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Employee Retention Strategies for the 2024 Job Market

Posted on July 18, 2024August 9, 2024 by Sean Malady

Maintaining a stable business model is best accomplished by maintaining the same workforce for months to even years at a time. By focusing on how your business can benefit your employees, you will ensure that those you hire will be willing to stay with you.

Studies show that the current job market is uniquely unpredictable. 75% of employers report that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to fill open positions. So, what do we do to ensure potential employees choose us or current employees stay with us for an extensive period? Focusing on employee retention options is the first and most crucial step.

Why Is Employee Retention Important?

Ensuring your business has a strong, steady, and stable workforce will ensure long-term success. It’s important to remember that hiring people willing to work for you for a longer period of time means your efforts can be focused on the bottom line instead of staffing and behind-the-scenes organization.

There are five things to keep in mind when considering why employee retention is vitally important for your company.

Reduced Company Costs – First and foremost, longer employment periods end up costing you less in the long run because you don’t have to spend money on onboarding costs at a more frequent rate.
Greater Productivity – It’s important to remember that keeping a steady workforce means your employees can rely on each other and work together as a team to get the job done. With frequent turnover, your employees are stuck training new employees instead of focusing more on the company’s overall productivity.
A Strong, Flourishing Work Culture – Overall, your employees’ motivation will remain positive and high if they see that their coworkers are sticking around. It shows that you respect, support, and appreciate everyone in the company.
Enhanced Employee Morale – When employees remain the same and a reliable unit, the morale across the board will be higher. Knowing that the people they work with will be there daily allows employees to feel more connected and motivated about their jobs.
Happier Customers – The longer an employee stays with your company, the more likely they will know how to interact with your customers. This, in turn, will allow your customers to rely on and trust your company and leave them more satisfied with the services being provided.

Important Strategies to Keep in Mind

We have previously posted about employee retention strategies. While many of these strategies have stayed the same, there are a few key differences that better match the working environment in 2024.

It is also important to point out that our strategies for hiring and retaining millennials can now be applied to all working individuals. What used to be exclusively the feelings and desires of a younger working audience are now found among all employees, from young to seasoned.

So, what strategies do we suggest? On the grand scale, our suggestions focus on things that uplift morale and employee motivation. Keeping that in mind, let’s get started!

Ensure Your Hiring Process is Quick & Efficient

J & J Staffing has consistently made this suggestion since 2022. We truly believe that the faster and more efficient your hiring process is, the more motivated people will be to work for you.

This becomes the easiest way to ensure that the people you hire will want to work for you specifically. In 2024, the most eligible employees are looking for employers who make them feel special, valued, and respected even during the hiring process.

Offer Flexible Work Arrangements

At the end of lockdown, late 2020 and early 2021, employers started to find that having either a work-from-home option or a hybrid setup was more motivating for their employees. This is due in large part to the flexibility they offer as a means to help productivity and employee happiness.

While we understand that not all businesses can offer either of those options to their employees, there are ways to make flexible work arrangements in every environment on a case-by-case basis. Taking the time to accommodate employees tells them you value their contributions and want to keep them happy and employed.

Offer Positive Feedback

Offering positive feedback seems like the littlest thing you can do, but it truly can make a significant impact. Employees need to feel that their efforts are seen, appreciated, and acknowledged.

Positive feedback starts you off on a positive note and fosters an overall positive, caring company culture. Starting with an employee’s strengths allows the areas they need to improve on to be better received.

Foster Creativity

Humans all want to feel like their ideas are worth something. Allowing your employees to make suggestions about company policies and procedures that directly impact their jobs will motivate them to care about what they are doing.

Sometimes, the best ideas for growth and development come from the people on the front lines performing the tasks day in and day out.

Encourage Mutual Respect

In recent years, more individuals have been looking for bosses and supervisors who treat people with respect and allow the same level of respect to be reflected back to them. While positions naturally create a hierarchy that needs to be in place for a business to operate properly, giving room for equality in other aspects can change the whole game.

Well-respected employees and supervisors are likely to come together and remain united in furthering the business goals. Respect goes a long way toward ensuring employees feel as though they have a voice and are valued at work.

Provide Growth Opportunities

It is proven that if employees feel they don’t have anywhere to grow in their job they will move on. No one wants to spend years doing the same work over and over without any potential for promotion or professional development.

Even if you are only offering the opportunity to expand their knowledge and expertise in their chosen field, you are ensuring employees will appreciate the service they are providing. Any amount of growth is beneficial and can keep your employees satisfied.

