Hire to Retain!

Recently, when I attended a NASSCOM HR Summit 2007 at Chennai along with my Vice President(one of the speaker) & Sr. colleagues, I observed that most of the speakers’ themes primarily revolved around leadership development, employee engagement and retention. One distinguished speaker Prof. Peter Cappelli from The Wharton School, spoke on Talent management and employee retention, offering some precautionary measures to arrest the attrition in the early stages. This thought triggered in me to share my experiences around this concept. Here are my findings on attrition causes triggered due to wrong hiring strategies: .

1. Absence of Employment Value proposition (EVP )
2. High Dependency on lateral hiring (external source)
3. Lack of strong hiring methodologies and process (including Assessment centers)
4. Undefined career paths for some of the job families
5. Ambiguous job descriptions and absence of success profile
6. Untrained recruiters & interviewers, resulting in wrong hires.
7. Organization Philosophy of hiring revolving around ideal candidate (than right candidate)
8. Absence of innovative sourcing Strategies to reach right candidates resulting in large pool of active job seekers in hiring process
9. Absence of market competitive salary, and Benefits and Rewards
10. Lack of Incentive Recognition for Recruiter for achieving breakthrough results.

Having analyzed these reasons, I decided to look for corrective measures and intervention to resolve these issues at Hiring Stage. Here are some of them:

1. Identifying and communicating Employment Value proposition (EVP) with internal and external Target Audience: Hire for Retention should start at EVP identification. EVP will help the organization in attracting the pool of Right candidates to the organization. Communicating EVP to the Targeted Audience through industry, technology-specific magazines will yield greater results. Absence or EVP or over-stating EVP will result in attrition due to mismatch in expectations after on-boarding. Synergy between Employment value proposition and Employee Value proposition is pivotal for long term association and greater value in relationship in employment.

2. Interventions at Manpower Planning Level :
a. Current Organization unit analysis: Attrition data analysis, Team Lead-to-Engineer ratios, forecast of future demand, succession planning inputs should be taken into consideration before looking at lateral talent market. In absence of this, there is an imbalanced hierarchy, career aspiration system within which the new hire success will be a miracle. Doing proper manpower planning before getting into the hiring process would be a ideal step to avoid attrition due to lack of growth and leadership bandwidth reasons.
b. Demographic Analysis of Talent: Understanding talent market size, their demographics, market salary data and their change in expectations will help us in setting the right expectations about the time line of hire with Engineering Managers. This helps us in avoid attrition reasons that are triggered due to poor hiring due to “time to fill” bias.
c. Redefining the Hiring philosophy from Quality Hire to Right Hire: Sometimes Hiring Managers look for ideal candidates to fill their positions. It is not practical to challenge the ideal candidate in a real-time environment as hiring high pots (potentials) in absence of high growth environment/High quality work leads to attrition. Creating a mind set of hiring towards right candidate, who has more of right motivation behaviors than functional behaviors, will lead to greater retention at later stage.
d. Alternative staffing options: The flexible nature of today’s companies requires a flexible workforce. A blended workforce provides the flexibility, time to fill and gives competitive edge. Workforce consisting of fulltime, part-time, freshers, semi-freshers and temporary employees will give greater alignment with dynamic changes in work force requirements intern mitigate attrition risk. If you have part-time positions that will likely remain part-time, look for candidates who really want part-time work or you may experience turn over that can cost you in the long run.
e. Talent Harvesting: Today most of the companies are taking approach of Talent harvesting, where they look at potential candidates whom they can train, shadow and deploy or replace model than hire to deploy model. Talent Harvesting will give long term advantages in terms of retention and cost of execution.

3. Interventions at Requisition creation level:
a. Structure of Job description: Determining right Structure of JD that encapsulates all the required information under different headings, is very important. The Hiring Manager should be able to come out with all the required competencies by looking at the JD. JD which is static and not aligned with actual job requirements will lead to wrong fitment and intern’s attrition cause.
b. Mechanism to evaluate the key intrinsic and extrinsic factors of the job: Determine for each factor what the job offers and what it doesn’t. Having note about Intrinsic & Extrinsic job factors in JD will certainly help the interviewers to identify the right candidate for that job. Research consistently shows that intrinsic factors are more important determinants of job satisfaction than extrinsic factors. Intrinsic job factors: aspects of work activities what a person does on the job. Extrinsic job factors; aspects related to job, other than work itself.
c. Creation of a Success profile for the open position with Manager’s observation of high performing & long association team member will be taken as bench mark whiling arriving at required competencies for this position. In addition to standard JD providing Success profile information to hiring panel will help us in hiring the right candidate.
d. Kick-off meetings with selection panel will certainly help in role allocation, right expectations setting and synchronization of interview feedback between the panel members will help the hiring manager in identifying the right candidate.

