Question
What is the difference between recruitment and retention?
Answer
Recruitment
Recruitment is the process of identifying, attracting, interviewing, selecting, hiring, and onboarding employees. We have a responsibility to not only attract people to our organizations, but also to the respiratory profession and to our schools. When you are struggling because your staffing is not well, you have to think this is just not me. This is not just what I am facing every day. If I am not seeing new respiratory therapists start, the other hospitals are not, which means there are not people enrolling in respiratory therapy as a profession in their colleges. We have to fix that.
We also have to remember during the recruitment phase, it is a lot like dating. The attraction stage of recruitment is the most important to create that larger applicant pool. If your organization is not attractive and the profession is not attractive, then people are not going to want to come to your organization. They are not going to want to work with you or even as a respiratory therapist.
If you attract more people and have a larger applicant pool, you can have more diversity in your organization. This also allows the organization to be selective and not just hire anyone. We have to remember that just filling the position is not getting it done. The goal is to have satisfied employees and retain those satisfied employees. We also need to think about diversity as we recruit for our organization, schools, and professions.
Retention
Retention is the ability to keep your employees engaged, motivated, productive, and focused so that they stay. You want to keep the employees that you have invested the time in. You want to keep all the people that work with you so that you do not have staffing shortages and you can provide the best care to the patients that you are serving.
We need to work on our turnover. Sometimes turnover is good. You may have a disgruntled employee that is making everyone else disgruntled, or maybe someone needs to see that the grass is or is not greener on the other side. What you can work on is your avoidable turnover. Those are the employees that you need to take the time to have a stay interview with. It is not just managers that need to do this. The employees can have stay interviews with each other. If one of your peers is having issues and they are not feeling like they fit in, or they do not want to be at work or they dread coming into work, you can talk to them and find out what is working well and what is not working. What should we keep doing? Or what should we start doing? Managers need to take time to have those conversations with those employees to make sure that they stay focused and engaged.
The problem with that is 80% of the staff are those employees that are engaged, but managers oftentimes have about 20% of the people that they spend the most time with because they are the ones that are causing issues or having issues. We really need to focus on that 80% that are engaged to keep them satisfied. We want to create opportunities for them and we really want to focus on recognition. There are so many ways to recognize employees. We will talk about some of those examples later.
Remember, turnover can be good. It might be good for the 20% that you struggle with to go because you can get new staff in and train, mentor, and coach them to be that 80%. An example of this is in my market area, fiscal year 19, there was about a 14% turnover rate. We implemented a lot of changes around here to really engage our employees and create opportunities. We had about 230 employees. The average years of service were about 7.2. The average age of these employees was 37. Now with all the work that we have done, we are down to a 9% turnover rate.
This Ask the Expert is an edited excerpt from the course, Getting Our Mojo Back: Reframing the Way We Recruit and Retain, presented by Angela Saunders, MS, RRT-NPS.
