Increasingly the resignation period, represented by the two months that begin to countdown the first day of the month following resignation of an employee you’ve just committed to hiring, is a time for mischief that you are possibly not paying enough attention to. As a result, that neglect could nullify all of your efforts spent selecting and hiring a new employee, thus squandering the time it took and the money lost each day a key position remains vacant – especially if you have to go back and start all over again.
More than ever companies are striving to keep and retain good employees, rather than to simply roll over and witness them being stripped away. Perhaps your senior management feels the same and why not, good people might be difficult to retain, but they are even harder and more costly to replace. My points is, that some manner of the onboarding ritual of newly hired people should begin as soon as they accept your job and resign from their current company, rather than doing nothing and waiting until their first day at their new job. Otherwise, you might not be onboarding anyone and the fault will be more your own staff’s negligence than a company able to convinced their employee not to leave them and to stay.
For example, I don’t wait until the end of the process, or after the job offer stage to discuss counter-offers with the candidates recruit, I speak about it right from the beginning. I do a lot of things before it is necessary; I enquire with them about their references before they are requested. I talk with them about composing their resignation letters before they get a written offer. I do this as a preventive measure on behalf of my clients as well as to get a candidate to wrap their thinking around the seriousness of what they are doing. Changing jobs, for a good and valued employee is a big decision that bureaucrats or cynics take for granted; we spend more waking hours of the day with our co-workers than we do with our own family members.
For as long as I have been recruiting, during the very first meeting I conduct with any potential candidate telling me they want to look for a new job, I ask them, “Okay let’s say for instance, that we work together and you find a job, receive a job offer you like; when you resign, what happens if your company doesn’t want you to leave? What happens when you resign and they say, “no, we don’t accept and we want you to stay.” What could they do to keep you and convince you to remain?”
The moment a job offer is accepted and signed, I coordinate with my clients, enlisting the help of both HR and management to remain engaged and proactive, maintaining coordinated and alternating contact with the new employee so that each week one of them, and I, communicate with the new hire being available if they encounter such overtures. I suggest the gaining company use the next two month period to meet the new team members, take them to lunch and or meet them for coffee, get to know them because you’re going to anyway, when they arrive on their first day. Bring them into the fold and make them welcome as a member of the organization instead of leaving them essentially ignored, exposed to the forces of their current employer, who could be doing everything in their power to destroy what you were able to accomplish and prevent their departure.