How to Woo Knowledge Workers Away from the Competition

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

This is a two part series on recruiting and retaining knowledge workers. Click here to read part one.

As I mentioned earlier, knowledge workers are one of your company’s most valuable assets and while creating a strategy and culture kept on retaining them at your workplace, it’s likely that your employer’s efforts won’t keep everyone from jumping ship. It’s important to take a balanced retention and recruiting approach.

Find insights from your current knowledge workers. This balanced approach starts with asking for information and preferences from your current knowledge workers you employ. Whether it’s a formal survey or a series of focus groups, start talking to your current employees before you create a campaign to recruit internally and externally.

Create focused environments for learning, work and collaboration. Knowledge workers are at their happiest when they are inspired, comfortable and most productive. By creating an environment and culture that works best for these individuals, you can begin to build an employment brand and story to share with prospective candidates focused on the ways that they work and perform at their best.

Create your story and target job seekers appropriately. Great workplaces focused on the above perks and culture deserved to be shared with an employment branding strategy. Keep in mind that messaging, including content marketing like video and blogs, placement and marketing are key for this savvy and smart audience of candidates who are in short supply.

Create opportunities to engage. As part of your employment branding and recruiting efforts, it’s important to create focused environments with the purposes of engaging, sharing and learning for these highly sought after group of employees. Talent networks are a great place to start offering a highly dynamic and polished online environment centering on the prospective employee.

This balanced recruiting approach focuses on employment branding and the realization that when you are marketing job opportunities, your culture and benefits at your company, it’s not only external candidates and customers that are watching and listening, it’s also monitored by your current employees. Which makes the balance of content, information and resources shared even more important because with your employment branding efforts your not only wooing workers away from your competition, your retaining employees at your company.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @blogging4jobs. 

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