KeenHire Blog by Margaret Graziano

What's The Impact of Unwanted Turn Over?

Well, well, well that is a deep subject. 

When I first realized that unwanted turn over was a breaking point for my staffing business it was 1995. Growing up in the staffing and recruitment business and continually hearing my peers complain, "This is just what you get when you're in this difficult, stressful business, constant turnover is the name of the game." 

While I grappled with the thought of how could an industry that is supposed to cure the staffing and retention problem have such a crippling track record of their own, I defended my situation with the best and the worst of them.

I actually believed this limiting paradigm until I met and witnessed some fabulous leaders and mentors in and outside of the staffing industry. 

Certain CEO's and Business leaders had top performers work with them, not in an equity position and not earning humongous commissions for five, ten or more years.  Who would have thought that my strong need to succeed, my tenacity and my competitive nature that had me take on mastering the fundamentals of Talent Management would lead to an entire expansion of my career and a whole new service offering for KeenHire Talent Management.

If unwanted turnover, the limited supply of peak performers, mitigating the risk of a mishire or managing an unproductive or disengaged workforce has ever kept you up at night; you will want to read on.  Your interest in learning the reasons why turnover happens as well as your ability to put systems into place that reduce these issues could be the most important facet of your Talent Strategy.

It is important to know, in 2007 & 2008, before the dip in the economy, unwanted turnover cost US companies over 3 trillion dollars. This number is astronomical and is a major cause of companies not feeling they are getting their return on their hiring investment.  Besides the raw cost of unwanted turnover, there are other hidden costs, like: loss of Stakeholder & Shareholder value, loss of customers and relationships, loss of Intellectual property, lowered employee morale and mistrust in the organization's leaders. 

I could keep going, however I think you are starting to get the picture.

Turnover is caused by several reasons, I will highlight the top 11 for you now.

1. Employee lacks passion for the company's mission, vision and purpose

2. Employee is not challenged in the position

3. Employee feels unwanted, under valued and replaceable

4. Employee feels no sense of security

5. Company hired the right resume but the wrong person for the wrong job

6. Employee took the job for the wrong reasons (i.e. it's a paycheck)

7. Employee feels there is no place to go

8. Company treats people like cogs in a wheel

9. Employee does not feel a sense of belonging

10. Employer is under-whelmed by the employees’ performance

11. Circumstances change, role changes and employee cannot adapt

 

If you want to impact retention, first know who you are. What is your Employee Value Proposition?

Why would someone, someone with great talent, great ability and a great track record choose to work for your company? Why would they choose to stay? Why will they ignore a headhunters attempt to woo them away when the deal sounds amazingly stimulating?

Second, know what the role requires. Define who the person in the role needs to be, do and produce on a daily, monthly and quarterly basis. In other words, know what the intended outcomes are and what great performance looks like. Know how that great performance is achieved and the basics for how the right person will achieve excellence in the role. Winners want to know in advance how to win the games they play. And for winners, work is another game to play and win. 

Third, train your front line people managers to treat people as people. Train them to get into their employees heads and hearts, to find out what makes them tick and what gets them going. Teach them to exploit their employees’ strengths and acknowledge their employees unique contributions to the team and the company.

Forth, talk to leadership. Ensure that the company’s top leaders are aware and awake to what is going on in the trenches. Blanchard's book Raving Fans does a fabulous job of creating awareness amongst business leaders. Employee engagement and empowerment begins with leadership awareness and continues through a deep commitment to team contribution in the accomplishing the mission. 

The bottom line is if you want to impact unwanted turnover and mitigate the risk of great people leaving, you'll want to be conscious in the development and deployment of your Talent Management business processes. Create a hiring and selection processes that brings forth the right people, for the right roles, for the right reasons. Implement an early engagement program (on-boarding) that solidifies the sale.

And lastly, employ retention strategies that honor the company mission and vision while creating alignment and demonstrate an on-going commitment to employee fulfillment. 

Nothing mentioned in this article takes an extreme capital investment, what it takes is a commitment to adopt a Talent Mindset and a commitment to make your people your competitive advantage. In all actuality not following these guidelines and not making the most of your people is a much larger risk and a much greater cost.

Some Great Books on the Subject

The War for Talent, Ed Michaels

The Impending Crisis, Hermann, Goya

The Truth About Managing People, Stephen Robbins

Top Grading, Bradford Smart

Shaking Hands and Never Letting Go

Today the challenge for all of us in the staffing recruitment profession is establishing and maintaining customer relationships that last.  I have heard many times, “I am only as good as my last placement” or “How do I convince the customer that I am unique in an over saturated marketplace, where everyone makes the same promises and very, very few actually deliver?”  

KeenHire Talent Management is built to deliver a higher quality of service  to our end user as well as to maximize the time and effectiveness of our recruiting partners. 

