Many companies struggle with short-term turnover — they get new people in the door, just to see them leave within a number of weeks or months.

New Hire Onboarding Checklist: 

Invest in Training

From our research, we found that adequate training is the number one need of new people entering the workforce. It’s the critical ingredient in the recipe for long-term success and employee loyalty. In a nutshell, too many people are turned off, just because they don’t get smoothly initiated into the work that they are supposed to be doing. As a result, they don’t feel welcomed, or they feel like the employer is incompetent. By contrast, people who experience thorough orientation and training feel like there’s someone at the helm, welcoming and bringing them into the organization, and they feel well served and tend to stick around.

Give Them Something To Do

We’ve also seen that the biggest category of turnover is found at the entry level position. Often, the company simply hasn’t made an effort to make these positions attractive. They haven’t tied these entry-level positions to clear opportunities for advancement. They haven’t dressed them up with explanations of why these jobs matter. They just expect people to keep coming in and filling empty seats and empty spaces.

Battling turnover means giving everyone a mission-critical job, and respecting them for doing it. Otherwise, your company is going to lose out to others with corporate cultures that invite everyone to get engaged in the business.

Explain the Job

Another big reason for turnover is that the job wasn’t adequately explained beforehand. Someone comes in and interviews and gets the job, and when they arrive, they realized it wasn’t what was described to them. This can be massively frustrating, and as some HR professionals have learned, the ripple effect from this can drag down an entire department.

There’s also the ‘blank slate’ phenomenon, where a job just doesn’t get described all. In these kinds of cases, a new employee can feel like a square peg being pounded into a round hole.

It starts with HR really looking at the open job position, and being able to define it and explain it in ways that will attract the right candidates who are going to stick around for the long haul.

For more about hiring and employee turnover, check out this blog post: 4 Ways to Improve HR Manager Interview Questions

Have a question? We’re happy to help.