How to Recruit and Retain Simultaneously
by Brenda Abdilla
| The only thing worse than employee turnover is…well…wait, nothing is worse than turnover! Okay, there are some worse things, but turnover is costly, a colossal waste of time and simply depressing for managers who can already barely keep their heads above their workload.
The American Management Association estimates that “the cost of hiring and training a new employee can vary from 25 percent to 200 percent of annual compensation. Costs include customer service disruption, emotional costs, loss of morale abd burnout/absenteeism among remaining employees as well as loss of experience, continuity and “corporate memory.” “ |
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One way to decrease turnover is to do a better job of managing expectations with your new hires before they are hired. While it is important to sing your company’s praises and to paint a nice picture of the future, it is much more important to create a realistic picture of the most difficult aspects of the job.
Ask your best (and worst) employees about the most difficult or disappointing parts of their jobs. Then, be sure that new hires know about these issues and have them tell you how they would cope with them.
For example, if prospecting strategies in your industry yield one sale out of 100 conversations, be upfront with candidates; ask them to submit a plan about their prospecting strategies. Sure, you may lose some seemingly “good” candidates in the process, but the ones who stick with the process and get hired will stay longer than any others.
Brenda Abdilla is the president of Management Momentum. After a 15-year career as an author, speaker and editor, Brenda founded Management Momentum to allow her to focus on fewer companies and utilize her intense passion for improving sales and management performance. She now does specialty recruitment projects and performance coaching for managers. Contact her at 303-456-1210 or www.managementmomentum.net.
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