Our recruitment, hiring and retention programs elevate how we are viewed by business leaders and position our consultants as the full life cycle solution to their talent management challenges.  

As the founder of KeenHire, I have spent five years investigated leading industry technology, new age sourcing solutions, lean recruitment processes & tools and dug deep into enough assessment and on-boarding instruments to make anyone’s eyes glaze over.

The coolest part of my research was that I sat in the seat of a recruiter for over two decades, I have a keen sense of what works, what doesn’t, what’s fluff and what’s real.  The result of these efforts is that my team and I created a world-class hiring process that maximizes our ability to put the right person in the right job for the right period of time. The technology and efficiencies enable us to do it all for the right price. 

KeenHire is committed to transforming the way staffing and recruitment is delivered. We have vetted and designed a conscious-hiring process that maximizes Keen Certified recruitment and retention professionals’ effectiveness.

Imagine you show up at your customers’ door, no one but people in your circle are offering the level of service you did. Imagine your customers invited you in to planning meetings and strategy sessions.  Imagine your recruitment and hiring process is the fabric of your customers’ talent acquisition and retention strategy.
 
As an independent recruiter or contract staffing professional, jumping from one gig to the next has got to be exhausting. Sure the money is great but when the jig is up, it’s up. Not to mention that you become part of most company’s dysfunctional hiring process and you pretty much have to go with it or say something and make waves. For most people making waves is not a lucrative option.
 
Imagine yourself as the Sheppard of a world class recruitment and hiring process, fully armed with the tools you needed to do the best job in the minimum amount of time and are paid an engagement fee, a project fee and a performance bonus for work well done. Furthermore, visualize you as an integral part of the new hire on-boarding and employee engagement process and achieving another bonus for effective retention.
 
Imagine participating in on-going training and development and elevating your ability to deliver better candidates in a shorter time frame and offer leading edge talent management solutions to your customers.  Imagine being surrounded by and serving like-minded customers, working with philosophically aligned professionals and being known as someone who truly makes a difference in their work.
 
There you are, shaking hands with your client and never letting go. Be a KeenHire Certified Talent Management Provider and experience all the above and more.
 
 
 
Service Provider Track                         Sales/Business Development Track
 
Talent Strategy 3.0                             Talent Strategy 3.0
Talent Delivery Model                          Strategic Selling
Behavioral Interviewing                       Talent Delivery Model
Assessment Interpretation                   Success Factor
 
 
56 hours of intense training, coaching and certification over 7 weeks. 10 hours of follow up mentoring and coaching that solidifies your mastery of the systems, tools, training and technology.   66 hours of career altering training and development.
 

Regular cost is $4592 when you register for all three courses you save $919.00. Your price is $3673.00 per person or $55.65 per hour of training.

Is Recruitment Process In-Sourcing A Solution For You?

Does the life of your company depend on the people inside?

Are quality service, employee productivity and corporate effectiveness important to your organization’s success?
 
Are you forced to do more with less?
 
Have you experienced frustration and concern that your current recruitment and hiring process is not delivering people who deliver the results you need when you need it?
 
Is your company committed to maximizing your return on your people investment?  
 
If the answer to any of the above questions is yes, Recruitment Process In-Sourcing with KeenHire Talent Management is the solution for you.

Our Premise

We partner with companies serious about thriving in today’s competitive market place by enabling them to maximizing their return on their people investment. We do this by developing and managing a recruitment, hiring and on boarding process that mitigates the risk of a mis-hire and brings forth the best-suited talent for the role and the company. Our work doesn’t stop at the offer; we work with your management team to ensure a smooth transition, effective integration and peak utilization of the new hire’s skills and talents.

Keen’s conscious-hiring process is comprised of 4 key elements
 
1.  Understanding your corporate strategy and creating a workforce assessment and gap analysis – we tie your corporate strategy to your people strategy.
2.   Conducting a deep dive performance based role analysis for each position - we validate the job needs from an outcome, behavioral, value and  competency point of view.
3. Executing a lean recruitment and candidate vetting process – we save your management team time, money and resources and only submit the right match
4. Standardizing On-boarding and creating a customized new hire integration plan for each manager and their new hire – we maximize your team’s ability to leverage this new talent in the shortest possible time period

Today there are many alternative cost saving packaged and component recruitment solutions from RPO to off shore resume aggregation and on line candidate sourcing.  

Imagine working with a company who brings forth the best component offerings and built a process that operates on efficiency, economies of scale and identifying the right fit (cultural, philosophical, competency, character, values), all while maximizing your ability to synthesize your new hires.  

KeenHire Talent Management offers this specific solution and we have many happy customers to show it.  

