.webp)
The Winning Strategy to Attract and Retain Top Talent
.svg)
According to Gartner, 51% of employees worldwide are currently open to new job opportunities or actively looking for a new position. Their goals are clear: higher pay, more development opportunities, and above all, a better work-life balance. These expectations are the key levers to attract and retain top talent!
When you consider that replacing an employee can cost 6 to 9 months of salary, the case for investing in retention makes itself. It's far more cost-effective to keep your best people engaged than to continuously replace those who leave. In the era of quiet quitting, keeping employees engaged is no easy feat. In France alone, 93% of employees are disengaged, and half struggle to find meaning in their work.
To keep attracting, engaging, and retaining talent, HR teams have no choice but to continuously refine their HR strategy. But what topics should you prioritize? And how do you make sure your strategy truly meets the expectations of both candidates and employees? Here are some insights to help you stand out.
Why Invest in Talent Attraction and Retention?
"To attract and retain top talent, you don't need a grand strategy — just offer a competitive package and you're done." While that might have been true 15 years ago, it's far from the reality today. A study by the Jean Jaurès Foundation, which found that 61% of French workers would rather earn less and have more free time.
Salary alone doesn't tell the whole story. Several other factors come into play when employees decide whether to seek a new job or stay put. For example:
- Work-life balance, and especially a healthy balance between professional and personal life
- Job security (e.g., the possibility of a permanent contract)
- Interest in the role and meaningful work
- The level of responsibility, autonomy, and trust
- A positive workplace culture and relationships with colleagues
- The flexibility in working conditions (e.g., the option to work remotely)
- company culture and management style
- Available career growth opportunities
- The company's commitments on CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility)
We explain below how to leverage these factors to attract and retain your best people.
How to Attract Talent
Offer Competitive Compensation Packages
Even if salary and benefits aren't the only factors, they still matter enormously. According to a Robert Half study, compensation remains the number one criterion when choosing a new job. If you want to attract the best talent, you need to offer an attractive package.
This package can be clearly spelled out in the job posting, including:
- The base salary range for the role. The more competitive it is, the better your chances of attracting qualified talent — but keep it consistent with market rates and internal pay scales.
- Variable pay (bonuses, profit sharing, stock options, etc.)
- Remote work policy
- Employee benefits, such as:
- perks in kind: company phone, company car…
- additional paid leave
- comprehensive health coverage
- free access to sports and/or cultural activities
- the option to contribute to an employee savings or retirement plan
- childcare expense support
Strengthen Your Employer Brand
To attract talent, you also need to be visible to candidates. That's where employer branding comes in: it refers to the image a company projects both internally and externally. When done well, it can significantly increase the number of applications you receive.
To boost your attractiveness, we recommend highlighting your company culture, values, and your commitments on topics such as the environment, diversity and inclusion. This can be embedded in job descriptions, on your careers site, on job boards, and on social media.
If you have the resources, don't hesitate to experiment with different formats — videos, carousels, quizzes, etc. This will help you stand out and leave a lasting impression on potential candidates.
Build an Effective Recruitment and Onboarding Process
Recruitment and onboarding are also critical levers for attracting talent. Yet the reality is that current practices don't always measure up.
Nearly 60% of candidates have had a negative experience during a recruitment process — most often due to poor communication or slow response times. In the digital age, many won't hesitate to share that experience online (on sites like Glassdoor), which can deter future applicants.
To create a positive candidate experience, you need to put a solid recruitment and onboarding process in place. Key steps include:
- clear, detailed job postings that reflect actual internal needs.
- An automated recruitment process using an ATS (applicant tracking system), which helps process applications quickly and ensures no candidate is left without a response.
- Interviews with the right people who ask the right questions, kept to a reasonable number — ideally no more than 3 per role.
- A comprehensive onboarding program that helps the new hire understand their role, get to know their colleagues, and develop the skills needed to do their job well.
How to Retain Talent
Invest in Professional Development
Of course, learning doesn't stop at the end of the onboarding period — it continues throughout the employee's career. As the saying goes: an employee who stops learning is an employee who's on their way out. And there's good reason for that.
According to a BVA study, 21% of employees who are considering resigning cite a lack of growth as their reason. Investing in professional development is therefore one of the most effective ways to attract and retain talent.
Depending on your internal resources, you can offer employees training delivered by internal or external stakeholders — either self-paced e-learning formats or live training sessions that allow for real-time interaction and Q&A.
To encourage continuous learning, you can also create rituals. At Talkspirit, we run a weekly "Growth Academy" — a session that brings together sales, marketing and customer support teams to share best practices and lessons learned. Each session covers a different topic, giving different team members a chance to take the floor. Subjects have ranged from social selling and client onboarding to the use of artificial intelligence.
Foster Transparency to Build Autonomy
On average, employees spend up to 8 hours a week searching for information. The culprit: the proliferation of apps and information sources that scatter data across multiple locations. This fragmentation leads to information overload, reduced productivity, and even higher turnover.
To keep attracting and retaining talent, everyone must have access to the same level of information — regardless of their position in the hierarchy. The more transparency you build in, the more easily employees can find what they need, and the more autonomously they can work. This — in turn — will boost employee engagement and improve talent retention.
Two key tools can help you build that transparency:
- Talkspirit: the ideal platform to centralize all information and knowledge shared internally. It features a news feed organized by topic groups, a customizable welcome portal, a drive and a content library.
- Holaspirit: this self-management solution helps you map roles and processes across your organization, bringing clarity to who does what. With this increased transparency, teams can gain autonomy, agility, and performance.
Build a Culture of Recognition
Last but certainly not least: recognition. According to a My Happy Job study, only one in four employees says they receive recognition from their company. Yet it's one of the most powerful levers for retaining talent.
Building a culture of recognition can deliver real benefits for your team. It can help employees find meaning in their work, increase motivation and performance, and ultimately improve retention.
Here are some ideas for fostering recognition:
- Celebrate your team's successes on the welcome portal and/or news feed of your enterprise social network
- Create an award for the best employee of the month — and make it genuinely rewarding
- Set up a discussion group where anyone can congratulate, thank, or recognize a colleague or team for their work
- Show each employee how their contribution drives overall company performance
- Give bonuses and/or gifts to the most engaged and high-performing employees
In Conclusion
Attracting and retaining top talent requires acting on multiple levers simultaneously — employer branding, recruitment, onboarding, training, compensation, recognition, and transparency. By addressing all of these areas, you can build a comprehensive HR strategy that supports your company's growth.
Of course, there are many more best practices for improving talent retention . Discover 10 of them in this methodology guide below.
