High job turnover has always been a concern many have had to worry about. Particularly in retail, sales, and HR, turnover is rampant and finding ways to retain employees can feel fruitless. In fact, over the past year, we’ve seen a massive increase in turnover in the HR industry. According to data collected by LinkedIn, positions in HR have the highest rate of turnover of any other job function. So, if even those who themselves hire and recruit others can’t stay in a job long-term, something must be awry.
As previously mentioned, the worker market has been great for offering job opportunities to workers. However, of course, this means there’s simply been more competition for employers to find the best candidates. So, how can employers aim to retain their employees, especially in jobs with high rates of turnover? Let’s start with what exactly is meant by this and who it is impacting the most these days.
What Is High Job Turnover?
According to Academy to Innovate HR, turnover is simply the amount of people who leave in relation to the amount of people who remain at a company over a certain amount of time. Regardless of an employee’s reason(s) for leaving, then, turnover refers to how many times a position has needed to be filled.
You can measure your organization’s turnover rate by dividing the number of employees who left their positions in the past year by the number of employees there were at the beginning of the year. With this number, you can measure how well your retention is working relative to other organizations in your industry.
Of course, there is no one answer for making sure your employees never quit on you (or retire!). But there are common reasons why employees quit or switch industries entirely. But if there are ways of retaining employees, you’ll surely want to hear them! After all, refilling positions can be both time-consuming and costly—so costly, in fact, you can spend up to two times an employee’s salary just replacing them!
Particularly, if an employee quits because they are feeling unfulfilled or under-appreciated/burnt-out, they may begin to lose momentum in their productivity. This lowered productivity can then continue when a newbie joins the team and has to figure out the ropes in their first few weeks, or even months. What’s worse, if you have to let an employee go, your cost of replacing them might also have to include a severance package.
Jobs with High Turnover Rates
As I mentioned earlier, HR nowadays has the highest turnover rate of the jobs surveyed on LinkedIn. However, folks in this industry are not alone! Other fields that tend to have high turnover rates include:
- Marketing
- Consulting
- Research
- Product management
Contrastingly, on the lower end of the turnover rates, there are jobs in administration, accounting, finance, operations, and business development.
While this isn’t generally a rule of thumb per se, LinkedIn’s recent findings aren’t entirely out of left-field. Authors Greg Lewis and Joseph Soroñgon note that “Recent years have been particularly volatile for talent professionals, with demand for recruiters seesawing from a precipitous fall to a sustained spike.” So, maybe reducing these volatile environments for workers will improve rates of turnover.
Preventing High Turnover with Packfinder
If you already have a staff full of stellar workers, you’ll want to retain them through any means possible. We have a few blogs that offer ideas for how to retain employees, like this one here. But being proactive about employee retention doesn’t simply start when they’re already hired. It starts at the hiring/recruiting process.
That is, you’ll want to hire for a certain attitude and personality. After all, as Simon Sinek says, “You don’t hire for skills, you hire for attitude. You can always teach skills.” Maybe even more importantly, however, you’ll want to hire for potential. This is where Packfinder comes in.
In case you’re new here, Packfinder is Workwolf’s very own psychometric soft skills assessment. Made in partnership with candidate potential experts at Self Management Group, Packfinder determines a candidate’s potential in 60 unique job functions. And because Packfinder is a self-assessment, its results are designed to empower job seekers, not discourage them. That is, they may not be best-suited for some work positions or industries, but their results instead suggest what they would be better suited for. That way, both the worker and the employer/recruiter who is offered access to the worker’s results know the worker’s potential in the job place before they’re hired.
If you want to measure your candidates’ potential for success in your organization, use Packfinder for free.
With your free account and a base annual subscription, you can have access to candidate Packfinder results the moment they are complete. With Packfinder, you can skip the hassle of having to ask for expensive assessment results. Offer assessments that are free and easier to use.
Try it out for yourself! Click here to sign up for a complimentary Workwolf Business account.
