Attracting and keeping the best employees around is a tough challenge during normal times. But in today’s labor market, with the great resignation shaking businesses across the U.S. to the core and changing the landscape for employment and hiring, finding and keeping the best talent is a full-time job. The secret to keeping employees happy and satisfied at your business doesn’t have to be complicated – if you know what sorts of perks, benefits, and bonuses truly matter to prospective employees and what is just fluff that costs your business money without making an impact on hiring. Here are the eight key things you should do to attract the best employees to your company.

Define Your Core Values

IN order to discover. The best ways to attract talented and successful employees for your company, you should first start by asking what makes a great employee? Some people may tell you that it is work ethic, or determination that is the most important factor, some will say intellect and skillset is the most important – but these answers won’t really help you find the best employees for your company. You need to find employees whose values align with the core values of your company. Which means you need to start by clearly defining your company’s core values. Displaying your core values loud and proud will attract employees who share those values and goals and want to work for your company to help achieve those goals. That is what makes a truly great employee.

Define Your Company Culture

Another key aspect to attracting better employees is to advertise your company culture. The reason many people are quitting in today’s labor market is that the environment of most businesses is stifling, robotic, and one where workers’ opinions and ideas are not valued. So, you need to make sure that you are providing the kind of company culture to potential employees that they want to work in. Define your company culture, what you stand for, what you hope to gain from your employees, and how you plan to foster and grow your employees through your company’s culture. A strong culture will attract the best of the best.

Leverage Your Reputation

There are few things that can help you get quality employees quite like a good reputation. If your business is highly reputable, having your job on their resume can be a great tool for them to continue to rise in your industry. If your company is prestigious enough, workers will seek employment from your company as a credential that they are high quality and valuable workers. Try to leverage your businesses reputation in job postings and interviews to show prospective employees that working for your company will pay dividends for their continued success and career growth.

Provide Good Benefits

This is the most classic piece of advice out there to recruit high quality talent to your company, but it has a place on this list for one simple reason – it works. But it is not as simple as offering benefits, you must be offering good benefits. Don’t just offer health insurance to new employees, offer them top notch health insurance. Health insurance plans typically cover specialists like dermatologists. Make sure that your employee health plan is reasonable and very good, and prospective employees will come flocking to your office applying for jobs. Also offer benefits like vision, dental, and generous sick leave and PTO. These are the kinds of benefits that employees want to see, and that means it’s the type of benefit you should offer.

Parental Leave Packages

One of the most important things to potential employees that are young and looking to start a family soon is parental leave. It is no longer common to see single income households that allow one parent to stay home with the children while another goes to work, and you can’t just leave your newborn with a nanny after just a few weeks. Make sure that you are offering parental leave packages that involve at least two months of paid parental leave. You could also think about offering a slow return to the office and fulltime work, slowly increasing the days new parents are expected to be in the office as their newborn ages to help them adjust to being in the office.

Offer Upward Mobility

Employees like to work at companies where they have an opportunity for career advancement. Your business may be successful, prestigious, and even offer generous benefits, but if you don’t offer employees, especially young employees, upwards mobility opportunities, they are going to look elsewhere for job offers. Would you want to work somewhere you knew had no opportunities for you to advance? So why would you expect anyone else to take on that offer? Make sure that you have a plan for the upwards mobility of your new employees and be open and honest with them about what the timeframes and opportunities look like at your company.

Raise Your Salaries

There is no way around it, sometimes the only way to get the best employees is to offer the highest compensation packages. If you are not offering employees enough money, they will be tempted to look elsewhere. If you find that your job offers are routinely being rejected by potential employees in favor of offers from your competitors, you should do some research into the compensation packages being offered by your competitors. Odds are, they are larger than yours. There is no good way around paying the price for high quality labor.

Work-From-Home Options

This last piece of advice is a more recent phenomenon that could have a major impact on your ability to attract the best possible employees. With the pandemic forcing many people into a state of remote work, a lot of workers found that remote work is very enjoyable. If your company survived the pandemic with remote work, then you can probably afford to offer your employees remote working options, at least part of the time. Try decreasing your in-office days to just two or three a week, or less if you can manage it, and see how this increases your applications and helps you find better talent.

Hiring has never been an easy task. Attracting and keeping the best workers in each industry is a constant battle. But if you follow these eight tips, you can start attracting and hiring the best employees around.

Read this next: Tools Your Businesses Can’t Survive Without