Just like any organization, the employee life cycle inside the IT industry has its sole meaning to help visualize how employee engages within the company. The cycle itself describes stages in employee time with an organization. It shares many similarities with ‘conventional’ cycles, but HR tech professionals must approach it differently due to its specifics. Especially as IT employees name different priorities for employers to comply with, cycle awareness helps reduce turnover risk while signaling that something is wrong inside the company.
What is the employee life cycle?
Within its six stages, the model explains the most important parts of the employee journey inside the company. These stages cover attraction, recruitment, onboarding, development, retention, and separation. Knowing how software engineers look for another job once boredom strikes using the cycle model becomes a priority for HR professionals. It helps them monitor employee alignment with the company culture and employee engagement.
Attraction: Starts with your employer brand
Signing a job contract is just a formality and, for sure, isn’t the beginning of the employee life cycle. The cycle starts way earlier once a potential candidate gets in touch with the explanation of what is actually to work in your company.
That’s why IT companies pay close attention to developing employer branding strategies that translate company culture and values into understandable meaning. As it’s pretty obvious now, communication over social media isn’t enough anymore. Therefore, companies must use an active approach, approaching communities and organizing events showcasing how their ideas and technology contribute to the world’s better place.
Even sourcing activities must be planned in detail, as nonchalance in the way of just ‘saying hello’ doesn’t work anymore in HR tech. It’s getting super difficult, and planning the tone of your message becomes one of the priorities.
Recruitment: Old habits die hard
Most IT recruiting techniques still are conducted conventionally, and avoiding to comply with the fact that tech teams scale up and down faster than ever. Depending on the phases of layoff or expansion cycles, recruiters must become more flexible. Companies that rely blindly on job descriptions are struggling in the market. As an immediate improvement, hiring managers and recruiters must collaborate at all times together and exchange relevant information to avoid restricting the talent pool no more than it’s needed.
Nowadays, bringing tech talents to your company has to be performed with an out-of-the-box approach, playing with broader job descriptions.
Onboarding: Blending tech teams fast, ehm… faster
Now you understand why onboarding as a third step in the employee life cycle is essential. It became pretty obvious during the recent remote work era, as with limitations to getting in touch with new employees, it had to be done using video calls. It showed us how hard it’s to provide new candidates with all important aspects of their day-to-day activities or to get introduced to their teams.
As with any other employee, software engineers have grown all sorts of fears. Fears of what to expect of their first day and week at the job, or what kind of training there will be role expectations. Thankfully most companies responded very well to the challenge, according to our survey. However, HR teams can always review the effectiveness of their onboarding process using internal onboarding surveys.
Professional development: Where software engineers pay their closest attention
Every third software engineer (31%) finds professional development as a way to acknowledge their work and commitment, according to this survey. As a fourth stage of the employee life cycle, career development sets the stage for IT employees to get challenged and to have an opportunity for their careers to grow.
Software engineers want to develop further and learn new things. They demand training, conferences, and exchanging ideas are important benefits for them. Ensure that your team members never feel they aren’t making progress in their professional development.
Retention: 6 factors making software engineers glue in
Probably, making employees stay in comparison to joining your organization is way more challenging for HR professionals. According to a survey, this employee life cycle stage can be maintained using these six factors:
- Salary competitiveness
- Reduction of toxic working environment
- Stress at work
- Open discussions about job expectations with employees
- Lack of pay raise
- Long working hours
These factors are the ones that keep employees from leaving, at the same time having an enormous effect on employee engagement and work-life balance.
Separation: Inevitable experience that doesn’t have to be bad by default
There are times when employees have to leave your company, and of all mentioned employee life cycle stages, it’s impossible to prevent. Employees in the IT industry are the ones that are prone to greater mobility and fluctuations, and these actions happen by their own decision or according to industry trends such as layoffs. Importantly, employees and the employer should leave on good terms, so that employees speak highly of the company.
You fake it. You brake it. Employee life cycle shows it all.
Employee life cycle in the IT industry substantially influences attraction, recruitment, and retention. Work on its design thoroughly and often revisit, as it vouches for your company that it’s seriously aware of the needs and wants of software engineers and intends to improve employee experience at each stage of the employee journey.
