Improving retention is all about hiring in the right people from the start

Posted by

Carolyne Burns

When talent is scarce every business can struggle to hang onto staff, but it's a whole lot harder to improve staff retention if you're hiring the wrong people in the first place.

Staff turnover is a fact of life for every business. It's inevitable that people will occasionally come and go, but some businesses are plagued by a constantly high staff turnover rate. They often mistake this for an unavoidable cost of doing business, without even recognising the true impact that it has.

When a staff member leaves unexpectedly, the impact on the business is far more than the immediate hiring costs of finding a replacement. There is also the extended productivity impact on the rest of the team, which is now understaffed. Then there's the major imposition of needing to train the new hire and get them up to speed – only to have this new person up and leave, so it all starts again.

This kind of revolving door doesn't just have a major impact on productivity, it can also take its toll on employee morale. The strain of constantly working with a sea of new faces and training newbies starts to get to people, especially when they know this newcomer probably won't stick around for long.

After a while, you start losing your best people, who would have been happy to stay but grew weary of the ongoing turmoil caused by a high staff turnover.

To be fair, some businesses have a high turnover because they have significant problems with their workplace culture. No-one wants to spend their days in a toxic workplace, not when they know there is a talent shortage out there so they can afford to walk away.

Employers can make the mistake of thinking the best way to change workplace culture is to start hiring different kinds of people, but that won't work if you think you can change your workplace culture overnight.

We've seen businesses who realised they had a problem because their workplace was full of people who were angry all the time. They thought the solution was to start hiring people who were more soft and cuddly, but naturally these new hires never hung around for long when dropped into such a pressure cooker environment. Changing workplace culture requires a more nuanced, long-term plan.

Of course, even businesses which seem like a great place to work can still struggle with high employee turnover. The root of the issue is that they're hiring the wrong people in the first place, focusing too much on a potential employee's skills and not enough on whether they're actually a good fit.

The solution to hiring great people who will stick around is to place less emphasis on cover letters, CVs and hard skills when deciding who makes it through to the interview stage.

Some recruiters and HR managers have a lot of misconceptions as to what they can really learn from a resume. If anything, a quick glance at a resume is likely to see them jump to the wrong conclusions, as their conscious and unconscious biases come into play.

Because they put too much faith in resumes, businesses often hire on skills, but then typically fire on attitudes – or watch that people walk away – and are forced to start all over again. Meanwhile, they'll never know about the ones that got away, those hidden gems with a great attitude who were a great fit for the role – and for the team – but didn't shine through in their resume.

Instead of this traditional approach, you need to take advantage of the new generation of recruitment tools that focus on asking the right set of screening questions. This helps assess the critical soft skills which determine whether or not someone is actually a good long-term fit.

Using short surveys, Expr3ss! quickly and cost-effectively pinpoints job applicants with the right skills, attitudes, temperament and cultural fit.

These surveys typically only take around six minutes to complete. They can include deal-breaker questions to ensure applicants have all the necessary qualifications and certifications before they are recommended for an interview.

The beauty of this approach is that it lets applicants show you who they really are, rather than tell you who they claim to be. It allows the right people for the job to shine, even when you're looking for a needle in a haystack.

The results speak for themselves. Signature Hospitality Group operates 50 venues across Australia and New Zealand, including the Sporting Globe Bar, TGI Fridays and Varsity. They employ more than 2000 people and, thanks to Expr3ss!, they have an amazing 95 per cent staff retention rate – which is simply unheard of in the hospitality sector.

The solution to high staff turnover is clear: if you want employees to stick around, you need to go back to basics and ensure you're hiring the right people in the first place.