You're fired! You're hired!

Employee turnover is a lot like moving to a different town. Sometimes it's necessary to bring about a better end result. Moving is also considered one of the top five most stressful things to go through. It's expensive, tiring, and highly disruptive.

You're fired!

Getting rid of toxic employees may be the best course of action in some situations. That doesn't lessen the financial impact or disruption such turnover can cause within your organization.

It shouldn't need to be said, but there is a surprising number of hiring managers and business leaders that still think merely having warm bodies on staff is all that's required. They see these people as resources to be used and consumed, with a seemingly never-ending supply of replacements eager to take their place.

Ignoring — or even fostering — high turnover is like driving your organization with the parking brake on. It is literally throwing money away on wasted administrative costs, reduced team productivity, and disruptions to your operation.

In an age when customer service and the customer experience is rightfully getting proper attention, changing personnel inhibits customer loyalty and service quality.

Turn off your customers and you will also turn off your revenue stream.

What's the cure?

You're hired!

It may surprise you that some of the simplest and wisest business advice is sadly ignored. On the first day of business school, session one, there should be a bold yet straightforward maxim written on the board for all students to see. It should be the first question on the first exam, and the final question on the final exam before graduation.

What is it?

Hire the right people for the role.

It sounds simple, doesn't it? How can something that straightforward be so important?

If you put the right people into the right seats, two things happen that directly and profoundly impact the success of your organization:

1. Productivity goes up
2. Turnover goes down

The advice is simple but the results are extraordinary.

How do you hire the right people? What steps do you take to make sure you are filling your teams with individuals who are best suited to their role?

Like a great dish in the finest restaurant, there are several key ingredients to every recipe.

Start by defining the functional requirements of the role. Get input from the current team and management. Be honest about what needs to be done, not necessarily what has been done in the past. Improvement can't happen without change, so be willing to revisit and revise everything. Work with an expert to define the psychometric profile of the role.

This establishes the requirements, experience, and psychometric profile of your ideal candidate.

The next step is the recruiting process. Compose your job listing to match your role profile. Follow best job listing practices to capture attention without pushing away segments of the workforce because of gendered or otherwise biased wording.

Spread the word in as many geographical places as possible for the needs of the position (don't waste money advertising your opening for a civil engineer on a legal industry website, for example).

Screen candidates using the same psychometric tool you used to define the role.

→ See Top Performer Profiles™ for an example of world-class tool to hire based on psychometric fit.

Do they match up? Trust the data. If you use a sound psychometric assessment, one with great repeat reliability¹, the scores should indicate fit with a high likelihood of success.

An additional benefit of the winning combination of psychometric role and candidate fit screening is it helps you narrow down your pool of applicants without interjecting any opportunity for unconscious bias to taint your selections. It is also highly efficient and cost-effective, saving you a lot of time.

With your small and manageable pool of candidates that have highly matched psychometric profiles, begin reviewing their experience and qualifications to ensure they meet your role's minimum requirements.

At this point, the narrowed pool of candidates that remain in the selection process would all have a high likelihood to perform well. Conduct interviews to ensure personality fit and make the hiring decision with confidence.

Candidates hired with highly aligned psychometric profiles to their role often exhibit 200% or higher productivity and experience 50% or lower turnover.

Great hires like these are happy and engaged in their work, and thrive on their success. Compare that to warm bodies who show up with just enough effort to keep from getting fired.

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Notes

[1] The Core Values Index has the highest repeat reliability of any psychometric assessment on the market, 97.7%, according to longitudinal studies. See https://erep.com/files/CVI_reliability_study.pdf