Offer a Competitive Salary

Along the same lines of promoting personal and professional growth, offering a competitive salary is important. You might find the perfect person to add to your company roster, but if you aren’t giving them financial compensation to match, they aren’t going to choose you.

If you aren’t consistently reassessing the salaries of all your employees against the current economy and job market, you also run the risk of losing long-term, loyal employees. They are going to go where the money is. It’s as simple as that.

Promote Trust & Transparency

In line with some other action items on this list, promoting an environment of trust and transparency is important. Every time your company makes a significant decision, it is best to inform your employees and open the floor up for feedback regarding said changes.

No one likes feeling blindsided by decisions affecting them, nor do they like feeling lied to. It takes zero extra time and effort to keep your employees informed and in the loop about anything regarding company policies and procedures.

Create a Collaborative and Open Culture

In 2024, the desire to work for a company where you truly feel like a unified team is at an all-time high. Employees want to have a positive work environment that feels completely balanced with their personal lives.

Feeling as though they have the support of their professional team ensures that employees are going to overlook any minor irritations they have about their jobs and remain with the company. In fact, with an open, respectful, and collaborative culture, employees are more likely to inform higher-ups about those things that irritate them in the workplace, allowing for changes to be enacted.

Identify & Alleviate Employee Pain Points

Listening to your employees is a significant way to take action today to ensure your employees remain part of your team. Everyone wants to be heard, especially when they spend most of their time on the job.

Showing employees that you care enough about them to listen to their concerns and make an effort to implement solutions allows them to be further motivated to meet productivity standards. A workforce that feels appreciated and heard is more likely to contribute 110% to the company goals and ensure the customers are happy.

Implement Changes Over Time

Finally, if you find that changes need to be made to current policies or procedures, make them over time. Most employees need time to adjust to anything new, so giving them the time to do so will boost their morale significantly.

Giving employees time to test out new changes and provide feedback on how well they work is also a great way to ensure your employees respect you and wish to stay with the company. They will more likely adhere to the changes and take pride in their work.

Work with J & J Staffing to Ensure You’re Hiring the Right Employees

One of the things J & J Staffing takes pride in is our ability to stay on top of the latest hiring and retention trends. This allows us to provide the best service for our clients.

If you have questions about how to ensure you’re hiring the right people or retaining the wonderful employees you already have, we are here to advise. Contact us for more information.

Staffing Services In Greater Philadelphia

J & J Staffing Resources is a professional staffing agency that connects local businesses to job seekers throughout the Greater Philadelphia area, including Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware.

We bring over 45 years of expertise in office, industrial, technical, and professional staffing placements as well as payroll management, and offer a wide range of services for both employers and job seekers.

Need help? J & J Staffing has offices in Newark, Bridgeport, Woodbury, Cherry Hill, Ewing, Princeton, Langhorne, and Horsham. Visit your local J & J staffing center or get started below.

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Using AI to Find the Best Candidates and Enhance Your Process

Posted on April 26, 2024August 9, 2024 by Sean Malady

In the last few years, AI has become a big part of who we are and how we go about our everyday lives. From automated ordering and integrating processes into one easy-to-use software, AI has helped make our lives much more accessible.

So, why not expand your hiring efficiency as a company further? You might already be using it to ensure your business works fast, efficiently, and to the highest quality. Expanding AI into your day-to-day back-end operations will work wonders for your business and customer relationships.

What AI Means for the Future

You need to understand that AI technology isn’t going away. As time goes on, it will only expand and evolve to become more involved in certain processes of our lives. If you want to stay ahead of the game regarding recruitment, you need to ride this AI wave, not ignore it.

More and more businesses are looking at ways to make their recruitment process much quicker and more accurate. AI affords them the tools to do so. By utilizing this technology, other employers can rest easy knowing they’ve found the best candidate for the job and that their entire hiring process is as fast as it possibly can be.

But what is the best way to integrate AI into your business’ hiring process? After all, just like most things, AI takes an adjustment period to work out all the kinks and ensure you’re using it to the highest advantage for your company.

Here are some steps to consider when thinking about integrating AI into your hiring process.

