in 2019 the company introduced gigs for workers to learn new skills. This was a massive pipeline for internal mobility because team members were 42% more likely to get a new role if they did a gig first.

Workday's efforts to boost internal mobility resulted in a significant increase in the number of employees applying for new roles inside the company. “We’ve seen about 30% of all our roles filled by internal candidates, which is good because we did the research and found that internal hires consistently performed and ramped up faster than external hires,” Willburn said.

When employees move up within the company, "that gives them that sense of growth," Willburn said. We saw a 26% increase in overall retention. If we’re making internal moves, we are keeping employees longer.”

Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Workday, for sponsoring this webinar.

Mary Pieper is a freelance writer based in Mason City, Iowa.

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