Why Your New Employee Already Wants To Quit

If you’re hiring or plan to hire this year it’s important you know two truths about present day hiring:

1. Just because you have a job opportunity doesn’t make you special (there are upwards of four times as many jobs as there are available/ qualified people to fill them)
2. When employees are looking for a new career they are often seeking an ‘experience’

​After a decade of working in the technical services and recruiting industry I’ve had few experiences, less than I can count on one hand, with companies that had onboarding programs which I would classify as amazing.  Most companies fall short, way short, when it comes to providing a good onboarding experience to their new employees.

There’s an important note to be made here.  When people hear ‘hiring’ and ‘onboarding’ they have a tendency to think that those responsibilities fall on our partners in HR.  This couldn’t be farther from the truth.  The leaders who make the actual hiring decision have much to do with this process and good leaders know firsthand that their involvement can make or break the success of that new employee.

Employees, regardless of age, are looking for an ‘experience’ at work.  Of course having a job is important to them but increasingly important, arguably more important, for a large majority of the professional workforce is the need to work at a place that provides an experience of comradery, meaningfulness in work, giving back, etc. and the list goes on.  

Part of that experience is a company’s onboarding program and these programs shouldn’t be taken lightly. 

Does your current employee onboarding program communicate the right message to the best candidates in the market?

Forbes estimates as high as 20% of employee attrition occurs within the first 45 days on the job as a result of poor employee onboarding.  In fact, new employees who attended a well-structured onboarding orientation program were 69% more likely to remain at a company up to three years. 

That’s a huge impact!

According to iCIMS, a software company specializing in recruiting systems and software, identified that new hires meet their first performance milestone 77% of the time when a formal onboarding program is in place versus only 49% of the time when one ceases to exist.

What that tells us is that when a good employee onboarding program exist BOTH individual performance and job tenure improve dramatically.  I would also dare to say that the employees’ happiness and appreciation for the job are improved as well.

What do you do if your employee onboarding program lacks an experience to capture the best of the best?

Look no further – this article provides a complete overview of the only onboarding program you will ever need.  Be prepared.  There’s some work to be done here before you can just go hire someone and plop them in their bean bag cubby, or dungeon, whichever you’re working with. For the purposes of this article the ‘onboarding experience’ refers to the entire spectrum from when a job posting first gets released straight through to the new employees sixth month on the job.

The SQR1 Six Month Onboarding Program:

Step 1: Candidate Identification
This is the employees’ first glimpse into your company, their experience during this time matters greatly as to whether or not you will have an employee for years or for a matter of months.

- Job Posting – make them friendly and exciting; talk less about performance expectations and more about the opportunity and experience they will have in the role; create enthusiasm in candidates by sharing with candidates exciting things to come like new technology, new services, positive changes within the company, company culture or philosophies, etc.

- Call Backs - ensure people receive call backs to their application; there’s nothing worse than when people apply to a job opening and don’t hear anything in return; automated responses acknowledging the resume submission are at a minimum a necessity, at which point an acceptance or notice of decline is appropriate and certainly better than not saying anything at all and sending people into a black hole.
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