There Is a Bright Side to Employees Quitting, but Here's How to Keep the Team You Have Now

May 19, 2015 at 12:30 PM by Kathleen de Lara

employee turnover

A few weeks back, we teamed up with The Resumator to share ways to make employee turnover work for your team. After pulling data from a recent study we did on when employees are most likely to leave their company, we sneaked to the other side of the fence and came back with strategies for how recruiters can use this to time their outreach and poaching, and how to use this to keep their current team.

Even if you didn’t catch the webinar, anyone in hiring understands turnover is all part of game, but you’ll rarely meet someone who looks forward to the day a talented employee leaves the company. Hiring someone with the mindset they’re eventually going to leave distorts the way you view their employment and your management. We’ll share four reasons employees quitting can work to your advantage, but we’ll also share four ways to turn these into applicable benefits now.

There are more diverse, fresh talent pools ripe for hiring.

Employees quitting other companies translates into new opportunities for you to reach out to the competition’s talent – people with relevant, transferrable skills who may also add diversity to the team.

Solution: Connect with your team for referral candidates. Why hold off the talent hunt for the times employees quit? Gradually build a pipeline in tandem with the team's growth. While planning hiring for each open role to come, meet and spend time with employees diving into their online professional networks to sieve through their connections, potential candidates you can start a relationship now to stay top of mind and to reach out when the timing is right.

Candidates get a chance to branch out and expand their skill sets.

Longer employment can stifle innovation as people get comfortable with their role, fall into a routine with their job, and eventually, success plateaus. The mentality of “don’t fix what’s not broken” settles and without the opportunity to take on more responsibilities in another role or a higher position, these team members continue to put in the same effort with the same skills to achieve the same results.

Solution: Offer employees resources or their own budget to learn more about their role, industry, or to get training in a complementary skill set, be it through reading books, or attending webinars, conferences, meetups, and online courses. Giving them the tools, time, and room for growth outside their comfort zone is one of the easiest ways to spark new interests and inspo. 

Engaged employees may stay with your team, but are they inspired or complacent?

Hiring teams often make the mistake of linking performance with long-term employment with the same company – complacency comes with convenience. Similar to the previous point, when employees start taking a formulaic approach to their work, it encourages others to do the same, stifling the team from welcoming and trying new strategies.

Solution: Check in with employees on a quarterly basis to learn how their personal career map lines up with what the company can offer them. Is he or she interested in taking on more responsibilities in a higher role? If not, what other projects does this person want to be accountable for? How can management improve? Is there a gap between what they want to do, where they want to be, and where they currently are at the company? Another way to drive creativity is to connect employees with the company’s networks, or to bring in speakers, teachers to present what they’ve learned in their roles over time.

There’s a chance to reevaluate your hiring process, company culture, and management styles.

For some employers, turnover is a reality check, a time to take a step back to see what went wrong either in the hiring process or during someone's employment, and to attempt a readjust to better prepare for the next hire.

Solution: Ask current employees for their feedback on the team's management and communication skills. Giving them a formal platform and time to share their critiques and praises communicates the company wants to hear it, and is proactively and constantly working on improving. 

If you’re looking for more data on employee turnover and for techniques on using this info to keep your workforce, check out How Recruiters Can Use Turnover to Their Hiring Advantage, where we go through a full-fledged, data-driven version of this blog post. (Who doesn’t like data?)

 

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