What’s Hidden in Your Data? Exploring Better Attraction & Retention Strategies

Every organization has been both burned by a bad hire and fortunate enough to have that amazing employee who makes you want to say, “We’re so fortunate to have you.” Ensuring the right people are hired for the right position is arguably the most important job in an organization. The potential impact of recruitment on an organization’s hiring outcomes and overall performance can be far-reaching and is deserving of a credit union’s time and resources.

Fortunately, credit unions have a rarely-used tool from which to gain insights and develop strategies for improving employee recruitment and selection: Their own data. Our most recent research report, “Diving Headfirst into the (Applicant) Pool: How Employee Attraction Impacts Employee Retention,” relies on a credit union’s human resources data to explore the elements that most affect credit union recruitment and retention.

Author Sekou Bermiss, a professor of business at the University of Texas-Austin and Filene research fellow, along with his co-author Samantha Darnell, a research assistant at the same university, are attempting to gain a better understanding of the necessary factors for maximizing the number of successful employees hired by credit unions. Given the high stakes impact of effective recruitment strategies, many researchers and practitioners have devoted substantial resources to better understand this complex phenomenon.

There are three phases of recruitment to consider that fall between identifying a need for an employee and onboarding. Recruitment can be broken down into the following generic phases:

• Generating applicants;
• Retaining high-quality applicants throughout the application process; and
• Getting the desired applicants to accept an offer.

Although every step in the process is impactful, this report focuses on the first phase, generating applicants, and examines the downstream organizational effects of fluctuations in the size and quality of an applicant pool.

An organization’s applicant pool is not fixed, and by understanding what forces could draw additional or higher-quality applicants, an organization can actively manage recruiting and other activities to strategically improve its applicant pool and beneficially impact overall recruiting outcomes.

Not surprisingly, attracting, recruiting and hiring employees is a costly process for credit unions. That makes retention an increasingly critical factor. From a base of extant research on applicant pools, we conducted an empirical investigation of the impact a credit union’s applicant pool has on employee retention.

Credit unions looking to improve employee retention and maximize the recruitment of quality candidates will find several takeaways from this research:

• Time your recruitment periods wisely. When the recruitment pool is large, credit unions should either be more selective or choose to recruit during times when employment pools are smaller.
• Recruitment practices for rural credit unions should differ from those of urban areas. Credit unions located in rural, low-population zones could have better recruitment when using low-involvement recruiting practices that could have a broader geographical reach than high-involvement recruiting practices.
• Alternatively, credit unions located in highly-populated urban areas face stronger competition for employees. In this case, the organization’s reputation is the key predictor of applicant quality. Strategic communications designed to boost reputation improve recruitment outcomes. It’s also helpful to optimally communicate the benefits offered at the organization, such as loan repayment, as that also increases the size and quality of applicant pools.
• Most importantly, credit unions can glean valuable information from tracking their own HR data, such as turnover rates for specific groups within their organization, or common traits among high performers. This data can provide meaningful insights suggestive of possible larger issues or opportunities within the organization.

Credit unions have the opportunity to use data gathered from their employees and candidates to learn how the organization has performed over time; these benchmarks will prove valuable when forming strategies to improve employee selection and retention.

In addition to this research report, credit unions looking to explore more effective recruitment and retention strategies have the opportunity to speak directly with the researchers and practitioners explored in this work at the University of Texas on Sept. 27 in Austin. This free event, made possible by a generous sponsorship from Visa, will bring together industry experts, outside industry thinkers and dozens of credit union executives to explore what’s hidden in the HR data – what traits, patterns and insights emerge when we ask better questions to get at the heart of improving the attraction and retention of talent at credit unions.

To hear from credit union executives attempting to apply this research to their HR practices today, listen to our podcast on it. The aim of all of this work is to enable credit unions to crack the code for winning the war for talent.

George Hofheimer is Chief Knowledge Officer for Filene Research Institute. He can be reached at 608-852-4632 or georgeh@filene.org.