Analyze Your Current Processes – The first step should always be to assess what you are currently doing. This way, you can determine the best way forward and the most effective use of AI for your business.
Select The Right Tools – Once you know where you currently stand, you can look at what AI tools are available to businesses and decide which ones might be the best for your recruitment process.
Get Your Team on Board – You don’t run your business alone, therefore, any AI decisions and implementation should also be run by your team. This allows them to provide feedback and gain much-needed information about the new processes and how they work.
Integrate AI Into Your Existing Systems – The next step is ensuring that your chosen AI program will integrate well with your current systems. The integration process can be confusing at first, so it’s essential to take your time and give it your full attention.
Do a Trial Run – We all know how important it is to test drive a new car before we buy it. Well, integrating AI into your hiring process deserves the same thing. You should always do an internal test run before making it official to ensure all the kinks are discovered and worked out.
Adjust Your New Process – Once you’ve completed your trial run, you can go back to the drawing board and smooth out any wrinkles you observed or that your team provided feedback on. This will ensure that the launch of your new hiring process will be successful.
Ready To Go – Now that you’ve completed all the previous steps, you are ready to launch your new process and see results. Just remember that everything needs monitoring to ensure it continues working effectively and efficiently.

Remember, as you integrate AI into your hiring process, you can do as little or as much as you want. AI can be utilized only on the candidate selection level or throughout your hiring process. Whatever you decide, AI is here to help through accurate candidate matching, faster screening processes, and predictive analytics.

Finding the Best Candidates Through AI

Starting small is an easy way to jumpstart your business’ integration with AI for recruiting. If you aren’t sure how much you want to rely on AI for the job recruitment part of your business, it’s very easy to try it out on candidate selection first.

As with all AI technology, humans should always be a backup for quality control and monitoring. When starting, AI candidate matching can be easily monitored and tested to see if AI is something that you want for your business staffing needs. AI can help you in significant ways to ensure the candidates you are interviewing are the best ones for the job, but if you go through the process and feel it isn’t doing enough, you can step in and try using AI in a different way.

Here are four simple ways to utilize AI to help find the best candidates for your open positions.

Predictive Analytics

With the immersion of AI, there have been advancements in analyzing data – in all areas of your business. This technology can also be used in recruitment. There are certain AI tools specific to recruitment that ensure employers are getting accurate data about their current and future employment needs.

AI technology can also predict whether or not a candidate will be successful in the job you offer. Over the years, employers have discovered that candidates with a resume that fits the job requirements aren’t always going to work out with their specific company. This is where AI predictive analytics comes in.

Using predictive analytics is a way to integrate AI into your business hiring process in a way that will benefit you now and in the future. This form of AI for recruiting will look at a candidate and assess not only their qualifications but also their work history and how they answer pre-screening questions to determine whether or not they will fit best with your company culture and goals.

Finding Candidates on Various Platforms

AI can also be a great tool to find candidates who might be looking for work but haven’t seen your exact job posting on their own. This allows you to expand your reach without any extra time taken out of your day to focus on combing other websites to find them.

By utilizing AI to comb job boards, job forums, and other professional business platforms such as LinkedIn, you are ensuring the best candidates are made aware of your openings without you having to spend the hours it would take to reach out to them manually. AI can do the work by sending these potential candidates an automated email describing your position and your business and allowing them the opportunity to submit their resumes and applications.

The work of this form of AI technology can take minutes, whereas doing it yourself could take hours. Utilizing AI here ensures that this portion of your hiring process can become even more streamlined and efficient with minimal effort.

Chatbots for Initial Candidate Screenings

Another great way to use AI to your advantage when it comes to finding the best candidates for your positions is through Chatbots. This tool, in particular, is ideal for doing those initial candidate screening questions to see how the candidate fairs beyond their resume.

Using a Chatbot will allow you to assess a candidate’s viability within your organization quickly. As stated above, a resume doesn’t always ensure that the candidate being presented will succeed at your company. By utilizing this AI recruitment tool, you can see how each candidate measures up against what you are looking for in your company culture and job requirements.

Using a Chatbot will work with the suggested predictive analytics advantage mentioned before.

Resume Screening

Integrating AI as a recruitment tool can be the most successful way to screen resumes. Running candidates’ resumes through an AI program to catch those who have the required qualifications will save you hours of manual labor going through each one on your own.

This tool will save you time and help eliminate the possibility that one candidate can be favored over another due to unconscious biases. Utilizing AI in this portion of your recruitment process ensures that the best candidates for the job are being selected for the next steps based on their resume and qualifications alone.

After all, a machine doesn’t know one name from the next. It ultimately gives each applicant a fair chance.

Using AI to Enhance Your Hiring Process

There are various ways that AI recruitment tools can be utilized beyond simply finding the right candidates for the job. Various AI tools can help you throughout your recruitment process, ensuring everything runs quickly and smoothly.

A few years ago, we published a blog talking about ways you could manually ensure that your recruitment process is the quickest and most efficient option for candidates. While at the time, we didn’t mention the use of AI to speed up your process, these suggestions paired with AI will ensure your process is quick, efficient, and reliable.

What AI tools can you utilize to ensure your entire process is as short and quick as possible? Take a look at the options below.

