When Your Client Asks for a Hiring Report and You're Still Building It in Excel

Turnover isn’t just a people problem, it’s a profit problem. Especially for organizations engaged in high-volume hiring in sectors like business process outsourcing (BPO) and warehousing/logistics.

There’s quite a hubbub going on regarding the job cuts at Intuit. If you missed the controversy, the company is laying off 1,800 people, and saying that many of those are being let go for underperformance. 

Retention starts with recruiting: the wrong person hired to do a job is likely to leave fairly quickly, regardless of how hard you try to engage them. But how do you screen for that? How do you hire people likely to stay and avoid talent flight risk? Understanding flight risk patterns and implementing targeted interview questions can help you identify candidates who are more likely to remain committed to your organization.

Chances are, you’ve tried multiple levers to cut down on turnover in your call center, warehouse, or other high-volume hiring location. Chances are also decent that those efforts aren’t working. We’ve heard of employers who feel like they have “tried everything” but still have above 100 percent turnover. (For more about reducing turnover in high-volume positions, check out this free guide.)

I recently had a conversation with a Talent Acquisition Leader that left me shocked. While discussing strategies to improve hiring accuracy and the balance between hiring efficiency and hiring accuracy in high-volume recruitment, I sensed an alarming degree of indifference around hiring accuracy altogether.

Now more than ever, human resources teams are expected to create tangible value for the business—from hiring and retaining talent to performance management to leadership development and more. People analytics are key to helping HR teams meet the demands of today’s business landscape.

There seems to be a current trend among employers to offer more unique and diverse office perks in the hopes of attracting and retaining talent. While perks can be fun and bring momentary happiness, they do not meaningfully move the needle on employee satisfaction or retention. One such example was highlighted by Payscale’s list of employee tenure at Fortune 500 companies, which denotes that Google, a company that offers top-notch perks, has a median employee tenure of 1.1 years.

If you are looking to decrease turnover, who you hire and promote to management is crucial. The reality is that people quit bosses more often than they leave for other reasons, making management quality a key retention factor.

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. 

If 80% of your turnover is the result of bad hiring decisions, the most important thing you can do to minimize 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. Understanding how to reduce employee turnover through strategic interview questions can provide clear answers to retention challenges.

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.).

According to the Harvard Business Review, 80% of turnover can be attributed to bad hiring decisions. This means the cost of regrettable turnover—losing employees you wanted to keep—is largely preventable through better screening and assessment processes.