With so much happening at your enterprise across numerous locations and departments, it can feel overwhelming to stop, zoom out, and focus on the bigger picture. However, to acquire and retain the top talent for your open positions, that’s exactly what hiring teams and management must do by creating career pathways.
Career pathways are predetermined plans that help employees predict their role progression if they stay at the company long-term. For instance, a common career path across industries is advancing from a direct report to a middle manager.
Presenting job candidates and high-performing employees with structured career pathways based on their roles is crucial for talent acquisition, retention, and engagement. Let’s explore how your enterprise can create, manage, and increase engagement with career pathways that appeal to top talent.
1. Leverage applicant tracking system (ATS) data
Nearly all enterprises use an ATS to manage their hiring processes and streamline recruiting. This tool saves valuable applicant data that are critical for making informed hiring decisions and can be useful in identifying potential career paths.
Regardless of your enterprise’s industry or job types, you probably collect the following data across your HR systems that can be useful for configuring career pathways:
- Job and salary progressions: If you already have baseline career pathways to work off of, track the average salary progressions for each department and corroborate them with the change in responsibilities.
- Employee performance metrics: Enterprises have many different departments—and, therefore, many different ways of measuring success. Establish what success looks like for each part of the business based on how the role supports company goals.
- Training and certifications: Knowing if certain certifications contribute to success and progression at the company can help you clarify the prerequisites for employees who want to advance at your company.
Your ATS gives you a wealth of data on applicants and future employees. Before you begin planning your career pathways, ensure you’ve configured your ATS to collect the most relevant data for your purposes. For instance, your ATS might integrate with your employee resource planning (ERP) solution or learning management system (LMS) and automatically store any certifications employees have received before or during their tenure at the company. Or your ATS might allow you to customize data fields so you can capture exactly what candidates need to succeed in their roles.
2. Develop a corporate mentorship program
Corporate mentorship programs help build camaraderie and cultural cohesion within your enterprise. These mentorship programs also can be a tool to establish your career pathways by:
- Spreading the word: Career paths are only a helpful recruitment and engagement resource when employees and candidates know about them. Train your mentors on how your career pathways work and how to discuss them with mentees so everyone’s on the same page.
- Building connections: Discussing long-term career plans amongst uncertainty can feel exciting yet overwhelming, which can turn employees off from exploring their career pathways further. Mentorship programs allow new employees to build a support system within the enterprise, which can help them feel comfortable engaging with your career pathways.
- Empowering the transfer of ideas: As with any other employee-facing program, you must accept and encourage feedback to improve your career pathways. Expressing ideas or feedback to a mentor can feel more comfortable than talking to a C-suite executive or even middle management. The mentor then can pass on the feedback to decision-makers.
When selecting mentors for your program, ensure they have a relevant connection to the mentee pool. For instance, you might select mentor and mentee pairs within the same department. This forethought ensures everyone has a productive experience and gets the best advice tailored to them.
3. Implement role-specific certifications and qualifications
According to Double the Donation, establishing a standard set of qualifications and skills that employees should have to advance through the career pathways is crucial for encouraging employee engagement. After all, a straightforward set of guidelines will ensure employees and candidates have what they need to achieve their fullest potential, which benefits both their professional development pursuits and your enterprise.
Once you’ve created your list of ideal qualifications based on data from your ATS and other HR systems, you’ll need to integrate them into your standard career pathways. At each step in the career pathway, outline the following information:
- Specifics about any necessary certifications and how to obtain them
- A short explanation of why the certifications are necessary
- A timeframe for obtaining the certification or being in a prerequisite role, if applicable
For example, you might specify that a Data Acquisition Associate needs a Master’s degree in data science and two years of experience in the role to be considered for a promotion to Senior Data Scientist. As rationale, you could say that it is required to have a Master’s degree in math and coding expertise, paired with at least two years of experience understanding the enterprise’s unique needs, to succeed in the Senior Data Scientist role.
As Jobvite recommends, you should treat your talent acquisition and development strategies as marathons, not sprints. It takes significant time and iteration to create effective pathways and pivot them with changing business needs. To ensure your career pathways remain helpful, ask yourself the following questions regularly:
- Are our career pathways supporting our current and near-future business objectives?
- What feedback have employees given about upward mobility?
- Are there new assessments, certifications, or skills we should add to or take away from our standard career pathways?
As long as you answer these questions, leverage top tools, and cultivate connections within your enterprise, you can make potential candidates, new employees, and seasoned professionals alike feel like they have a future with your organization.
