There are a lot of things that need to go right for a new hire to eventually become a top performer. In most cases, employees typically don’t check every single box you’re looking for, but there are a select few that come very close. Maybe even a handful that check all your boxes. Once you find those unicorns, it’s imperative that you hang on to them. Every company is different, but it might be awhile until you find another! 

The ability to manage and lead people is often thought of as an inherent trait that all individuals possess. This is not the case, as shown by Gallup’s State of the American Manager: Analytics and Advice for Leaders. Gallup conducted a comprehensive study based on 2.5 million teams and managers around the world, and their results showed that only 10% of working people possess the talent to be a great manager.

What's Causing Your Turnover?

I started my career at Bain & Company, a global management consulting firm charged with helping some of the world's largest organizations solve their most critical business challenges. 

If 80% of turnover can be attributed to bad hiring decisions, it's apparent that incorporating retention-related criteria into your hiring process is the way to truly mitigate turnover. But it can be hard to determine how much of your hiring process should focus on turnover. 

Jim Collins said, “The most important decisions business people make are not what decisions, but who decisions.” If 80% of your turnover is the result of bad hiring decisions, the most important thing you can do to decrease employee turnover is to focus on hiring people more likely to stay.

When it comes to retaining top talent, it's important to understand the true drivers behind why high performing and satisfied employees ultimately decide to go another direction. In the modern HR world, many would say that optimizing employee engagement is the way to go, when in reality, the research shows there are more important things we should be looking at to retain top performers. 

Hiring is hard. Hiring people that will stay in a position for a long time is even harder. Here are five questions guaranteed to flag a candidate for turnover risk and thus help you reduce employee turnover. 

One of the most common strategies for reducing turnover has been to invest in employee engagement initiatives. These efforts take many forms (engagement surveys, manager trainings, expensive company perks, etc.).

In an ever more competitive economy, hiring the right person for the right job has never been more critical. With more millennials entering the workforce each year, companies are finding that turnover costs hinder their ability to scale and thrive. Various strategies have been employed to reduce turnover in almost every industry. Most have yielded only modest results despite significant investment.

The technology giant, Google, is known for hiring the best talent in the market and equally known for their wacky interview questions. For years, Google interviewers used these seemingly random questions to "help" them hire great talent. Turns out though, these questions didn't help at all. 

“We found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time,” Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google, told the New York Times. “They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.”