And what you can do to make better hires (and avoid the killer cost of churn).
Let’s start this conversation with the logical supposition that you want to create, build and retain a team of talented, happy and high-achieving performers who laugh, smile and love to exceed expectations. Whoever does not have this as a priority business objective please raise your hand!
Churn is a killer!
But it does not have to be that silver bullet that regularly shoots you in the butt and sets you and your business back in time, money and growth progress.
Let’s start by getting a few words of wisdom and current trends from recruiters, job board blog comments and recruitment process outsourcing professionals – here and abroad. Then we’ll dig into what we know that works in delivering winners to your team and making you smile a lot more.
Here you go. Fast and furious!
Mikaela Kiner, CEO and Founder of uniquelyHR, wants you to think about following up and tracking how your candidates work out in the role.
“Recruiters always believe we’ve found the absolute best candidate for the job,” says Kiner. “After all, that’s why we hired them! But too often, we don’t know what happens once that person joins the company. Did that person become a superstar, did they plateau or were they eventually let go for poor performance? If recruiters can work with HR and hiring managers to get data on the quality of the people they’ve hired, they can spot trends and then use that data to improve the screening and recruiting process.”
https://www.glassdoor.com/employers/blog/reduce-churn/
Simply being able to do a job well is no longer the only requirement for stepping into a new role. Cultural fit / personality fit and the level of enthusiasm an applicant can bring to the role are decisive components of whether someone is a preferred candidate at the end of the recruitment process.”
The report also warned that employers still are looking for stability in a candidate’s job history, observing: Retention and tenure periods of approximately 2 years are still the standard, with career progression in previous companies and roles being a strong indicator of future success.
A third of small and medium-sized tech businesses are struggling to retain staff, while 40% of businesses say recruiting skilled members of staff is their biggest concern, a report by a U K SMB bank.
The study, which questioned 1,000 business decision makers around the UK, discovered that key positions in the tech sector are hard to fill and this means the IT industry is facing a recruitment disaster.
A fifth of respondents identified the biggest factor affecting staff churn as unhappiness over wages, with 22% saying skilled employees often seek alternative employment because they don’t think they’re being paid enough, while 20% want a complete change of career and another fifth are heading into retirement.
OK, this is pretty logical and broad-based process. I call it laying the foundation. What does your recruitment, retention and diversity landscape look like? A war zone or a healthy ecosystem?
An excerpt from an RPO blog post asks a vital question.
Are you in the know with Diversity recruiting?
It is a known fact that diversity recruiting has been a high priority amongst most talent acquisition professionals and organizations. Many people will agree that diversity is good for business. Not only bringing fresh ideas, but various perspectives as well.
https://blog.rpoassociation.org/blog/are-you-in-the-know-with-diversity-recruiting
What You can do . . .
Work together to create modern diverse and inclusive workforce: Your recruiter should be a talent partner who can help you with creating a more diverse and inclusive workplace. Having a diversity agenda or quota is not going to drive any actionable change if the recruiter filling the talent funnel is making decisions motivated by their own compelling bias; cash. You can ask recruiters to provide 50:50 shortlists or commit them to accessing new and mysterious talent pools that quite frankly don’t exist, but all you will ever get is lip service.
It is only in the recruiters’ interest in the current model to fill as many jobs, as quickly as possible, to make as much money as possible. Now I will also be clear that many creative agencies accentuate this problem by putting recruitment briefs out to 3, 4 or even 5 agencies at once, thus amplifying the race and worsening the problem. This does not broaden your potential talent pool, the market is too small, this just puts a rocket into already bad practices.
Attitude, talent and skills are what matter.
If you want to give your customers excellent service, there is a strong argument for hiring older people. And even if they are slightly more expensive, you’ll recover these costs in longer tenure and enhanced customer loyalty. If you need the sort of perspective that the young have and can afford to replace them frequently, then hire young people. But don’t expect there’s anything you can do to keep them for long.
Let’s not be trapped by the pointless argument about which is better.
The key to getting the best business results is about understanding the distinct merits of young and old, a variety of colors and both genders and then making hiring decisions on the value of each and the requirements of the role regardless of the candidate’s age, race or gender.
What happens to performance?
So, how do you develop a diversity strategy that gets results? The companies with the most effective diversity programs take a holistic approach to diversity by following these guidelines:
- Link diversity to the bottom line.
- When exploring ways to increase corporate profits, look to new markets or to partnering with your clients more strategically.
- Consider how a diverse workforce will enable your company to meet those goals.
- Think outside the box.
Use technology as intended. Tools, not rules.
If you’ve been following the latest hiring trends, you may have noticed that many recruiters are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) tools to tackle discrimination in hiring―and the expectations for success are high.
However, HR technology analysts and even executives at companies offering AI solutions caution that a totally bias-free hiring process may be difficult to achieve.
A study from McKinsey and Company found that companies that have a diverse workforce financially outperform companies that don’t.
Take a look at this slide deck about Age Diverse Work Groups. It gives you a real, usable roadmap from where you are (stuck) to where you want to go (happy, wealthy and wise) in terms of how you recruit a diverse team that performs.
And, to wrap up this conversation, here are some actionable thoughts you can use;
- Attitude, talent and skills are what matter.
- To give your customers excellent service, hire older people.
- If you can afford to replace them frequently, hire younger people.
- Let’s not be trapped by the pointless argument about which is better.
- High turnover (churn) consumes dollars, time, and energy.
- Getting new people on board translates to less time and fewer assets to fully execute your plan.
- If you recruit a bundle of skills, that person will likely leave you holding an empty bag 24–27 months from now.
- Change always happens. Continuity, scalability, remarkability, and sustainability emerge from your drive to be a winner and to get and keep winners on your team.
The danger of too much homogeneity is that your teams aren’t as creative in their problem solving. Encourage your hiring managers to consider their own biases. Remind your hiring managers that their job is to identify the best person for the job, not a person who fits their preconceived notions of who should have the job.
And then go buy my new book – Crazy Smart!
Come back for more! Joe