How to prevent the saddest form of employee turnover
Finding the right people, who will stay with you, starts with making sure the organization and the job applicant on the same track. So many times when I go into an organization I see employees who should have never been hired. They meet few, if any, of the target candidate criteria. Either the organization has not identified their candidate criteria or they are not sticking to the agreed on criteria. When I ask them about it they always say the same thing: “We need bodies NOW”. The employee makes it even worse because they also do not have their criteria for what they are looking for in a job. They “need a job – NOW”. It will just be a matter of time before the employee will decide to move on or the organization will decide that they “don’t fit in”. This is amazing to me – they decide six months later they don’t fit in? The organization should have known that at the time of the interview or even before. Both the organization and the employee are hurt for the same reason and that is sad.
The organization and the candidate are trading a short term problem by creating a long term problem. In these cases organizations have done a disservice to the employees by hiring them and to the organization by setting up a future problem which will always have to be resolved. The real questions needing to be addressed are: what does our ideal candidate look like and how can we find enough of them to fill our positions. Once you have identified your candidate criteria - finding people becomes a lot easier. Now it is a matter of finding the appropriate sources and determining how you get the attention of the candidates. What are the candidates’ criteria which they are looking for?
Most people are not looking just for what the job is going to be over the next 6 months. The better candidates are looking how they will fit in, grow and be challenged in the future. They are looking for a path and they are expecting the organization to provide it. Every company I have worked with has struggled with this issue of how the employee will be challenged beyond what they are being hired for originally. Certainly, the organizations did not have a clearly defined well thought out path including the training, experience and accomplishment standards which they want. When an organization has this as a recruiting tool they will be able to recruit, hire and retain the type of employees they want and need.
The short term problem will be resolved by a long term solution. When would you like us to help you develop the long term solution which will eliminate the short term problem?
