It’s impossible for recruiters to ignore: The Great Resignation is a trending headline for good reason.
According to Harvard Business Review, between April, May and June 2021, a whopping 11.5 million workers quit their jobs, and the rate at which employees are resigning shows no indication of slowing down. Currently, Gallup research shows that 48 percent of employees are still actively looking to make a job switch.
While these numbers might strike fear in the hearts of many tech companies, local healthtech company Carrum Health isn’t fazed.
After all, employees’ reasons for leaving often boil down to modern expectations of work-life balance, a connection to the work itself, and a company culture that resonates with personal values. For Carrum Health, the solution to retention is obvious: Reinforce your mission, evolve your company culture, and keep a close eye on how the employee experience is changing alongside a fast-paced world.
In Chief Operating Officer Dan Nardi’s experience, regular company soul-searching and proactivity help keep employees engaged and fulfilled. Behind that strategy is the belief in unity — coworkers who are organized around a company mission feel a sense of community and shared value, sentiments that are critical to modern retention.
What are some things you and your team do to attract great talent and stand out from other potential employers?
We have implemented a mix of proactive recruiting, tapping our existing network, and uncovering new avenues to ensure we are reaching the broadest and most diverse audiences as possible. But the biggest advantage that we’ve seen is clearly sharing what our mission is and how we are changing healthcare.
In an extremely competitive job market, we have found that being proactive with candidates and audiences has helped ensure we stand out from the crowd. Not as many people are cruising job postings and applying on their own any more; rather, they are looking for mission-driven companies that will allow them to solve big problems, have more of an impact and serve a higher purpose.
What are a few of your key strategies or offerings that help you retain talent?
We spend a lot of time thinking about, planning for, iterating on and evolving our company culture. We took up a year-long process to refresh our values in the middle of a pandemic. Along the way, we created a formal diversity, equity and inclusion committee, and we instituted an 80 percent employer-paid premium for medical insurance. We’ve truly put an emphasis on our culture and what it means to all of us.
It’s been proven time and again that the No. 1 reason people stay at a company is their coworkers. I think the other key to retention is listening to your employees’ feedback and implementing the benefits and programs they’re asking for. We plan to roll out competency-based career paths in 2022, as well as updates to our benefits portfolio and the formalization of our Carrum Culture Club to help plan engaging events.
Going from being one hundred percent in-office to fully remote overnight had its challenges, but we kept a growth mindset.”
How has Carrum Health adapted to the shifting wants and needs of your employees over the last year?
When the pandemic started, our company only had 16 employees who were predominantly in the Bay Area. We are now approaching 100 team members across four time zones! This rapid growth was done in a fully remote environment over the past year and a half — definitely a shift from our pre-pandemic approach.
We were successful in making this shift because we stopped limiting our hiring focus to just specific geographies. We revamped our interviewing processes to embrace video meetings and virtual settings.
Going from being one hundred percent in-office to fully remote overnight had its challenges, but we kept a growth mindset and solved problems one at a time. Some of our biggest wins came by leveraging technology (Disco and Donut plugins for Slack are excellent), while others involved agreeing to new meeting hygiene as a team (for example, including meeting-free times built into the week). We also created opportunities for people to simply connect through virtual programs like Monday morning coffee chats, Friday happy hours and cooking classes for charity.
Successful adaptations aside, at the end of the day, we are all connected and engaged through our shared passion to change healthcare.
