Here’s How A Job Profile Can Reduce Turnover

Turnover is one of the most important metrics to track when it comes to people analytics. It’s important to know how many employees are joining the team versus how many are leaving, and your turnover rate will help determine if something has to be done to help keep employees around for longer. Travis Jeffery writes for Hackernoon that the cost of a bad hire is often around $50,000 – with numbers like that, it becomes even more critical to figure out how to slow down that revolving door.

Often, organizations look at implementing measures to retain existing employees – and this is obviously very important. Your current employees are the heart of everything you do, and keeping them engaged will have a positive impact on everything the company does. But some organizations don’t realize that reducing turnover can happen before employees are hired – and that’s where the job profile comes in. We’ve written a lot about how to create a job profile, so I won’t repeat myself here. What I really want to focus on is that link between defining clearer candidate requirements and reducing a high turnover rate.

By taking a few minutes to create a job profile, you’re putting together a clearer picture of what your ideal candidate looks like. You’re going beyond the simple act of rattling off hard skills; instead, you’re thinking about the candidate’s personality and attitude, as well as the demands that will be placed on them in the role. When you consider that 53% of new hires fail because the employee’s personality isn’t suited for the position they’re in, it’s surprisingly obvious that more attention should be placed on figuring out what the ideal candidate should look like – before applications start streaming in.

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A job profile can get you there, and it can inform the rest of your hiring process. Once you have a benchmark for what you’re looking for, it’ll become a whole lot easier to determine who’s going to succeed in the role and who might be better suited for a different opportunity. Consider analyzing the performance of existing or past employees, and identify which attributes contributed to their success and retention. This way, you’re building long-term employment into the hiring formula – and you’re identifying the critical factors that will help employees stay with your company.

High employee turnover can be a drag, but it doesn’t have to be permanent. By creating a job profile, you’re defining vital requirements for your ideal candidate – requirements that go beyond the hard skills necessary to perform tasks. And as those requirements become clearer, it becomes easier to determine who meets them or not. That’s the kind of clarity needed to make the right hiring decision – and it’s the kind of clarity that’ll help reduce turnover.

Of course, creating a job profile is only one of the ways you can start reducing a high turnover rate.
Download our infographic to discover 4 additional strategies!