Candidate’s say, for the 1st time they feel listened to and cared for in the hiring process, whether they get the job or not they are better suited to go out and target the right role for them after participating in the KeenHire process. An effective recruitment and conscious-hiring process amplifies your Employee Value proposition.  

Employer’s are delighted when they show up in an interview and the person sitting across from them is exactly who they said they wanted at the beginning of the project.  A great process saves your people time and effort.   Hiring Managers are thrilled that they are given the tools, material and guidance to get the best out of their new hire early in the employment life cycle.  

KeenHire RPI – top shelf technology, efficient recruitment process, earnest employment branding, solid candidate assessment and effective new hire on-boarding. And there’s more, our highly skilled Recruitment professionals’ trained and certified in Employee Recruitment, Selection and Retention are available to work at your location or ours, it’s your choice. 

We help you put the right person, in the right job, for the right period of time, for the right cost.  

Recruitment Process Management

Every company is charged with the assignment of doing more with less. The movement to create efficiencies in every component of running a business has lead to a huge movement of outsourcing everything from office administration, technology, recruitment and manufacturing to accounting, supply chain, staffing and in some cases customer service.  Many of the largest companies in America have been among the first to explore Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) for some it is the best thing that they have ever tried, for others the results have been disastrous.

In the area of business that I specialize in I have been researching the RPO movement. Recruitment Process Outsourcing, is about removing the recruitment and staffing function from inside the company and having an outside vendor manage, execute and deliver people on an as needed basis. The choice to RPO has for the most part been about price, economies of scale and efficiency.  The most popular roles that I have read about RPO filling is call center, front line banking, customer service, retail, and medical.

Some user reports say this is the most efficient way for a National or Global organization to staff, others say their quality of hires has declined, unwanted turnover has increased and candidates are left with an ill feeling about the companies employment brand. 

What I have learned for sure is that RPO is not for every company; a company has to have certain staffing objectives that make an RPO offering appealing.

Just because RPO might not be the right answer for your company does not mean that there is not work to do to create an efficient, effective and highly successful recruitment function within your organization.  After all, your company is only as good as the people inside and an ineffective, inefficient recruitment process is a barrier between you and your next level of talent.

Over 10 years ago, when I owned Alliance HR Network, one of my mentors asked me for our operational quality ratio of interviews to hires. I did not have the number. He then asked me how many candidates we had to talk to, to generate a live interview, I did not have that number either. I began to see that my lack of managing those important numbers was in the way of me running an efficient recruiting operation and that was costing me money.

Efficiency

The journey was a painful one, back then we were interviewing 10 people to place 1 and we had to talk to 100 to interview 10. That meant that 90% of our time did not result in generating revenue. I began to understand more and more about lean manufacturing, operational excellence and performance ratios.  I chose to enroll in a certification program in organizational development and in that 12 month program I learned a great deal about why companies lay so many people off in recessionary times. 

I decided to go to work on my own company looking for ways to bring operational excellence, improve productivity, lower costs and continue to deliver a high quality of service.  What I learned and implemented was the impetus for the making of KeenHire. 

My team and I went to work on our business processes, we analyzed performance ratios in each of our core functions and worked on eliminating tasks that were irrelevant to effectiveness. We incorporated time saving technology that allowed team members to focus on high impact functions. We created a system for candidate intake that dropped our ratio from 10:1 to 3:1.  

Effectiveness

Considering quality was what my company was known for I knew I had to find a way to stand behind that claim beyond in words. This is what lead me to implementing behavioral interviewing and 'fit' assessments into our hiring and selection process. This not only aided us in the validation of the candidates we submitted, it save us thousands of man hours. It became much easier to select the best and eliminate the rest and was instrumental in my ability to quickly ramp up new hires. Our recruiters were making placements within 2 weeks on a desk, because I was hiring the right people and giving them a great process to follow. 

Our customers were delighted with the amount of data we had on each candidate we were representing. The real benefit was when our customers requested we manage the complete staffing of entire department, leadership and launch teams. The implementation of this conscious-hiring process not only saved us money and time, it was directly responsible for an uptick in work, sales and profitability.

Whether your company chooses to run recruitment from the inside or the outside it is up to you to manage performance in 3 key areas.  In no particular order, ensuring high quality hires, managing efficient recruitment processes and delivering a high quality of service to all of the stakeholders is critical to maximizing your return on your people investment and imperative to being an Employer of Choice.

How Can You Improve Performance Metrics and Employee Productivity?

A study of the Corporate Executive Board found that since the recession began, managers have become less effective at defining employees roles and accountability. Before the recession, only 60% of employees said their managers did an okay job of effectively communicating expectations, since the recession that number has dropped to 45%, which considering is quite low.  Before, Front Line and HR Managers told employees how they fit in to the overall strategy and market share objectives, now they tell employees to get to work and be grateful they have a job.  Ouch…….that is pretty short sighted thinking.