Video Interviewing Tools

Sometimes, the interview process is the most tedious part of narrowing down your candidate options. While eliminating in-person interviews isn’t suggested, you might benefit from your initial interview stage being conducted through an AI program.

By utilizing AI video interviewing tools, you free up your schedule to focus more on the candidates likely to be a good fit for your company. The initial interview is a great way to assess whether you want to see a candidate face-to-face and potentially offer them a job. It prevents you and the candidate from wasting their time unnecessarily.

It’s also a great way to weed out candidates that won’t fit your company culture. If they aren’t willing to do pre-screening through a video interview program, they aren’t likely to put the right level of effort into the job.

Automated Interview Scheduling

AI recruitment tools don’t always have to be extensive programs that encompass a massive part of your process. Sometimes, something as simple as automating how interviews get scheduled is enough.

It saves the time usually spent going back and forth via email with a candidate to find a date that works best for you both. By sending one email that contains a link to your calendar of potential dates and times, you are eliminating the time wasted waiting for a candidate to reply.

Calendar automation tools are so easy to integrate into your process, and they are simple to navigate on the candidate side of things. This makes getting an interview on the books as easy as 1,2,3.

Assessment Tools

Conducting preliminary assessments is another part of the recruitment process that could take up quite a bit of time. Some positions, such as skilled workers or higher qualified professionals, require a series of assessments to determine whether they are knowledgeable enough to hold the position they are applying for.

Before the days of AI, employers had to conduct these assessments themselves, taking precious time away from their actual job duties. Currently, a variety of AI recruitment tools are available that give employers options on how to assess each potential candidate before meeting with them in person for an interview.

These tools are crucial to speeding up your hiring process and putting the progression of a candidate back into their own hands, by allowing the candidate to determine when and how fast they get through the assessment process, you are ensuring that only those serious about the job are moving forward.

Offer Letter Generation

Finally, AI can also help you in the final stages of your process. Many companies already have templates for sending out offer letters to candidates. There are now AI tools that can take these templates and personalize them for you.

It’s a simple tool that can save you time and effort in the long run. Candidates won’t know the difference, but you’ll see a change in how quickly your process concludes with the integration of this vital tool.

J & J Can Help You Find The Best Options

At the end of the day, what you decide for your business has to be more helpful than not. J & J Staffing is here to help you determine the best way to use AI to speed up your hiring process.
If you are still curious about what might work best for your recruiting process, give us a call.

Staffing Services In Greater Philadelphia

J & J Staffing Resources is a professional staffing agency that connects local businesses to job seekers throughout the Greater Philadelphia area, including Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware.

Need help? J & J Staffing has offices in Newark, Bridgeport, Woodbury, Cherry Hill, Ewing, Princeton, Langhorne, and Horsham. Visit your local J & J staffing center or get started below.

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Hybrid Workplace Management: Your Tools For Success

Posted on December 5, 2022January 24, 2023 by Sean Malady

When the pandemic first hit, companies had to scramble to find a work-from-home solution within 24 hours. It’s been a few years since that hectic time, and while during the early days, we prayed for everything to “return to normal,” we have accepted that having a work-from-home business model is the new normal.

But not all companies can go completely remote; some can only make a couple of days a week work.

The magic is finding the sweet spot for your company and the perfect management style to keep things running smoothly, no matter the environment.

As long as you look at the three most important things as you make this transition, you are bound to be a success. You can’t make a significant business change like this without considering the company’s goals, the managers, and the other employees. All of these things will be affected by any decision, which will, in turn, determine your business’s continued success.

So, how do you manage your whole business from the office and home? The answer is simple: having a plan before transitions start happening.

Management

An essential part of creating a thriving hybrid business environment is ensuring your management works in both the office and remotely. Your company can test this over some time before enacting a company-wide hybrid policy.

That is one of the benefits of going hybrid now versus a few years ago. You can take the time to establish what works best for your company structure and who struggles the most from remote work. Not everyone will take to work from home as easily as it is to breathe. If we learned one thing from early 2020, some people are fantastic managers, teachers, and leaders when their audience/team is right in front of them. However, put a computer screen between them, and they struggle to establish a rapport and authority because they can’t visualize what they need to do.

Taking time to establish a remote option in your workplace slowly allows you to sort out which team leads might need extra support when transitioning to a new way of managing. Giving your employees time to get used to the change in structure will ensure you become a successful remote company when you need to be.

Taking time also allows you to work out any technical issues when setting up home offices. This is a crucial part of management because it’s part of each role working at 100% every day of the week – no matter the situation. Having rules and guidelines in place for when a connection issue occurs will help your company save on downtime.

