This is a guest post by Trainual Certified Consultant Elizabeth Yarbrough with Untangled.

With unprecedented numbers of people leaving their jobs right now, hiring has never been so difficult — especially for small business owners.

If you want your business to succeed, you just can’t rely on outdated, haphazard hiring practices anymore. It’s time to update your talent strategy so that you can compete for the best and brightest people out there. Yes, you!

Here are three processes you can document to defy The Great Resignation and hire great people:

1. Your employee value proposition (EVP).
2. Your employee “surprise and delight” strategy.
3. Your offboarding process.

Your Employee Value Proposition

It’s way past time to start thinking about our employees in the same way we think about our customers.

What does that mean exactly? 

Remember — you’re engaging in a “value swap” with both your customers and your employees. For your customers, you provide a product and/or service that saves them time, makes them money, or makes running their business easier. In exchange, they give you money.

For your employees, you provide financial resources, a meaningful vision they can be part of, and/or opportunities for them to build new skills and develop their career. In exchange, they bring existing skills, unique expertise, and their time to help build your business.

Many well-meaning business owners have bought into the idea of mutual value exchange in theory, but aren’t quite sure how to put it into practice. 

Here’s what I’ve done in my own business.

When I sat down to put some polish on my 2022 annual plan, I realized there was something big missing. As I scrolled down, there were lots of insightful, detailed bits of information I’d collected over the years about who my customers are, where they spend their time, what makes them tick, and why they decide to partner with me.

But there was nothing in there about my employees.

How was I supposed to meet my goal of doubling my employee count this year if I didn’t know who they were, where to find them, or what I could specifically  offer them?

The thing is, I did know these things — they just weren’t documented. And as we all know — if it’s not documented, it’s not scalable. 

So for the first time this year, I created an employee value proposition (EVP) and I documented it. From now on, every time I engage with a prospective employee, or an existing one, it’ll be much easier to visualize what’s most valuable to each of us.

And it doesn’t have to be long. Your EVP is a high-level look at why a talented person would want to work for you in the first place. What do you have to offer as an employer that other companies don’t? 

Your Employee “Surprise and Delight” Strategy

Documenting your basic HR processes (like how to create a new job post, conduct an interview, and onboard new hires) is critical if you want your business to scale.

But it’s not enough.

Study after study shows us that lost employees cost a business at least $3,000 each, and that’s an average based on a $10/hour position. For managers and senior level executives, the cost is much, much more; often skyrocketing into hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue and productivity.

Yes — some turnover is just the cost of doing business. But when it reaches a certain point (and that point ranges depending on industry), it may be a sign of severely problematic issues within your organization or company culture.

What can we do?

Much like we create a clear value proposition for our customers, the best businesses also find ways to surprise and delight them so they’ll turn into repeat customers and keep coming back.

It is so much less expensive to keep an existing customer than it is to find a new one — and it’s no different with employees.

Now, I pride myself on providing a positive employee experience. But it wasn’t until recently that I actually started systematizing it, instead of just winging it. Here’s what I do:

1. Provide concrete growth opportunities once per quarter for each employee. This might be something as simple as purchasing a book to help them learn a new skill, or a more involved venture like enrolling them in a course or conference. Instead of stopping at the belief that I want to provide growth opportunities, I systematize the behaviors — they’re on my calendar, built into my budget, and shared with employees ahead of time.
2. Follow a process for sharing client wins publicly. This one’s my favorite because it’s all bang, no buck.  a huge impact on employee morale, and doesn’t cost me a penny. Whenever I get positive feedback from a client, and someone from my team was involved in making that particular good thing happen, I share it in a Slack channel called #clientwins, along with a screen shot of what the client said, if appropriate. I’m pretty good at giving employees recognition, but when left to chance, it tends to happen sporadically. This way, I know I’m recognizing my employees with consistency.
3. Quarterly profit-sharing. This one might sound intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. I’m a small business — emphasis on the small. If I can do it, anyone can. I’ve designated a small percentage of company profits that is then shared with the entire team at the end of each quarter. This doesn’t replace a competitive salary or benefits; it’s pure icing on the cake. People love it, whether their share in that quarter’s profits gets them a fancy vacation or just a nice meal.

Your Offboarding Process

On the Eisenhower urgent/important matrix, onboarding new employees probably falls in the urgent/important quadrant. Offboarding (AKA, what you do when employees leave your company voluntarily) usually feels less urgent, less important.

Get their passwords, find out what they won’t be able to finish, and have their emails forwarded. Right? Wrong.

The way you handle departing employees speaks volumes about your company culture, and although you may not know it, the rest of your employees are watching.

Using employee offboarding as an opportunity to show your employees that you value them as individuals — not just cogs in your machine — will exponentially increase your team’s morale. As a result, you’ll enjoy higher levels of employee productivity, engagement, and retention.

You’ll also attract better future employees. One Glassdoor survey showed that a whopping 70% of people look at company reviews to help them make a job decision. That’s a lot of people that will be reading your company reviews, many of them basing their decision to work for you on past employee experiences.

As a busy business owner, you might not have considered your more people-centered procedures yet. Maybe you’re where I was — you were doing it, but not documenting it. Or maybe you're managing people for the first time and feel in over your head. By documenting your 1) employee value proposition, 2) surprise and delight strategy, and 3) offboarding process, you’ve found a great place to start.