Heading into 2026, we’re a long way from the candidate’s market of the post-covid years. While the worry a few years ago was that employees would jump ship for a better job at a moment’s notice, employees today are clinging to the jobs they have. Fewer positions are opening up, competition is tight, and there are often too many candidates for employers to sift through. With so many people applying for so few jobs, you’ll want to take the same approach to recruiting that you take to marketing: you don’t need every candidate in the world to apply; you just want to make it easy for the right candidate to find you, get excited about working for you, and apply for the job.
Attracting top talent is about assessing your needs, defining the role, and identifying what kind of person will succeed in the role. Retaining that talent is a matter of understanding what employees want and what you can deliver to them.
Attracting Talent
The Talent Funnel
Finding the right person for the job begins long before you identify the need to hire. Even if you’re starting a business from scratch, and you see yourself as your only employee for the time being, you’ll want a clear idea of how you expect to grow and what kind of candidates you’ll want to attract. To attract the right candidates, start thinking about recruiting as though it were marketing. Marketing has its sales funnel, and so does recruiting, with candidates moving through the stages of awareness, consideration, interest, and action.
Like the sales funnel, the talent funnel begins with awareness. Even if you’re months away from hiring, identify your target employee and differentiate yourself in a way that appeals to them. Make local connections and build a portfolio of contacts who can connect you with people with the kind of skills and experience you’ll eventually need. Local media, including “best place to work” contests, can put you on the radar of potential employees, and it’ll give you a nice badge to put on your website when they enter the consideration phase.
Once candidates have heard of you, they’re going to begin considering the benefits of working for you. Those benefits should be evident on your social media and website. Not just tucked away on a “Careers” page, but baked into everything you do. Your business’s values, the way you work, what you do, and what you stand for: anyone visiting your website or social media pages should leave with clear answers to these questions.
After consideration comes interest. This is where stories and testimonials are most effective. As former employees will post reviews on places like Glassdoor, some aspects of this stage are out of your control, but if you’ve done the work to a positive work environment (which we will talk about more below), you won’t have to worry as much about bad reviews scaring away good candidates.
With this groundwork in place, you’ll have a pool of interested talent and a network of colleagues to draw on when it comes time to hire. Make it easy for job seekers to take action with a straightforward application process and an email sequence telling them what to expect next. Before you can start collecting applications, however, you have to create the role they will be applying for.
The PRO Job DescriptionTM
For now, we’ll assume that you’ve done a SWOT analysis, your Skill MatRXTM, and a needs assessment; you’ve determined that hiring is the best course of action given your growth strategy; and you’re ready to write a job description.
For the job seeker, the worst part of the process is probably developing a resume and writing a cover letter. For the employer, it’s the job description. There’s so much riding on getting it right that employers and hiring managers might find themselves overwhelmed thinking about where to start, what (and how much) information to include, or how to get the right message across to the right candidate. The result is often a list of tasks punched up with cute but imprecise language (there seems to be a major shortage of wizards and ninjas in this country’s workforce).
That’s why we developed the PRO (Purpose and Results Oriented) Job DescriptionTM, our proprietary method for designing roles by outlining the purpose of the role, the expected results, and the knowledge a person needs to succeed in the role. Writing a PRO Job DescriptionTM requires a lot of thought and effort, but it will be worth it in the end. You’ll produce much more text than will actually end up in the help wanted ad, but you’ll also end up with a deep and precise understanding of what the role entails, what its purpose is, and what kind of candidate is best suited to it. We can walk you through the process and help you distill your insights into a help wanted ad, prepare interview questions, set training goals, and develop onboarding plans and performance reviews.
Retaining Talent
After the pandemic, workers had the power to quit an unsatisfying job and immediately find something more to their liking. The current job market makes job hopping a little more difficult, but particularly talented employees in in-demand fields might have more options, so it is still important to create an environment in which your best employees are motivated to stay with you and do their best. Even if you don’t have to worry about employees quitting, there is still the fear that they are simply showing up without being particularly engaged in their work. “Retention” looks different for different roles. Sometimes it’s a matter of keeping someone from quitting; sometimes it’s a matter of keeping someone engaged.
No matter what the goal is, the solution is to create an environment that employees are happy to be a part of, one in which they are involved and energized, not unmotivated and disengaged. Happy employees are ones who feel respected and heard, who feel like their needs are being met. Most employees, when it comes down to it, want the same things. They want to be a part of a positive culture. They want to feel valued and respected, and when they are hired, they want to feel welcomed into the team. They want the opportunity to make a positive change in the lives of others. They want to grow professionally. More practically, they want competitive compensation and work/life balance.
Providing this kind of positive, energizing experience can be difficult in a larger, more hierarchical organization, where individual teams are at the mercy of the neuroses of particular managers. In these cases, it’s important for managers to be trained as managers and be held accountable for embodying the company’s values, and for employees to be given the kind of environment they need to succeed.
There’s no weird trick to creating a positive work environment. It’s a matter of living your values on a consistent basis with honesty, respect, openness, and fairness.
Stop Putting Out Fires
While the specifics of the job market change every few years, the fundamentals of hiring remain the same. Attracting and retaining talent is a process that begins long before a position opens up, one that is rooted ultimately in your growth strategy. Above all, hiring should not be reactive. You’ll need a clear picture of where your business is now and where it is going. You’ll need to understand what kinds of talent you already have and how you expect to grow. Hiring isn’t about putting out fires. It’s about knowing what’s flammable before the sparks start flying and getting a fire extinguisher in place before anything starts to burn.
