Written by UT Center for Industrial Services’ Workforce Development Consultant Tim Waldo. Originally published on November 10, 2023 on the The Optimized People Development System Blog.
There was no starting gun. No one approached a line waiting for someone to yell “GO!” It’s an age-old, ongoing competition and if you’re an employer, you’re in it. Whether or not you recognize it, you’re in the competition to be an employer of choice. And your success, long-term and short, is directly linked to how well you do in this race.
Imagine a list of every employer in your area, each one scored and ranked from the best place to work to the worst. You’re on that list. Even if you put little or no thought and effort into this idea of being a preferred workplace, your company is impacted by its performance in this competition. Placement on that list has many implications for your team.
What does it mean to be an EoC? It simply means that your firm is positioned in the minds of your employees and potential employees as a great place to work. Becoming an EoC is not a simple thing to achieve or sustain because it requires a combination of several dynamic factors.
In this series of posts, we’ll explore four strategic tips to help improve your position and move up the ranks of the best places to work. First, to become an employer of choice, there’s a need to understand the nature of the competition. Then, stakeholders should consider who is making choices. It is also important to let the whole team in on the goal. Finally, make sure your system can sustain your status.
Who are we up Against?
Recognizing that you are in the competition is the first step. Then you must accept the fact that you are competing against all employers for talent, not just those you consider to be in your industry. This helps you look at the recruiting pools differently and informs the development of your training efforts.
It would be great if we could hire the talent we need and just put them in play immediately. That hasn’t been the case in a very long time. Practically every company is working to train people to do the functions required for the organization to succeed. We hear it all the time, “If you can find me someone with desire, we can train them to do the work we need done.” That person with desire may be looking at other sectors and industries. Is your internal people development system (PDS) able to attract them, and more importantly, can you really train them (and do it well) if you do succeed in hiring them?
Getting to know them…all of them.
Sports teams watch game films. They study their opponents and try to develop strategies to win against them. In the competition to be an EoC, there may not be game films, but there are plenty of sources of information that will help you understand how your many competitors find, train, and retain people.
Study your opponents and learn from them. Look at the job postings from other industries. Check out their webpages. Do they show their company culture? Do they make it easy to find job postings on their site? Are their job postings attractive?
Some companies are actively chasing the pole position as an EoC. They are committed to the race and are making improvements that give them a competitive edge. If this were a car race, there would be super sports cars, family sedans, and even some clunkers. Your company may not be at that sports car level, but that doesn’t mean you can’t compete well.
There are large employers with deep pockets and many resources. Certainly, going up against them seems unfair. Still, you must stay in the game. To compete against them, look at the areas where you have some advantages. Things like flexibility in scheduling shifts, skills development opportunities you can offer, connections to the community, and giving employees opportunities to contribute at meaningful levels. Use the leverage available to you to improve your ranking.
Good teams also watch game films on themselves. This is an area where teams might findF improvement opportunities. They look over plays and talk about what happened; if it went well, they probably don’t spend too much time on it. If things did not go well, that’s where they spend time talking through the failure and learning from it.
Can you see your PDS…all the functional areas of it? Again, there’s no film to watch, but there’s lots of data and communication that should be going on within your system. Capturing that and regularly assessing performance is crucial. Where can the system be improved? Which of the five areas in the PDS is operating the best? Which area needs help? We’ll continue to explore this system in coming posts.
There’s fierce competition in the race to find, train, and retain the talented folks we need to succeed. Choosing to look closely at the other competitors can help you make decisions about how your PDS can be improved. Other choices come with the title of Employer of Choice. And that’s the topic for the next post.
The University of Tennessee Center for Industrial Services (UT CIS) proudly serves as the One Stop Operator for the East Tennessee American Job Centers. If you are interested in seeing more blog posts from Tim Waldo, check out his Optimized People Development System blog
