Bright and sticky | Part 2: 5 ways to retain the top 1% of external talent

In Bright & Sticky Part 1, we pointed to 5 ways in which you might attract the top 1% of external talent. Those were:

1. Engage hearts & minds – and how speaking to both rates and roles as well as purpose & ethics, seamlessly and meaningfully is essential to attract top tier talent.
2. Bring a map – and the power of conversations around potential growth and possibility beyond the task on the table to spark their ambition.
3. Do your research – and how curiosity about them beyond skills and experience engenders both trust and connection.
4. Sharpen your game – and how the role of relentless self-inquiry and the evolution of your attraction strategy is vital to winning in the attraction game.
5. Be present – which explored how ‘seeing’ the candidate in front of you is vital to make the kind of connection that top-tier talent value most.

In Bright & Sticky Part 2, we complete our guide on finding and retaining quality talent in a competitive market. Our team of recruitment experts has identified a second set of 5 levers to help you win in the top talent retention game.

Attracting top-tier outsourced or external talent is critical to bringing energy into your culture, as well as plugging capability and skills gaps in your operation, all the while managing economies and efficiencies. It’s the retention of this exceptional external talent that builds dynamism and resilience into both your operation and your culture for the long haul. So let’s get started on how to retain top talent:

If your organization’s talent strategy requires you to engage and retain top-tier external talent to do it, before you do anything, first make sure that your in-house is in order. It is dangerous to just assume that everything looks great from the outside-in and that you simply need to shape that top talent to feel more like your in-house teams.  

Viewed from the outside (and you can bet your bottom, middle, and top dollar that the top talent will have checked up on this)], in-house cultures in many companies are far from pictures of employee contentment – more often, quite the opposite. Recent findings on general in-house employee satisfaction are not great. A Gallup research piece recently stated that:

Less than one-quarter of employees are “actively engaged” in their work. Although they show up, few feel connected to the company’s mission and purpose and lack the motivation to go above and beyond in their work. 

Fact: Many organizations are struggling to retain their best people – let alone attract and retain new ones from outside who are freer just to go elsewhere. One piece of research found that:

‘2023 saw a third of US employees resign due to misalignment with their employer’s values, and a third of UK employees quit due to bad management.’
‘Over 53% of employees are likely to [have] quit their jobs [in 2024] (which is up from 34%, according to a similar study from 2023)

What’s more, because of the exponential drive towards tighter performance management, often fuelled by AI and the contracting of increasingly ‘giggy’ tasks to maximize control and budgets, the general breadth and nature of the average employee are suffering – because the employees are effectively ‘shrinking to fit’ the new narrow-channel view of the workplace, and of the role they find themselves in. 

LinkedIn’s recent State of the Labour Market piece found that, though increasingly in demand, soft skills like problem-solving, cognitive reasoning, reliability, adaptability, creativity, and originality, are in ever shorter supply. There are simply fewer and fewer people demonstrating the breadth and depth of these skills in their everyday work.

So, if you want top-drawer external people to ‘stick around’, don’t assume that your in-house culture is wildly attractive - make sure it is.

A shift in mindset is critical when retaining top talent. For a long-term retention strategy with external talent, it’s vital to expand conversations beyond rates, deliverables, and timeframes, and embrace the softer, more intangible aspects of what a great working relationship might look like.

The most sought-after talent is far choosier in regard to the culture, ethics, and mission of the companies they wish to contract with. This selectivity only heightens if they are considering a longer-term working relationship with you. So make sure that your culture and values are not only loud and proud but authentic and committed – with the evidence to back it up.

In this way, if curated, organized, and managed properly, they constitute a ‘standing army’ of AI-ready workers able to bridge the gap in the short- to mid-term while organizations take the proper amount of time to both build an AI-first culture strategy and the upskilling program required to deliver it.

Your Employee Value Proposition for in-house talent should have its equivalent for external talent, formalizing and clearly communicating the benefits of working with your organization long-term.

To remind ourselves of the basics of Employee Value Propositions:

‘An ‘Employer Value Proposition’ communicates what’s on offer to employees joining your company. The main pillars of an EVP should include compensation, work-life balance, respect, location, and stability. These elements are usually communicated through your company mission statement, career page, and other recruitment materials.

If you have a value proposition for external talent ship-shape and ready to go, then you’re all good. If not, we strongly urge you to optimize it for finding and retaining quality talent before engaging with the best candidates. You rarely have more than one go at them. There’s a world of organizations with good, great, and sometimes remarkable EVPs out there – many of which have achieved almost legendary status. The top talent will be brutal in their relative assessment of yours.

If you need to make a case to the CFO for why investing in shaping a better EVP is worth its weight in gold, look no further than the HBR piece on Rethinking your EVP and the WD40 example:

By shaping its EVP around employee feedback, the American manufacturer WD-40 managed to maintain 90% employee engagement scores for the past 22 years. During that time, the company’s compounded annual rate of shareholder returns also grew by 15%, and its revenues increased 3x.

So yes, it’s about retaining top talent, but it’s also about staying in the game – and what it takes to stay competitive, agile, and innovative. That is how you ride turbulence over time while still achieving growth and returns. Top-tier outsourced talent is, increasingly, the key to achieving that goal.   

Time-stamped everything has become the norm in our AI-fuelled, platform-based work life, especially for those working remotely or operating as outsourced talent. Now, running everything optimally on some highly polished work tracking system is all well and good – but to keep your best people, you’re going to need to install a ‘Be A Human Being’ button in there somewhere. When it comes to external talent, that rule applies a hundred-fold.

As we’ve already seen, beating employees – either in-house or outsourced ones – into ever more atomized and dislocated work streams, systems, and processes will do little to attract those looking for a cohesive meaningful company culture to be part of. Passion, purpose, and connection require time and resources investing in them – and that means more than just calendaring ‘quality time.’ You cannot battery farm culture. It requires the room for people to feel like they can connect and engage with each other. As we know, soft skills are already under threat and creativity is most likely to only happen in the gaps between regimented tasks. Serendipitous innovation needs space to breathe – even in the neverlands of Trello and Slack.

Exceptional talent are highly ambitious and driven by a fierce need to self-realize their best work environment and work-life balance. They will not stay a second longer than they have to if they think you’re simply stitching them into your optimizer machine.

If you have a highly-tuned EVP, a healthy respect for your employees, and a fierce passion for building an exceptional culture, you’ll already be aware of what your in-house teams prize beyond competitive compensation packages. You’ll already know whether the health perks you offer them are rated, the time in lieu system appreciated, the gym membership valued, and the nifty little rewards voucher thing you’ve got going on gives their satisfaction a boost.

So one of the simplest things you can do to retain top talent in a competitive market is to open up your material perks, intangible rewards, and recognition systems to them. Share the material and professional love you show to your in-house teams with the outsourced teams you bring in. Just sharing your socials and internal comms isn’t enough in the longer-term talent retention game.

Remember, this also holds true for how you line-manage your people. If the line managers of your in-house teams check in once a quarter, double that for the outsourced teams on longer-term contracts – it’s a sure way to make them feel heard, seen, and valued from the inside out.

The big takeaway for retaining talent in a competitive market? You need to think about retaining external talent as seriously as you think about retaining in-house talent.

However as HR teams invest more in employee retention strategies, adding the complexity of external talent can overwhelm your internal resources. Our bespoke talent management solutions can help understand how to retain top talent, then manage everything from onboarding to ongoing engagement, allowing you to focus on growth.

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