How to Prevent First-Year Leader Turnover

Imagine you’ve spent significant time and resources onboarding a new leadership candidate, only to have them quit within a few months. All the effort your team put into the hiring process will have been wasted, and you’ll have to start all over again from the beginning. What could be more frustrating?

Unfortunately, turnover within the first year of hiring is all too common. For example, in the healthcare sector, the first-year turnover rate is almost double the overall turnover rate, according to data compiled by Hutrics.

High turnover is very harmful to organizations. Every time an employee quits, institutional memory is lost—the new employee will have to be retrained to make up for the lost knowledge, and some innovation may be gone for good. High leadership turnover is also extremely harmful to organizational culture, because it sends a signal to remaining employees and other managers that people are unhappy at the company.

Not only is turnover detrimental to company culture and performance, it’s also very expensive. For example, losing one RN leader carries an average cost of $96,400, according to NSI Nursing Solutions. The cost of turnover includes all the time and resources spent on candidate sourcing, screening, interviewing, hiring, and onboarding. Once a new hire is onboarded, it can still take anywhere from eight months to two years for them to reach full productivity.

Fortunately, there are ways to lower the risk of first-year turnover and avoid these costs. Hutrics’ suite of hiring assessments has been proven to predict retention and loyalty.  By using the assessments, your organization can hire leaders who are the best fit for you, and are likely to stay.

Here’s how to avoid first-year turnover among newly-hired leaders:

Hire Leaders Using Hutrics’ Proprietary Assessments

When trying to lower turnover, the best place to start is by selecting the right candidates during the hiring process. To improve the efficiency of your process, you can use psychological assessments to better understand each candidate and judge if they’d be a good fit for the position.

Hutrics offers a suite of professionally developed tests which have been validated by extensive research. Our tests have been shown to improve business outcomes (like new hire performance and turnover), while delivering reliable, unbiased results.

Use our HEXACO personality tests, working memory assessments, or values assessments to get deeper insights into your candidates, and find the best person for each role.  

Review the Assessment Results with Managers

After conducting assessments during your hiring process and using them to select the best candidate, you can get even more value from the assessment results by sharing them with the new hire’s direct manager.

The assessment results offer you valuable insights into the successful candidate’s values, beliefs, goals, and personality. By sharing them, you can help your leadership team understand how to best manage and communicate with the new hire.

Build a Solid Onboarding Process

Even the best candidates may struggle in the first few weeks of a new job if they aren’t offered adequate support. A successful onboarding process is key for avoiding turnover. In fact, 93% of employers agree that a good onboarding experience is crucial to influencing a new hire’s decision to stay with an organization.

Not only do leadership hires need to be successfully onboarded, they also need to learn how to onboard their own newly-hired team members in the future. This is why Hutrics offers six months of coaching for newly hired leaders. The coaching covers the leader’s own onboarding and also teaches them how to onboard others, so they’ll feel comfortable with the team from the very beginning.

Help the New Leader Integrate with the Team

Once the new leadership hire has been onboarded, they must integrate with the existing team and learn to manage them. This means understanding team members’ performance records, characteristics, and communication styles. It also means understanding company policies in key areas like employee wellness and DEI.

Organizational data (such as employee survey results) is a rich source of information for new leaders to learn from. New hires should have access to this data from the get-go, so they can get up to speed with the people they’ll be managing and the current culture within the team.

At Hutrics, our aim is to help our clients lower their turnover rate and improve results—so we offer much more than just hiring assessments. Our 360° program also includes a comprehensive assessment review, an onboarding toolkit, and six months of new hire coaching, with a coaching plan that’s customized for your organization.

To learn more about Hutrics’ proven, data-driven solutions for leadership assessment and hiring, contact us today.