Employee retention is becoming a major problem for modern companies.

In June 2016, the ‘quit rate’ of employees voluntarily leaving their jobs reached 2.1%. If this continues, just over a quarter of private employees will have quit their jobs voluntarily by the close of the year.

One cause of this is the increase of millennials, those born between 1981-2004, in the workplace. Millennials are less likely to remain loyal to their employer, and like to change jobs more regularly. When asked whether workers should stay with their employers for at least 5 years, 13% of millennials agreed. However, when asked the same question, a whopping 41% of baby boomers said yes.

This is part of a wider trend towards labor flexibility that can cause problems for employers. According to recent research, it takes an average of 29 days to fill a vacancy,4 causing a loss of productivity and a lack of product development.

If you have technical employees such as research and development professionals, engineers, or software developers, this is even more important. They’re typically more difficult to find than sales, PR, or marketing staff, and losing them can lead to a lull in product development and the risk of getting left behind by your competitors.

To deal with this problem, it’s never been more important to have a strong employer branding strategy to help you retain your technical staff and attract new  talent.

Here are three questions to ask yourself. The answers will help you form an effective employer branding strategy and help you retain and attract great employees.

You can find more free information and resources about this topic here.

There’s sure to be something that sets you apart from your competition.

Maybe you have a unique product, or you’re the market leader. Maybe you have a reputation for innovation.

These are the reasons technical staff will want to work for you, but, most importantly, reasons why they’ll want to work for you more than any other company.

Communicating the quality that sets your company apart as best you can is a surefire way of increasing retention and bringing in new staff.

You can offer employees all the benefits in the world and communicate this as widely as possible, but if you misunderstand what they want, you’ll waste your time and money—and you won’t manage to move the needle on employee retention or attract new employees.

So before you implement benefits for your technical staff, consult with them to see what they value most. They might not care about a free gym so much, but really value the freedom to work on a personal research project within the company. Or maybe what they want most is the time to learn new skills.

The values of your technical staff will be different from those of your other staff. And it’s vital for you to understand what motivates them to offer benefits that address these motivations before incorporating them into your employer branding strategy.

One of the main components of any employer branding strategy is company reputation. What is yours?

With the growth of social media and websites like Glassdoor, where employees share inside insights into what it’s like to work at companies, it’s never been more important to manage reputation.

These forums can tell you what your staff really think of your company—both in terms of what you’re doing right and what can be improved.

Once you’ve answer this basic question and have an idea of what your reputation is among potential employees, you can shift your employer branding strategy and improve your reputation. Having a great reputation is a surefire way to attract the best technical talent, and decrease your quit rate.

You can find more free information and resources about this topic here.