5 Ways to Keep Your New Hires for the Long Haul

Recruiting and onboarding new hires are some of the most expensive aspects of employee relations. There’s the search, the interview process, winnowing down candidates, more interviews, training, training, and more training. Sure, a new hire may have the skills you’re looking for, but you’ll still need to teach them your business culture and protocols.

The worst part: After you’ve invested all that time and money, 10-25 percent of your new hires are likely to bolt in less than six months. One in four is expensive odds, and that’s just the average. Turnover rates for new hires are even worse in certain industries.

How do you fix it? How do you get good people to stick around? Here are five ways to convince your best new hires not to leave:

1. Know Why You Need Them

Talented people love a challenge, especially when it suits their skills. Don’t bury your best hires under busy work. Sure, some mundane work may be inevitable, but try to give top talent something important to do, some reason for getting up in the morning.

2. Be Resourced and Ready

Sometimes, you need someone now; you don’t really have to time roll out the red carpet. That’s okay, but it isn’t an excuse to have a secretary lead your new hire to a cluttered desk and tell them to get to work.

Even when the timeline is tight, welcome your new hires. Introduce them to the rest of the team and prepare the equipment and documents they’ll need to get started ahead of time. Your employees are trying to make good first impressions; give them the opportunity to do so.

3. Clearly Communicate Your Expectations

This takes time and forethought, but it’s one of the most important things you can do to prepare a new hire for success. If a new employee doesn’t know what’s expected of them, how can they meet or exceed those expectations? You hired them for a reason, so make sure they understand exactly what that reason is and what they can do to  justify their continued employment. Coupled with the previous step of providing the proper resources, clear expectations can mean the difference between a new hire who becomes a trusted asset and one who waltzes out the revolving door of your office.

4. Facilitate Cultural Immersion and Connection

All offices have politics and pecking orders. Yours is no different. Your new hire is coming in without any real understanding of the subtext and human drama happening around them. You know why you hired them, so you also know who they need to connect with to deliver optimal results. Make sure these connections get made. Put new hires in the position to use their complementary skills to create shared success. Don’t leave your new hire all alone, trying to figure out where they fit.

5. Get Out of Their Way

This is a big one. The temptation to micromanage a new hire can be exceptionally strong, but you can’t yield to that temptation. Instead, you need to find the line between “coaching” and “hovering,” and then you need to stay on the coaching side!Once your new employee has the resources, the direction, and the connections they need, give them the opportunity to show you what they can bring to the table.

Ronn Torossian is the founder, president, and CEO of 5WPR.