The highly interesting part of this is that when employees understand how what they do fits into the overall strategy of the business and the achievement of their corporate objectives productivity can increase by 10% at a minimum. Ten percent of ten employees equates to an additional headcount.

When I lead my Maximize Your People ROI workshop and keynotes I speak a great deal about Jim Collins’ call to action, “Put the right people on the Bus”.  Five years ago I learned two provocative processes for assessing, evaluating & validating job specifications, at Keen we call these Benchmarking and Role Analysis.  Both of these tie Organizational Development and Recruitment processes together and drastically improve hiring metrics and recruiting success rates.

If you want to attract more of the best, you first have to truly understand why some of your employees are high performers. Is it coincidence, dumb luck or a lot of hard work when a key manager assembles a team of high performers?  Or is it a calculated and well-executed strategy?

Experts say that building a high performance work-group does not happen by anything other than a well defined, executed recruitment plan and selection hiring process. High performing teams are not created by accident.  There is always a plan of attack that attracts people with solid competencies, required behaviors, complimentary traits, and shared values.  Companies like HP create programs for this by assessing their top performers and understanding what drives their performance; aspects like competencies, motivators, behaviors, values, work style, and emotional intelligence.  They then build a hiring model that vets candidates with similar winning formulas.

This is what KeenHire refers to as benchmarking.  The Keen team has assessed over 1000 high performers conducted over 200 corporate benchmarks since our launch.  In one company alone, we saved the employer over $1,000,000.00 in poor hiring costs  Download Keenhireclarknatcasestudy because they stopped hiring people who they thought would fit and they started hiring people they knew would fit.  This new age Talent Management stuff really works!

Conducting a Role Analysis on positions that you are filling whether through an internal promotion or a new hire impacts not only your ability to put the right person on the bus, it effects your companies ability to improve workforce production and engagement. When your employees know that you chose them because they had the natural ability to do the job in a way that amplifies the companies mission and vision and they know what is expected as well as how these accomplishments impact the big picture; they are awake and aware to exactly what you are counting on them to achieve on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual basis they are much more likely to achieve it. 

The Bottom Line is if you want a more productive, engaged workforce hire the right people for jobs they are well equipped to do, make sure they know what you expect from them and then encourage them to use their natural talents and abilities to get the job done.

If you have professional HR Management, Contract Recruitment staff or In Sourced Recruitment consultants on your team make sure they are trained in these critical hiring selection programs and strategies; if you do not and you need to go outside to Recruiting services require these service providers to offer solutions that enable you to hit your hiring and retention metrics. 

Does Your Recovery Strategy Include a Talent Management Strategy?

If the reports are true and employee disengagement is on the rise, when 25% of your Key Contributors, Mission Critical players and Next level leaders become the departed, who will take their place? 

What systems are you putting in place to have the departing knowledge and skills effectively transferred to the impending replacements?  What retention strategies are you implementing to avoid loosing the 25%?

Experts who have studied the global economic situation, America’s long awaited recovery, workforce statistics and workplace psychology fear that in many organizations employees are ill equipped to carry out new business strategies that will be critical to a companies ability to compete and thrive in a global economy.

Business and Human Capital pundits hypothesize that in a recession-altered workplace, employees are often adrift, without well-defined roles and accountability or managers who have a grasp on how to actually execute the business leaders key strategies and metrics.

Many of the nations largest companies have or are implementing new ways of attracting and recruiting the best talent for key contributor roles, stimulating their ongoing engagement and amplifying their reasons for staying.  If the largest companies are doing this with a vengeance the smaller, mid sized and newer, mission driven, socially responsible companies need to take note and get in action.

Some popular initiatives that I have seen with KeenHire's Recruitment Process In-sourcing and Talent Management Process In-sourcing customers are:

1.    Making Organizational Development & effective Recruitment a priority
2.    Altering the objectives, roles and accountability of HR Management
3.    Hiring the right people who shared common values and purpose
4.    Establishing an on-line employment presence flaunting their EVP
5.    Reducing Executive compensation before reducing employee comp
6.    Sending daily motivational positive messages
7.    Providing employee development, mentoring and coaching for hi-po’s
8.    Creating On-boarding programs that stimulate early engagement & bonding
9.    Making rewards personable and customized
10.  Building relationship strategies into management
11.  Implementing a top grading culture


There is no better feeling in the world than when a high potential employee recognizes the value of a program that Keen implements. I have had the privilege to work on several organizational development, recruitment and talent management projects where the mission critical, key contributor and next level leaders were positively impacted by the initiatives we implemented.  It is a great feeling to find someone a job; it is a very powerful experience to elevate his or her career and impact.