How to Hire, Attract, and Retain Your Key Employees

Key Points

• Knowing how to hire, attract, and retain your key employees can lead to increased productivity, improved reputation and client base, and higher profitability for your business.
• In order to hire the right people, you must first know—in detail—the role you’re hiring for.
• Powerful compensation packages set a company apart in the hiring and retention game, especially considering the high level of executive turnover and competition for talented individuals in the market today.

Decreased productivity, loss of clients, damaged reputation, money wasted due to recruitment and training costs… All of these sound like a CEO’s worst nightmare. This nightmare is the result of a bad hire, and the inability to attract and retain your key employees.

So, how can your organization avoid this? By knowing how to hire, attract, and retain your key employees. 

How to Hire Key Employees

According to Entrepreneur, hiring the right people matters more than the many other decisions your team might be responsible for making. If you can’t hire the correct people, after all, the job, regardless of what it is, cannot be completed properly.

LinkedIn tells us that “an executive provides strategic oversight, helps the company evolve, and motivates your workforce to achieve key objectives.” In some cases, executives are tailored to specific departments within companies.

An individual who fulfills this role might be hired for a number of reasons, including:

• “Create and execute achievable business plans alongside the leadership team 
• Unify the organization through strong, shared values 
• Outline clear and actionable goals for the company 
• Lead the team to achieve goals by defining and executing strategy 
• Define what company success looks like, both short- and long-term”

Key employees and executives represent the company. This considered, knowing how to hire the correct key employees is crucial. A key component in hiring the right people is first, knowing the role you’re hiring for.

Know The Role You’re Hiring For

This goes beyond the job description you put out on LinkedIn for applicants. Have you established the essential duties and capabilities of the key employee you’re hiring? It is crucial to know precisely what your company is looking for, including qualifications, experience, personality, and even connections. It is better to be specific than too broad, as it will help weed out the less strong applicants.

Who Is On Your Hiring Panel?

In order to hire the best key employee or executive, you need to ensure your company’s hiring panel is diversified. In other words, half of the panel should include those from a separate department, who will not be directly working with the hire. People from the “outside” will pick up on things about the candidates that those who are directly in the department being hired for might not. Additionally, if hiring an executive, chances are they will work beyond a department from time to time, if not always.

How to Retain Key Employees

There are a variety of steps your organization can take to attract employees. Fancy offices, standup company culture, and vacation time are all great tools in attracting employees… We’ve learned over time, however, that attracting key employees is of no importance if you’re unable to retain them.

In the current market, we’re seeing a lot of executive turnovers as well as tremendous competition for talented individuals across the marketplace. In short, retaining employees proves difficult. It seems everywhere an employee looks, there’s a better company to work for. So, how can you retain your key employees and executives in this environment?

At Newcleus, we recognize the power of compensation. After all, providing powerful compensation incentives is what sets a company apart in the hiring and retention game.

When it comes to compensation design and packaging, there are a variety of benefits that can be bundled together—all with varying attractiveness and effectiveness. Most commonly, executive compensation plans, at the least, consist of four elements:

• Base salary
• Short-term incentive (typically an annual bonus)
• Long-term incentive
• Additional benefits and perquisites

When it comes to executive compensation design, however, there are many details to consider, and it is often best to seek the advice of a professional.

At Newcleus, we specialize in designing compensation packages to retain your top‐tier people. We ensure they’re paid appropriately while maximizing the return your institution provides to your shareholders. We want you to keep your valuable employees as much as you do. Contact one of our professionals to learn more.

Learn more about how to design a deferred compensation plan that meets your goals in this article.