4. Sourcing level:
a. Internal source: It is very much a known fact that looking for internal talent is always a better option than external talent as the not only bring functional competencies but also more aligned with company value system & Culture. Retention of new hire will increases when they are more aligned with company value system, being part of internal social groups and since they feel that they are valued.
b. Targeted sourcing: Targeting candidates from similar industries/companies that are smaller in size which has similar value system can be a good idea. In the recent past we are hearing the success of leaders who has great portable skills from similar industries are found to be successful with longer tenure periods.
c. Employee Referrals programs will certainly help us in reaching to right talent. In the recent analysis I found that the new hire attritions rates are very low for the Employee Referral source. One of the reasons being, the new hire has lot more authenticated EVP information from referees and had more insights about the organization before their joining. Other reasons is that they get lot of moral support from the Referee in the initial tenure and some times these referees act as coaches for them in this change management process.
d. Innovative sourcing strategies: Using new internet platforms (linkdln, orkut, groups, blogs etc.), personal network, and latest technologies to reach the right targeted Audience is very important. We need to realize that hiring managers will hire the candidate from the available pool of resumes that are provided by recruiters. Increasing the quality of pool increases the chances of identification of right candidates. Incentives’ to recruiters & referees’ based on quality of source (passive candidates) & their Stay tenure will increases the chances of right hires.

5. Interview level
a. Resume Screening level: Most often, we give less importance to phone screening. A few minutes of screening by the recruiter will bring greater benefit to overall hiring process as it ensures right candidates playing in the hiring ground. Recruiter need to emphasize on candidates short terms goals, motivations, job change reasons, values, location preference, current priorities, and technologies preferences will give lot of insights about his alignment with organization. In absence of screening call HR team might have lesser say in the last minutes selection, if hiring managers like to go ahead with candidate (liked functionally).
b. Using Assessment Tools: Some of the competencies for particular positions can be best assessed using assessment tools instead of personal discussions. Having a written test and psychometric test will help us in screening the wrong candidates in the beginning where there is a greater clarity on minimum required competencies that can be evaluated through test process.
c. Preparation before hand: Doing homework and writing down the possible questions would help the hiring manager to great extent in finding the right fit. Most often interviewers will loose the interview focus in absence of strong preparation which is the determinant of a right hire.
d. Running Realistic Job preview: Running RJP in the beginning of screening or interview process will help us in setting the job expectation in the beginning. This helps us to avoid statement from employees like “If I would have known this, I may not have chosen this opportunity” situations later.
e. Competency based selection model: It would greatly help us in selecting a right candidate based on set of required competencies that are required to be successful in the current job. This also helps us in minimizing the bias related to pressure to close, halo effect, contract effect, and similarity bias and so on.
f. Asses the candidate’s motivation to do the job: This is a key area to assess because motivation can sometimes be a better predictor of performance than one’s skills and abilities. Motivation fit is a more important factor than skills and abilities in hiring people who will be satisfied with a job and stay with it.

6. Offer Stage
a. Reference checking: Having a Strong Reference Check Mechanism will dramatically reduce the chances of attrition as we understand candidate behaviors (earlier assignment) and motivational fit from the third party reference.
b. Hiring Salary matrix: Organizations should focus on pitching the market median salary to potential candidates (companies they want to compete with) than internal median. This avoids the risk of loosing the new hires as well high pots as normalizing the salary once they are in the system is very difficult due to merit increase budget constraints.
c. Designing Variable compensation based on value to the candidate: Pitching right salary matrix and help the candidates to choose right benefits based on the current context they are in, will greatly increase the stay. If organizations have a “basket of benefits” from where the candidate can choose his preferences as they find more value from the employment.
d. Pre-Employment Screening: Background check is always a good idea in any selection system. Some candidates simply exaggerate their credentials, while others actually falsify information. When jobs are scare, applicants may be tempted to embellish or fabricate their background to gain a competitive advantage. Inform all applicants upfront that a background check will be required. They have the right to know what is expected of them, and any applicants who are unsure about a check can withdraw from consideration early in the process. Of course doing a background check cannot prevent misconduct. But, it does substantially mitigate your risk.

7. On-boarding Stage
a. Develop personal retention plans on day one instead of the old-fashioned orientation programs, in which HR managers tell the new hires about the organization's policies and procedures instead of using orientation to start a career planning dialogue with new hires. What changing role might your organization play in the career of each new hire as he/she moves from one stage of life to the next? If you begin this dialogue on day one, the dialogue has a greater chance of continuing through all the key turning points down the road when the employee might consider leaving.
b. Revisiting New Hire Induction: New Hire induction program should not only give insights about the organization policies, vision and procedure; it also should take care about possible career paths, details about communities, current organization status quo, culture related info (with example) and the transition process. This pre-inoculation, orientation & sensitivisation will help us in reducing “cultural shock decisions” taken by new hires.
c. Having a buddy or mentor for new hires: New hires leave the organization if any thing that disturbs them in the initial stages. Looking at the current market opportunities it is a wise approach to keep these new hires under any mentor or buddy for a month, who can help them in this smooth transition. Having new hire grievances or mentoring cell might help to address this issue, better. Creating communities and making this new hires part of some communities that of interest to them will substantially reduces the new hire attrition.

Moving forward…

Increasing the tenure of right hires can be a greatest financial benefit to the organization. It is a primary responsibility of the hiring team (including recruitment) to identify the right candidate (not ideal) who has right motivation fit apart from functional competencies. Hiring a candidate who is 100% fit or who is planning to build his career with some competencies that do not have more meaning to the current role will be a high-risk factor.

Going forward, organizations should articulate the EVP and create a mindset of “right” rather than “ideal” hire. Focusing on manpower planning, dynamic content of JDs, reducing the dependency on lateral hiring by looking at internal and alternative staffing solutions will greatly reduce the attrition of new hires as well high pots.