Retail companies the world over realize that the best customer is not the one who buys once, but the one who stays loyal to a brand through thick and thin. In the same way, the best employee you have is not the one who wowed in the interview, but the one who stays with your organization for the long term. Why Employee Retention Matters Employee retention matters. According to the Wall Street Journal, experts estimate it costs upwards of twice an employee’s salary to find and train a replacement, not to mention the damage to the morale of your remaining employees as they watch a parade of new hires come and go. Despite its importance, however, good employee retention is sometimes hard to achieve. Take a look at these telling retention stats: 78 percent of business leaders rank employee retention as important or urgent. One in three new hires will quit their job after about 6 months 33 percent of employees know whether they will stay with a company long-term after their first week. 32 percent of employers expect employees to job-hop. How Your Hiring Process Impacts Employee Retention It is not by accident that Forbes’ “7 Tips to Better Employee Retention” lists “hiring selectively” as the number one tip to improve employee retention rates. An employee who is a poor match for the position or for the organization as a whole will likely move to greener pastures quickly. So, the first step to good employee retention is hiring the right candidate in the first place. Template: Creating Ideal Candidate Personas – Our free persona template will help you improve your talent acquisition by identifying who your ideal candidates are and how best to reach them. Your hiring process should include several elements designed to help you separate a candidate who is a good match from the myriad candidates who are not. For instance, rather than relying solely on the listed qualifications and skills of potential hires, it is wise to include skills testing or challenge questions in the interview process. Requiring a candidate to produce concrete evidence of mastery of the skills required for the position is a good way to weed out possible overstatements that might be present on a resume. Likewise, it is good to institute a collaborative interview process. Rather than relying solely on the input of one interviewer, it makes sense to involve others in the process. For instance, if a new hire will be working directly under a particular manager, a good practice would be to include that manager in the hiring decision. Good Employee Onboarding a Must An often overlooked essential piece of the hiring puzzle is employee onboarding. Your interest in a job candidate cannot just stop once that candidate becomes an active employee. Remembering that one in three new hires will quit their job after about six months, it is easy to see why ongoing employee onboarding is so important. A strong onboarding process enables you to immerse your new hire more fully into the corporate culture. Checking in regularly in the first few months and providing ample opportunities to both give and receive feedback from the new hire will help keep that hire engaged. Since employee engagement is closely tied to employee retention, making an investment in a good onboarding process will pay off in terms of better retention rates. A strong talent management solution will facilitate a smooth hiring process which incorporates high-level employee onboarding. ThriveTRM helps hiring managers collaborate with recruiters and others involved in the hiring process in real time. ThriveTRM also supports a robust employee onboarding experience for new hires. To see ThriveTRM at work, schedule a demo and begin a process to increase your employee retention rates today.