Help me! My team members are leaving in droves.

Most of us have been hit by attrition in our careers. If not controlled in time, it can have devastating consequences for the projects, teams, organization and customers. The call center industry suffers from the highest attrition rates (30-35%). Attrition is usually lower for highly-skilled workers (<10%).

Let us now see what can be done during various phases of employment life-cycle to control attrition:

  • Hiring: This is the most crucial phase and sadly is not handled correctly by both start-ups and established companies. Most of the times the hiring managers very reluctantly take out time to clear define the role and success criteria. Job Descriptions are written by juniors using “templates” and Google. Smart hiring managers flip the hiring process by meeting with the candidates first rather than allowing the junior team to filter out profiles on flimsy grounds. Here are some of the mistakes and how they can be avoided:
    • Selling JD and not the company vision: Start-ups today are able to attract the top talent without necessarily paying the top money. The founder’s passion shows through when he shares the vision of the company. Job Descriptions which tend to slot people have very little relevance in the knowledge economy.
    • Making promises which you can’t keep
    • Hiring people with the right qualifications: Hiring engineers for jobs which can be done by arts, commerce or science graduates is again a recipe for disaster.
    • Not Matching personality with role: There are several personality assessments tests which can be used for matching personality with the role especially for the senior positions.
    • Ignoring cultural fitment: Organization cultures varies significantly even within an industry. Large organizations typically have too many policies and procedures which slow down the pace of work while the environment at several start-ups will appear completely chaotic to someone whose most of the work experience comes from working in large organization in 9-5 environment in the same domain and worse on the same account for years. The complex knowledge economy today requires people who have handled both depth and breadth for the senior roles.
    • Reactive hiring: Hiring team needs at least 60-90 days to identify a good candidate and with 30-90 days notice periods it is unreasonable to expect that the candidates will join in 30-60 days. When you are hiring under pressure, you end up hiring candidates who are mediocre. Proactively meeting candidates when there are no immediate requirements is always much better then to hire when there is a fire!

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