Stop the Revolving Door of Employee Turnover
This is a guest post written by Robert A. Cameron of from Robert A. Cameron & Associates in Weston FL. Mr. Cameron works with employers to help them increase the effectiveness of their employee selection and retention, and improve their company’s productivity and profitability. They can be reached at 954-385-8701 or visit their website at http://www.racameron.com.
Stop the revolving door of employee turnover. Employee assessment tools have advanced so companies can now more effectively identify, select, and retain top performing employees, and that means providing better service.
The challenge and cost of employee turnover is one of the most discussed, most frustrating and most misunderstood problems businesses face. CEO’s have identified employee retention as one of their key challenges. Yet organizations continue to struggle with this costly issue. The science of psychological assessments has recently advanced, allowing the development of much more predictive assessment tools.
If you do not know what your employee turnover cost is, many experts agree that you can come surprisingly close to the cost of a single turnover incident by simply multiplying the annual salary for the position times 2.5 – that will cover productivity loss, recruiting and hiring cost, training cost, liability, unemployment and the other 101 hidden costs that we usually try not to think of when we lose an employee. What is the cost of poor customer service!
Employee turnover often begins with a poor hiring decision. When we hire someone who is a poor job fit, we have already begun an almost inevitable course that will end with failure – and another turnover casualty. Part of the problem of poor hiring lies with our poor tools: One comprehensive study of the hiring process indicated that, if an interview is your only tool, you have only a 14% chance of making a good hire. Add good reference checking (and we all know how difficult that can be), you can raise your success ratio to 26%. If your goal is to beat one out of four odds, you need better tools!
Fortunately, the science of employee assessments has produced increasingly useful tools to add to the art of hiring. While no assessment, or even a combination of assessments, guarantees success, the same study showed that use of personality, abilities, interests, and job matching measures can raise your success rate to 75% or better. Equally important, valid pre employment screening assessment tools in all of those areas can be applied for well below 1% of the projected cost of a bad hire.
Why don’t more of us use employee assessments to improve our hiring (and lower turnover)? Part of the answer lies in lack of education on the topic – not many of us have even attended a single seminar on use of scientific assessment tools. Part lies in reluctance to spend any money on new processes. Part of it, frankly, is the already overwhelming load we place on the people who are doing the hiring – they are so busy bailing the boat, they can’t take time out to turn on the bilge pumps! To change the course of turnover, you must recognize that the costs are killing you, that you can change course, and that the rewards are well worth the trouble.
For more information on employee assessments, you can call Robert A. Cameron & Associates at 954-385-8701 or visit their website at http://www.racameron.com. Thank you to Mr. Cameron for writing this post about a very interesting topic.
If you have an idea for a guest writer, feel free to post the person or company’s name, web site, etc. in the comments section.
Service Untitled » Who else wishes there were no moronic idiots in customer service? said:
Aug 02, 06 at 10:42 am[…] Test their abilities. Read this post written by an employee assessment test expert. Inc. Magazine had a big article about testing employee’s abilities through a series of assessment tests and job-like scenario tests (note: at the time of writing, the new issue of their magazine is not on their web site). Testing employees to get a feel about how their actual knowledge, if they will fit into your company culture and how well they will do on the job is extremely important. It’s hard to tell that from an interview, so try the tests and challenges out. […]
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Jan 23, 07 at 10:18 am[…] Maybe I have to ask Robert Cameron this, but I wonder if the employee assessment tests can pick people like me up? And if they can, is that necessarily a bad thing? Eternal optimists sometimes aren’t fully in touch with reality. While I can see how that could possibly benefit a customer service representative, is it something that is really a good thing? Personally, I don’t think so. What do you think? […]
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Mar 06, 08 at 9:07 pm[…] Hire with personality in mind. If you aren’t doing it already, it might be useful to include personality tests or at the very least, personality focused questions, in the interviewing process. In the perfect world, you don’t need to and won’t hire people that don’t like working with customers. Ideally, everyone should enjoy working with, talking to, and serving customers. […]
Human Resource Consulting said:
Oct 31, 08 at 10:13 am“Why don’t more of us use employee assessments to improve our hiring (and lower turnover)? ” – A good software package to evaluate your employees before hiring is always a good investment. A little extra cost at the beginning can save a lot in the long run!