Talentometry Briefing: Your recruitment partner is having a huge impact on staff turnover – here’s why

Staff turnover has the potential to really damage your business. When good engineers leave for seemingly avoidable reasons, you also lose critical client relationships, a bank of ‘living’ technical knowledge that go beyond code libraries, and other social infrastructure that help your project teams overcome complex challenges.

A survey of over 300,000 employees just before the outbreak of Covid19 by CultureAmp highlights three key reasons as to why employees leave:

  1. Career growth: Employees who left were less favourable on the question “I believe there are good career opportunities for me at [Company].” Additionally, a lack of Growth (in their career or development opportunities) was selected by 1 in 3 employees as a top reason for leaving at the time of exit.
  2. Role expectations: Unsurprisingly, they were also less favourable when asked if “I am happy with my role relative to what was described to me.”
  3. Inclusion: Those who left were less likely to feel like they belonged at the organization.

Here are three ways in which your external recruiter has an impact on the above:

1) Expectations on the future

Your external recruiter is the first person to speak to your new hire about you and their new job. If your external recruitment partner hasn’t taken the time to understand your business, they will simply miss the mark in conveying what is realistic to the candidate in terms of what they can expect when it comes to development, growth and progression.

This can be as simple as understanding the often different and nuanced paths of development and progression within our industry, and the realistic growth possible from the market in which you yourselves operate.

The bad will generated from this first misstep has the potential to misshape every annual review until they ultimately leave.

2) Does your external recruiter really understand the role?

How many times have you interviewed a candidate from an agency where they do not want to work away / on site for you to awkwardly tell them that it’s at least a third of the time. That experience is a small reflection of a larger problem.

A candidate’s misalignment of what the job will be like can be a huge reason for you to lose an engineer after 2-3 years – e.g. will the level of your average project’s complexity keep them engaged? Will they get bored and leave when they see something more exciting?


3) Does your external recruiter know what personalities would fit your team?

There is obviously more to inclusivity and engagement than making sure personalities are balanced but this is one area your external recruiter can really add value if they are recruiting properly. What environment are they coming from, what do they most recent about where they are?

Multiple meaningful engagements with candidates gives us a deep insight into the people we put forward – this combined with a thorough understanding of your current team can improve inclusivity and engagement in the long run.

Obviously in candidate-short market you may not have the luxury of turning person after person down. This is useful from both from a matching point of view or increasingly to tailor the onboarding process to create a transition / adaptation periods to fully immerse your new recruit.

Talentometry operate as true businesses partners when it comes to operating as your external recruiter. In addition to sing a skills qualification methodology developed with other engineers, we align our interview process with your business, so candidates feel a reflection of the true opportunity available to them with your business.

Looking to recruit people who are more likely to stay? Contact Zack to see how we could help you recruit sustainably.

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