Many organisations out there have a “hiring season.” You know, the peak seasons where there is more work than manpower so they hire more at those seasons.

I choose to do things differently. Hiring, to me, is 24/7, regardless of season, regardless of workload. Hiring, and retaining talent is crucial in any organisation.

What other companies choose to do is that they over hire for a peak season, and once it is over, they will then find excuses to retrench their staff by making their working environment difficult.

To me, that is really unethical as it promises false hope to the employee that they finally get a job, only to be laid off after contributing and giving their all during the peak season.

“Business is about people. People, without business, is still business. Business, without people, is not a business,” Dato’ Sri Adrian Wee.

To me, the issue is never with over hiring. Over hiring only happens when you hire a person for a specific purpose and you compartmentalise them. Say for example you hire a person in your team to do a project, and once the project is done you have an extra staff laying around doing nothing.

Hiring staff on a contractual basis is also not a very viable solution because they are not loyal to your branding, neither do they know where your company and you are heading to. Having too many contractual staff is also problematic because by nature they wouldn’t know your company culture or procedure. Contractual staff is only here for a short period of time and they’ll leave, possibly bringing along company secrets and database.

To me, there is a better way of doing things – and that entails looking for different criteria when hiring. Talent aside, we look for additional criteria when looking for new hires. Being resilient, willing to learn and being adaptive in different environments are just basically the rules we set down for new hires before we take them on board.

They know upfront even as they are being hired for a specific role, they are not expected to stay stagnant for a long period of time. After they have mastered their task and create a system, we will upskill them and let them adapt to other roles instead.

To me, that is the way to retain talent. Talented people, by their nature, cannot sit and work doing the same thing over and over again. If they are not constantly trying to improve themselves, they wouldn’t have acquire their talent in the first place. There will come a time when they are bored, so new tasks are necessary to keep a talented employee constantly challenged and motivated.

When the talent is continuously learning and setting a higher limit, that is how the organisation as a whole grow too. As the company grows, every employee will reap the benefit too. That is the secret to keeping talent.