Hiring Right

Client: A growing manufacturer.

Situation: Our client was experiencing an unexpectedly high turnover rate of new hires. Very few stayed beyond six months, and most were gone within two years.

All recruiting efforts made to try to reduce turnover focused on attracting "problem solvers." Senior management had determined that the company's future success would hinge on attracting and retaining these "problem solvers". Unfortunately, increasing the base wage was not an option - any solution had to be at the current wage rates.

Assessment: Upon meeting with senior management, our team learned that most of the effort was placed on retention and almost none on selection. Furthermore, their "ideal" employee, the one they believed they needed in order to be successful, was the type that was most likely to quit within the first six months. One of the first things we noticed was that about 70 percent of the workforce had worked at the company in excess of five years. The other thirty percent had been there less than five years; in fact, 25 percent had stayed less than two years.

Strategy: Our goal became to hire people who would stay beyond five years. More specifically, we needed to hire people like the people who had been there longer than five years.

We focused our efforts on the recruiting and selection process. In order to identify people like the "top performers," we used a customized psychometric model to assess fifteen of the "top performers" and fifteen of the "bottom performers." (Our assessment tool measures personality attributes only - there are no right or wrong answers.)

Result: Our tests showed that there were distinct differences between the top and bottom performers. The top performers, in fact, were not the problems solvers management had thought. In fact, the top performers preferred mundane tasks - which is the type of work they did each day. Bottom performers needed to be challenged - which is not what the job offered. Management had been hiring what they thought should be top performers, when in reality they were hiring people who left the job because they quickly became bored.

Using the data, we developed a customized personality portrait that compared each candidate's profile to those of the top performing group, allowing us to hire more people like the top performers, resulting in a much lower turnover rate.

Hiring Right | Managing Growth | Controlling Costs | Cutting Expenses