With 2023 fast approaching, organisations are starting to develop new strategies for recruitment success for the coming year. In this article we will explore the role mental wellbeing will play in future organisation recruitment strategies and why employees should be focussed on mental wellness and wellbeing.

Are Employees Really Focussed on Mental Health Wellness at a Recruitment Level?

According to PerkBox, the talent reward platform, three quarters of employees have considered leaving their current employer due to insufficient mental health wellness provision. This is further amplified by a study from HeadSpace, the mental healthcare app, that highlights the link between better talent onboarding and the provision of mental health support in nurturing long-term talent retention.

As more and more potential employees focus on mental wellness when experiencing prospective onboarding channels, recruitment professionals need to apply this thinking into their own recruitment experience. According to the CIPD, whilst there is a growing understanding by organisations developing recruitment strategies to the role played by providing mental health wellness support in the workplace, many organisations have yet to grasp the importance of implementing such approaches and that a “gap” between organisations who have nurtured this approach against those who have failed to understand the importance of wellness will only grow in time. This ticking time bomb could prove to further hinder the ever-growing talent shortage facing global businesses today.

Why Focus on Mental Wellness When Designing Recruitment Strategies?

It is critically important for any organisation developing a recruitment strategy to understand the strategic and long-term needs of their business in terms of staffing and future growth potential. By developing a strategy that helps organisations attract and retain top talent, businesses can align key organisational objectives and create processes whereby recruitment flow can follow a structured patten that allows a business to recruit either at pace or for targeted purposes.

However, focusing purely on “the bottom line” can hinder organisational talent recruitment in terms of accessing a new generational pool of talent. With Gen Y and Z becoming a more pivotal recruitment channel for new talent, this also means understanding the shift in employee needs. In past recruitment strategies, for an older generational recruitment cohort, mental wellbeing wasn’t centred as a key priority. As such, by failing to understand this generational shift, businesses could be putting off potential talent by failing to highlight mental wellbeing support provision within their own in-house or external mental health wellness services.

Why “Community”-Centred Thinking is Central for Wellbeing Recruitment Success?

As highlighted above, advertising an organisation’s internal or external support provision for mental health wellness can help drive talent onboarding – especially within a fast-changing intergenerational cohort. However, there is another way, which is community-centred mental health wellness.

Many organisations are providing subscriptions to apps like HeadSpace or Calm. This is provided as a personal service to an individual employee to help individuals in managing better mental health outcomes.

However, others have moved in a more ‘community’ minded direction and have focussed on building internal mental health wellbeing support forums – safe spaces whereby people with concerns or needing advice in relation to mental health can engage with a trained staff member in a dedicated space with access to other remote (tele-counselling) services that can provide a more holistic community-centred approach to mental wellness in the workplace.

By understanding mental health wellness, and by including this experience within both the employer branding experience and the wider recruitment strategy, organisations can improve talent onboarding to help cater towards intergenerational differences that improve organisational success.