Employee Experience as a Lever for Talent Retention: Beyond Recruitment

Résumé

Abstract

In an organizational environment characterized by increasing competition for skills and a growing range of opportunities available to employees, talent retention has become a major strategic challenge for organizations. While previous research and managerial practices have traditionally focused on talent attraction and recruitment, the ability to provide a positive employee experience appears to be an essential condition for building a sustainable relationship between employees and their organizations. This study aims to examine the extent to which employee experience contributes to talent retention and to identify the psychological mechanisms underlying this relationship. The proposed conceptual model considers employee experience as a multidimensional construct including work experience, interpersonal harmony, organizational and managerial practices, professional development, and compensation and recognition. Job satisfaction and organizational commitment are introduced as mediating variables, consistent with social exchange theory (Blau, 1964; Cropanzano & Mitchell, 2005). A primary quantitative study using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) is proposed among employees working in service companies in Morocco, particularly in the customer relationship / BPO sector, an industry undergoing strong growth (148,500 direct jobs and 26.22 billion Moroccan dirhams in exports at the end of 2024, with a target of 270,000 additional jobs by 2030 under the "Maroc Digital 2030" strategy) yet facing structurally high staff turnover. Pending this primary data collection, the plausibility of the model is supported by a synthesis of already-published empirical findings on comparable relationships: a South Korean structural-equation-modeling study (Lee & Kim, 2023; N = 534) shows that several dimensions of employee experience have a positive and significant effect on job satisfaction and organizational commitment; the landmark meta-analysis by Tett and Meyer (1993) further establishes significant mean correlations between job satisfaction and turnover intention (ρ = -0.58) and between organizational commitment and turnover intention (ρ = -0.54), with these intentions in turn predicting actual turnover. These findings, obtained in contexts distinct from the one targeted by this research, converge with the stated hypotheses and support the relevance of the proposed conceptual model, whose integrated empirical validation in the Moroccan context remains to be carried out.

Keywords: employee experience; talent retention; job satisfaction; organizational commitment; social exchange theory; PLS-SEM; human resources.