Written by: Eric Handler

Leverage “Stay Interviews” to Inform Right-Fit Recruitment

Successful employees already know what right-fit talent is for your organization.

Leading-edge talent strategies in today’s competitive marketplace include “stay interviews” to ensure the company knows how to retain its Top Talent. 

The purpose of “stay interviews” is to find out what keeps key employees showing up every day as well as what might cause them to want to leave.

Both factors are critical information for retention.

Handler believes there’s a third and equally important purpose that “stay interviews” can serve by expanding the discussion to fine tune right-fit recruitment.

After all, who better than your Top Talent know what it takes to be successful at the company? Nobody. Top Talent can rattle off why and how they’re able to hit their goals or numbers, and exactly why others can’t. They know what it takes to navigate the internal politics and processes, and why some types will simply never be able to do it.

So here’s Handler’s big idea: Ask your Top Talent how they would go about defining the criteria for and qualifying new talent. Ask them to prioritize the qualities and characteristics, the skills and experience, attitude and aptitudes. Inquire as to where they would look to find such people. Then compare their input against job descriptions, interview questions and recruitment strategies to see how well it matches up.

We think the exercise will yield valuable insights.

Top talent crave working with A-player colleagues so they can challenge each other to reach even higher productivity. By leveraging “stay interviews,” you can find out not only how to keep them but how to attract more of them.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCE:

If your organization is clinging to the reactive strategy of exit interviews alone, or if you are using proactive stay interviews but want to learn best practices, click here for a 1:43-minute video “The 5 Most Effective Stay Interview Questions.”