A magic bullet to spending less time and money on recruiting?

“You can’t recruit your way out of a turnover problem”

People Profits Principle #32

I see this a lot, an HR department recruiting at break neck speed. Tons of resources, lots of recruiter fees, mountains of time spent attracting, interviewing, selecting and on boarding. The reason is always the same, because their turnover is ridiculous and in many cases getting worse by the minute.

“Our turnover problem is unsolvable.”

“That is just the way it is in our industry/city/state.”

“You can’t understand because you are not an engineer/paramedic/truck driver.”

Baloney!! I have worked in four vertical industries over 28 years as CHRO. The concepts are the same. The issue is that if you cannot figure it out does not mean that someone else can’t. In every company I have worked for I have cut turnover and in two cases – dramatically.

"Managers need to look a little more closely at what it's like for their people to come to work there every day."

- Peter Drucker

Fix the root cause of your turnover FIRST - then you will recruit less and more effectively. Why is it a two-step process?

They can leave faster than you can hire
The new employees will leave for the same reasons the old ones did
The cost of recruiting is higher than the cost of retaining
The root cause of your turnover is multifaceted - so is the cost
When fixed the benefits and savings will also be multifaceted
Your reputation for having high turnover will precede you in the talent pool
Sooner or later you will run out of candidates who will apply

The "Talent War" CANNOT be won by an employer with high turnover.

If you have high turnover – you are NOT IN the talent war.

How do you identify the ROOT cause?

You have to crunch numbers
Answer the basic questions: What, Why, Who, When, Which and How
Be unwilling to accept the surface answers
Look for the answers they don’t want you to find
Look for trends and “coincidences”
Determine how you are going to deal with the very successful employee who is creating turnover

Case study: A service company was bleeding out of senior technicians. We could not replace them as fast as they were leaving. The company's viability was at stake. A thorough review of the REAL root causes of our turnover was done. Solutions, with the cost, were identified. The costs were dramatically less than our extraordinary recruiting costs. We stopped the bleeding first - recruiting was no longer a crisis. The solutions worked in the long term to the point that few employees ever left. Our engagement and productivity soared.

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#engagement #turnover #profit