The most important retention metric of all

Have you ever been on a boat with a hole in it? Unfortunately I have. What would you do? As a kid, I would try to get a bucket and feverishly bail the water out as fast as I could. Usually it left me exhausted, frustrated, and at the end of the day, the boat would either sink, or, in the best case, after all that work, I would be left with the same amount of water. As an adult, I’d like to think I would approach the same situation a different way. I think I would look for the hole, try and patch it up and then bail out the water. To me that makes the most sense, just like waiting for a snow storm to be over before I shovel my driveway, and why I wait until the very end of fall before I rake my leaves. I hate doing things over again, and I hate wasting my precious energy (I’m also a little lazy).

In recruiting, I see a similar exercise taking place. I get to meet a lot of different clients who are consistently battling with the problem of retention, and I’m amazed at one common denominator: many of them don’t measure their age of attrition. By age of attrition, I don’t mean the average age of the employees that are walking out the exits, but rather the length of time that they worked at your organization before they left. I feel that this is perhaps the most important metric that needs to be determined in order to fix any issue with attrition, and one that many companies don’t pay enough attention to, if they’re pay any attention at all.

Why is this important? How does it help me fix my attrition? Have you really been in a sinking boat? All great questions.

Here are my reasons why I think this is a key metric to look at.

Why is this important?

I firmly believe this is where you identify the hole or holes in your talent acquisition and retention process. Based on what you find out, you can determine whether your issues lie in the recruitment, screening, selection, onboarding, training, supervisor management, succession planning, compensation or leadership areas.

How is this information going to help me fix my attrition?

Once you have identified your age of attrition, you can determine which area of your process you need to look at first. If you’re finding that the majority of your attrition happens in the first 30 days or during training, there’s a good chance that your selection process and tools aren’t working. You may want to analyze your process and add a few steps, such as a realistic job preview, if you don’t have one already. You may also want to review your source of hire information (if you track it; if you don’t track it, you should!). You may want to re-validate your “success profile” of core competencies that are required to do a job, and make sure any assessments that you’re currently using do an adequate job of screening for those competencies. Another area you may want to look into is your overall hiring process and pass rates throughout the process. This will help you determine what steps should be added, and which ones are not adding any real value.

If you’re facing attrition between 30-90 days, I would investigate your onboarding, training, and nesting programs in addition to the selection process. There is a good chance that any attrition that happens after 90 days to 180 days is due to an employee’s expectations not meeting up to what they were told during the hiring process, or from a poor relationship with their supervisor. Anything after 180 days might have to do with a lack of succession planning and their perceived lack of a brighter future within the organization. As usual, compensation is always an important factor and you need to make sure that you’re staying competitive with other local organizations within your space.

Most experts will say that people don’t quit their jobs – they quit their managers. But I also think that perhaps the second most popular reason why people will decide to leave an organization has to do not with where they are now, but rather their unhappy vision of with where they see themselves a year from now.

It’s important to measure these metrics to determine where you should spend your time and money to make an impact on retention. It is also important to set clear, realistic goals and expectations for any candidates that you are considering for hire and that as an organization you live up to those expectations.

- John Hassett