Average Tenure of Staffing Firm (Internal) Employees

Each year, firms evaluate their recruitment efforts and prepare a budget for the future year. When creating a budget, there are often two primary considerations: how many people we intend to replace and how many people we expect to add. Both of these utilize information from prior years, including predicted attrition, known new recruits, internal recruitment efforts, external recruiter charges, job board expenditures, software licenses, etc. After determining the number, we accept it and move on. What organizations frequently fail to consider is why their turnover is occurring, if and how it may be decreased, and the overall impact on the firm. Reducing this cost can minimize the need to backfill some of your most expensive positions, reduce onboarding costs, and improve company performance as a whole.

Exit Interviews

Before taking any action, you must fully comprehend the scope of your employee turnover and the underlying causes. The first question is simple: how many employees departed or were terminated last year? The second section requires additional evaluation. Some employee churn is straightforward to classify, but the underlying cause of employee departures can be extremely difficult to identify. It is possible for people to depart for a better opportunity, but this might imply anything. It could be due to compensation, the availability of more growth opportunities elsewhere, conflicts with management or coworkers, or simply that the new firm has a better cultural fit. This also applies to employees who are terminated or laid off, as there may be underlying performance difficulties that transform good employees into poor performers. Conducting exit interviews with all departing employees, regardless of their reasons for leaving, may help you uncover the true causes of turnover, allowing you to address them in the future.

Recruitment and Orientation

According to studies, the manner in which personnel are recruited and on boarded can impact their overall duration. For example, the average duration of employees introduced by current employees is 4.7 years, compared to 4.2 years for individuals without pre-existing contacts with other employees. These same studies identified good onboarding as a critical determinant in employee retention, noting that when employees are properly trained and empowered, they are far more likely to succeed. If you’ve been in business long enough, you’ve witnessed rush-hires, positions that “need to be filled immediately,” but the company lacked the resources to properly manage the person, beginning with onboarding. Some ambitious individuals will overcome this issue, and the performance difference will be minimal, but all employees who are not properly onboarded may experience a decline in overall performance.

Culture and Morale

There are numerous strategies to create a positive company culture, and each company’s culture is unique to its beliefs and industry. A bank or financial industry business may not have the same culture as a software startup. Regardless of the type of culture you have, measuring it to ensure employee satisfaction is essential for retaining staff.

A robust feedback loop is an excellent method for measuring employee satisfaction. Annual employee surveys, the option to submit recommendations and complaints anonymously, regular one-on-ones between managers and staff, and annual reviews with a segment dedicated to employee comments are some ways to obtain feedback.

At SOAL, we use a golden rule to determine whether or not our employees love their jobs. If employees are eager to recommend our company to their friends, they must appreciate working here. Employee satisfaction surveys are a fantastic starting point, but actions speak louder than words, and referrals speak equally as loudly as employees who do not make referrals.

Conclusion:

Long employee tenure is difficult to achieve since it is nearly hard to remedy a problem at the end of employment (when it is most apparent). However, if your organization appreciates the long-term influence of seasoned personnel, employing some of the aforementioned best practices can have a substantial effect on staff retention. It all begins with leadership recognizing the significance of tenure to the organization’s mission, recruitment teams embracing the appropriate KPIs, and management’s ability to adapt to an ever-changing workplace while maintaining employee satisfaction as a top concern.