In the past one year (exactly 302 days), I had personally met 20+ mentors (Senior folks in the Industry), 60+ Business leaders (CXO level), 130+ HR leaders, 100+ people managers, 300+ employees & new hires. Just to understand what are problems faced by organisations and its people due to no-shows (offer-drops) & early attrition (people leaving within first 3 months) in this Dynamic (aka. Chaotic) Indian job market.
I am still far from understanding the nexus; but thought of sharing the exploration and learnings. Some of which would make sense and some of it would not; but I’ll try my best to make it business relevant, to add value to the readers.
There’s one problem every Organisation faces:
Attracting great People and keeping them.
We spend enormous amount of time, money and resources to find some good people out of 100s of profiles, put them through the interview process, do the background verifications, shortlist promising candidates and offer them; what you believe is a great offer.
Related Read: Future of HR: It’s Not Rocket Science, But Behaviour Science !
Since the job market is very dynamic, and there is a big gap in the demand and supply of qualified professionals often leading to a candidate with multiple offers at a time.
In India, approximately 37% of the offered candidates; drop the offer (No-shows) and 2/3rd of them do that just before or on the Date of Joining. And across the globe, about 22% of new-hires quit within the first 45 days.Â
Imagine the behavioural, business and economic stress it brings to an organisation and its people. Â
New-hire retention is an ongoing struggle for many organisations, which spend about 16%-20% of the average annual salary on attrition each year. Even assuming, the average associate earns around ₹ 5,00,000 annually, it costs a company approx. ₹ 80,000 to replace each departing new-hire. Those costs add up quickly; a company of 1000 employee size can bleed more than ₹ 40 lakhs (straight from the bottom-line) annually on the last-minute no-shows and early attrition alone.
There are lots of reasons behind this kind of churn (No-shows and early attrition); but here are the three overall dimensions which attributed to the turnover.
- ~21% – personal reasons (aka reasons unknown). People are people
- ~16% – compensation / Salary. Job shopping or just got lucky
- >60% – expectation mismatch. On the role, people or culture
It seems that no matter how organized a company tries to be, attracting and onboarding new hires can quickly turn into nightmare. It’s largely clear to the industry that poor onboarding produces poor employee engagement, which influences retention.
Related Read:Â Future Of HR: Personalised Employee Experience Through Pre-Boarding SMART Bots !
As recruiting becomes increasingly competitive, candidate engagement and creating a positive candidate experience with your brand is critical. But, limited time, focus and resources are some of the factors which makes onboarding and retaining new-hires challenging. So how can you create a consistent onboarding process to maintain relationships with the great people you just offered, and keep them engaged & motivated so that they show up on day one and remain longer to create the expected value.
In this era of mobile and tech savvy workforce, structured pre- and on-boarding has much to do with retaining new hires, because they feel supported and have access to the information and resources they need from the day of offer.
Four quick tips to make it happen (Using card game terminology for easy consumption)
- Attract (A Spade):
- The actual requirement marketing starts after we make the offer. Make the new-hire onboarding experience easy and personal. Use the pre-joining period (aka. Notice period) and engage the offered candidates meaningfully.
- Absorb (A Club):Â
- Provide time and space to allow absorption of the key information about the organisation and its people (drip campaigns) to happen in a timely fashion. People do not like to be overwhelmed by information; so, snack it all the way.
- Allow (A Heart):
- Allow the new-hires to get in touch with their future work buddies (HR, hiring manager, Peer) to get guidance and support to improve engagement and productivity. Vice versa can be done too.
- Acknowledge (A Diamond):
- Provide acknowledgement and celebrate each milestone achieved by the new-hires to motivate continuous growth in a new role. Remember it’s important to know and place those short-wins in the path of the new-hire assimilation.
To be continued…
(Disclaimer: This is a guest article contributed on Techstory. All content as well as views expressed are those of the author. Techstory is not responsible or liable for any content in this article.)
Image Credits:Â cbc.ca
About The Author:
Anish Padinjaroote Co-founder & Learner Aout Innovations.
Aout is a technology company with Behaviour science based SMART bots and next generation AI at its core. IOXY is their first product; addressing Pre-boarding issues.