We will get into this a bit more in a minute, but another crucial part of management is meetings, scheduling, and employee support. All of these must be established before making your remote workplace option available companywide.

As a business owner, you dictate how much your manager needs to be in contact with their team throughout the day. By establishing this scheduled structure from the start, you are giving your managers the tools for success even before they have the opportunity to feel overwhelmed.

These meetings and check-ins can be altered based on workload and capabilities, but they still need to happen at a specific frequency – daily, once a week, every other week, or once a month; you need to make it company policy that they occur. This way, your employees aren’t just out there doing whatever they want without making themselves available for the responsibilities of their position.

Scheduling

Most importantly, you must determine how your hybrid schedule will be set up—having a plan will make it easier to manage your employees’ expectations. Employees are less likely to abuse the system if they know how many and which days they are allowed outside of the office.

When planning the schedule, you need to decide your company’s needs, each role’s needs, and how often you can afford your employees to be out of the office. No two companies will have the same hybrid plan because each situation is unique. The most important thing to remember is to find what works best for you.

It would be best if you also considered allowing your employees some schedule flexibility. Whether you decide they can have access to this flexibility from the start or it is a perk for them once they’ve established that they can handle working from either environment. You have to assess what works best for your company overall and the various roles within the company.

Don’t let scheduling bog you down. When you first start, decide on a schedule and stick to it. Choosing to have a whatever-goes attitude from the start can create tricky problems with staffing that you don’t need. If you realize after a few months of hybrid that your company can afford more at-home days or need less, you can adjust to fit the needs.

Maintaining Culture

One of the first things to suffer when deciding to go hybrid is the overall business model, which includes your culture. More often than not, when your company was created, it was with the mindset that everyone would be in the office every day and interacting with one another face to face quite regularly. Naturally, when you take your business hybrid, there are going to be some adjustments needed.

Company culture can seem effortless to establish when your workforce is in-person. When you adjust your practices, that culture could take a significant hit if you aren’t careful. While the culture may remain as it has always been for your seasoned employees, whenever you bring on new hires after this change, you need to have a plan to convey that culture to them despite not being in person.

It’s easy for new hires not to understand the values, beliefs, and vibe of the company they work for when their interactions with coworkers and managers are limited. Knowing this will help you set up a successful transition and path forward.

You don’t need to change your culture’s basic structure; you need to adjust it to fit a more tech-centric environment. If you used to have monthly team-building exercises, you should continue that trend but find new ways for them to be exciting and fun even if members join in virtually.

Make sure these team-strengthening activities, which are a big part of your culture, remain well-attended and have feedback from everyone involved. This way, your teams still feel like teams despite not meeting in person.

Part of adjusting your company and your culture is changing your communication style. With not as much face time, some employees may need increased communication throughout their days to feel less on an island. Ensure your company policies and best practices include a structure for this change.

Communication ensures everyone is a success no matter where they work. It enhances your culture and provides employees with the support they need to be their best.

Hiring Practices

Ensuring your culture withstands the move to remote work is extremely important when considering your hiring practices. During the hiring process, you will need to account for a remote employee’s inability to know the office’s culture from experience. This means you must adjust your culture so that new hires understand the company from day one, even if they never step foot in the office or meet their coworkers.

You can make some significant changes to your hiring process because of remote work. One of the major ones is you can adjust compensation to reflect the changes made to your company structure. Depending on how remote you can feasibly make your company, you may be able to extend your pool of candidates from your area to include the whole United States.

In a hybrid world, it might be beneficial for your onboarding process to include time spent in the office. This can ensure your new hires are going to be good fits for the remote aspect of your company. It also gives you a chance to introduce new employees to the executives of the company as well as their direct managers. Making this meet and greet part of their orientation is crucial if you have to do a virtual onboarding.

You want to ensure your practices help the 90% of employees who will thrive in whatever environment your company gives them and the 10% who may need extra help for whatever reason.

How We Can Help

J & J Staffing has been on a hybrid business model since the start of the pandemic. Our company continues to thrive and adjust to each new challenge. As the area’s premier staffing resource, we know how companies have worked around this new normal. If you need help hiring any new employees for hybrid or just some more tips on what best practices you can use, give us a call.

Staffing Services In Greater Philadelphia

J & J Staffing Resources is a professional staffing agency that connects local businesses to job seekers throughout the Greater Philadelphia area, including Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware.

Need help? J & J Staffing has offices in Newark, Bridgeport, Woodbury, Cherry Hill, Ewing, Princeton, Langhorne, and Horsham. Visit your local J & J staffing center or get started below.

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