Candidate Selection: A Definitive Guide
Learn of candidate selection to improve your candidate selection process and build a high-performing workforce.
High turnover rates are a nightmarish outcome for managers, executives, and HR professionals. These professionals are responsible for keeping top talent engaged and motivated, and failure to achieve this can be deeply frustrating.
After all, employees are the backbone of an organisation, and retaining them is crucial for the long-term success of the business. However, turnover can be a significant problem for many businesses, resulting in a loss of productivity, decreased morale, and increased hiring costs.
In this article, we will outline key strategies for retaining staff, minimizing turnover rates, and setting the organisation up for success throughout the entire talent management cycle.
Turnover rates are calculated by taking the number of employees who leave, dividing it by the average number of employees over that period, and then multiplying by 100 to convert to a percentage. For example, if 100 employees left within a year and the organisation has 1000 employees, this represents a 10% annual turnover rate. Alternatively, if 10 employees leave the organisation each month, and the organisation has 1000 employees, this represents a 1% monthly turnover rate.
Regardless of the metric used to measure turnover rate, a high number is detrimental to the organisation as a whole. When employees unexpectedly leave the organisation, existing employees are left to pick up the slack, which reduces morale and increases the likelihood of further attrition. This puts the organisation into a vicious cycle that could ultimately cause its collapse.
However, organisations have many strategies available to them to minimise turnover rates. Here are five such strategies that can be employed to avoid future attrition, help retain top performers, and avoid making additional bad hires.
If you would prefer to watch a video, here is Ben talking about our effective strategies to reduce turnover rate:
Role fit refers to the alignment between an employee's skills, experience, and personality and the requirements of the job they are performing. Essentially, it's about hiring the right person for the right job. When an employee is a good fit for their role, they are more likely to be engaged, productive, and satisfied with their work.
Hiring for role fit is essential for reducing turnover rates because it helps ensure that your employees are happy and satisfied with their work. When employees are a good fit for their role, they are more likely to feel fulfilled by their work, which can lead to increased job satisfaction and a lower risk of turnover. Additionally, employees who are a good fit for their role are more likely to be engaged and productive, which can improve the overall performance of your business.
There are several effective strategies you can use to hire for role fit:
Although implementing this consideration requires a full reset of the organisation's hiring practices, it can minimise the probability of bad hires and reduce turnover rates in the long-term. Over time, as new hires replace older ones, the rate at which employees leave the organisation will reduce simply by addressing this issue, making it perhaps the most important aspect of managing turnover rates.
Hiring for organisational culture fit is another important strategy for reducing turnover rates and retaining top talent. Organisational culture refers to the shared values, beliefs, and behaviours that characterize a company.
When employees fit well within the organisational culture, they are more likely to be engaged, productive, and satisfied with their work.
They are more likely to share the company's values and beliefs, which can lead to increased engagement and productivity. Additionally, employees who fit well within the organisational culture are more likely to have positive relationships with their co-workers, which can improve the overall morale of the company.
There are several effective strategies you can use to hire for organisational culture fit:
Once you have accounted for role and culture mismatches, you will have set your organisation up for future success. Although the fruits of these labours are likely to require time, these two approaches are the most likely interventions to work long-term.
However, there are many causes of employee turnover aside from person-organisation mismatches. These problems stem from the organisation itself and require more immediate diagnoses and action. The following strategies will address ways to identify and correct issues for which the organisation is predominantly to blame for high turnover rates.
While hiring for role fit and organisational culture fit can help reduce turnover rates, there will still be times when employees decide to leave. Exit interviews can provide valuable information about the employee experience within the company. By gaining insight into the reasons why employees are leaving, the company can identify areas where they need to improve. This can help reduce turnover rates in the future and improve employee satisfaction and engagement.
There are several effective strategies for conducting exit interviews:
Managers, especially senior managers, often have a difficult time hearing negative feedback and can become defensive. It is important to resist this urge when conducting exit interviews, as the feedback itself can be tremendously helpful. Because the employee is leaving anyway, they have little reason to lie about their motivations, making them an essential source of insight into the dynamics of their team. This must be recognized by management, and any information presented to them must be taken particularly seriously.
Measuring employee engagement is an important strategy for reducing turnover rates and retaining top talent. Employee engagement refers to the level of emotional investment that employees have in their work, their team, and the company. When employees are engaged, they are more likely to be satisfied with their work, more productive, and more likely to stay with the company long-term.
Measuring employee engagement can provide valuable information about how employees feel about their work and the company.
Measuring employee engagement can provide valuable information about how employees feel about their work and the company. This information can be used to identify areas where the company needs to improve and to implement changes that can improve employee satisfaction and engagement. By improving employee engagement, the company can reduce turnover rates and retain top talent.
There are several effective strategies for measuring employee engagement:
By measuring employee engagement, you are able to gain quantitative data about your organisation's people. You can benchmark accordingly and see how happy and productive your staff are compared to other relevant organisations. More importantly, however, you can use this data to identify specific areas where your organisation is lacking. For example, these data may reveal that relationships between managers and staff are particularly poor and may be the cause of increased turnover rates.
Once you have this data at hand, organisations with access to the relevant expertise can leverage these findings for predictive analytics, the final stage in the process.
Predictive analytics is a valuable tool that can be used to reduce turnover rates and retain top talent. Predictive analytics uses data, statistical algorithms, and machine learning techniques to identify patterns and predict future outcomes. By analysing data related to employee engagement, satisfaction, and performance, companies can identify factors that contribute to turnover and implement strategies to retain top talent.
Using predictive analytics can provide valuable insights into employee behaviour, satisfaction, and performance. By identifying patterns and trends, companies can predict which employees are at risk of leaving and take proactive steps to retain them. Additionally, by identifying factors that contribute to turnover, companies can implement strategies to improve employee satisfaction and engagement, reducing the likelihood of turnover in the future.
There are several effective strategies for using predictive analytics to reduce turnover rates and retain top talent:
Predictive analytics can even be used to identify staff members who are especially vulnerable to attrition, acting as an early warning against turnover. If a predictive model has detected a group of candidates who seem at risk of attrition, the organisation can provide the necessary resources and support, helping to reduce the probability of them leaving. Although few tools have the power and depth of a well-executed predictive analytics project, this approach does require considerable expertise in statistics, psychometrics, or data science to be properly employed.
High turnover rates can be extremely frustrating for HR professionals and senior managers, as they highlight a failure somewhere in the talent management cycle. This could be due to ineffective selection decisions leading to repeated mishires, or issues with management and the organisation's systems that reduce employee engagement and cause good staff to leave. Whatever the cause, HR professionals and managers must pay careful attention to their turnover rates and any variables that could be impacting them.
When addressing role and culture-fit, Test Partnership offers a range of helpful assessments. Our soft-skills assessments are designed at the role-level, measuring soft skills that underpin both performance and engagement in a range of roles. These assessments can be customized to measure organisation-specific competencies, soft skills, or values, improving the quality of hire and reducing the probability of misfit. For more information on our suite of assessments, please contact us directly or register for a free trial.