How to Create a Hiring Strategy and Retain New Hires

Employee retention is still at the top of HR leaders’ priority lists in the second half of 2022 and the Great Resignation continues steadily, with one in five employees saying they’re considering switching jobs this year. New hires are one group of employees that account for a significant amount of turnover — about 20% of employees quit in the first 45 days at a new position. Not only are new hires at risk of quitting, but 88% of hiring managers also say they’re having a hard time finding and hiring those qualified candidates to begin with.

Hang on to your valuable new employees with a hiring strategy that fosters new hire retention.

Why Focus on Hiring Strategy?

No matter their age, job seekers agree that their application and interview experience was the top factor in their decision about where to work. Your hiring strategy matters because you won’t even get a chance to retain employees if they have a bad hiring experience and reject your job offer.

The hiring process could also be considered much longer than just a few days or weeks since 90% of new hires take the first six months to decide whether or not they want to stay at a new job. Even after the offer is signed and they’ve passed the three-month mark, your company needs to continue “recruiting” new employees far past their start date.Did you know? 90% of new hires will take six months to decide if they want to stay at the company. Employees often quit for reasons that could be avoided with better hiring practices — and that’s a clear opportunity for companies to improve. Try these hiring and retention strategies to make better hires and keep them long-term.

Let Company Culture Shine

Job seekers’ priorities indicate that the relationship between company culture and retention may be stronger than ever:

• 70% of employees say they want to work at a company that shares their values.
• Millennials are 11x more likely to leave their job if they feel a lack of purpose at work compared to Gen Xers.
• Among employees who quit during the first 90 days of employment, 32% say it was due to company culture.

Your company’s employer brand should represent company culture and permeate recruitment strategies. You can do this with a branded careers page, an employer value proposition (EVP) that describes why it’s great to work at your company, and job descriptions that include an overview of benefits and perks.

Set Clear Job Expectations

43% of new hires who quit in the first three months say it was because the job was not what they expected. Research shows that only around 50% of employees feel like they know what’s expected of them at work. Inaccurate job descriptions and a lack of direction can lead to disengagement and turnover.

You can avoid wasting time and money replacing these employees by setting clear, accurate expectations throughout the hiring process.

Here’s how:

• Define role responsibilities with the hiring manager before the hiring process begins.
• Write job descriptions that cover responsibilities as thoroughly as possible without alienating applicants, and ensure job postings are consistent across the various job boards you use.
• Cover expectations during interviews by talking candidates through a typical day in the role.
• Plan onboarding programs new hires can anticipate what’s expected of them now and going forward.
• Set goals with new hires to ensure onboarding stays on track and they become proficient in the new role.

Put Candidates On a Level Playing Field

Hiring is hard even without a talent shortage. There’s a demand for objectivity that can be difficult to achieve, especially if you have more than one hiring manager, many potential candidates, or both. First, you need to source a diverse candidate pool and give every qualified candidate a fair chance. Then, the interview process needs to maintain that neutrality and rate candidates with as little bias as possible.

You can reach a wider pool of candidates from the start and evaluate candidates fairly with recruiting software. Among the many benefits of using a modern hiring platform is access to powerful tools that enable recruiters to diversity their candidate pool and conduct fair interviews:

• Build a more diverse talent pipeline with an applicant tracking system (ATS).
• Interview guides give recruiters and hiring managers a standard set of questions to ask during interviews based on the role.
• Interview Scorecards ensure interviewers evaluate candidates on the same criteria using the same rating scale.

Cut Extra Recruiting Steps to Hire Faster

Multiple rounds of interviews or long skills assessments may seem necessary, but failing to streamline recruiting processes could be costing you candidates. One of the top reasons candidates ghost employers is because of long or complex hiring process. HR professionals know it’s an issue, too, with 35% admitting they’ve missed out on a candidate because of slow hiring processes.

You can trim time-to-hire by trimming the fat from hiring processes:

• Involve fewer interviewers
• Eliminate unnecessary interviews
• Keep assessments to a minimum
• Communicate via text instead of email

At ClearCompany, our Talent Acquisition team uses the Advanced ClearText Suite to hire candidates faster.

“We text with probably 99% of our candidates, which is way faster and so convenient because the messages appear both on our recruiters’ phones and on the ClearCompany platform,” said Director of Talent Acquisition, Brian Abraham. “I can be away from my computer and still keep the recruiting process moving along.” As a result, our time-to-hire is 21 days on average, compared to the market average of more than 45 days. Find out more — read the Q&A.

Stick to an Onboarding Process

We mentioned that it takes a majority of employees six months to decide if they’ll stay or quit. That may seem like a long time, but consider the fact that Gartner estimates it can take up to 12 months for employees to be proficient in a new job. In other words, employees might decide to quit before they even have a chance to get comfortable in their new role and work environment.

An onboarding plan can boost retention by up to 82%, but unfortunately, only 12% of employees say their company does onboarding well. However, 69% of employees who had a good onboarding experience will stay at their job for at least three years. Great onboarding increases employee engagement, too, which is another factor impacting retention.

The data is clear: it’s worth it to create a structured employee onboarding program. Supporting new hires during those first critical weeks and months reveals important truths about working at your company:

• Your organization invests time and resources in its employees to enable their success.
• Employees can expect clarity around their roles and responsibilities.
• Your company cares that employees are both prepared and engaged with their work.

Hire Smarter to Reduce New Hire Turnover and Retain Top Talent

Hiring and retention strategies today have to consider how the two affect one another and the net positive of putting in the work to create retention-focused processes. Luckily, while we may be experiencing a turbulent labor market, we’re also living in the digital age. Using recruitment software for hiring is a must to create an engaging candidate experience that kicks off an excellent employee experience.

There are a wide variety of HR technology solutions available to enable smart hiring strategies, and the ClearCompany Applicant Tracking System is the best. Power the recruiting strategies we covered in this article and then use your real employee data to tailor your approach even further.

Want to find out how it works? Get a demo of the ClearCompany ATS to see how you can use our award-winning software to build your own data-informed, retention-boosting hiring strategy.