Next Steps in Hiring

Your organization's survival hinges on keeping your top performers. 

Whether you are selecting the team that will remain or hiring for growth or attrition, if you have a group of top performers and you add anything but a top performer to join their group, bad things happen.  Within days, if not hours, everyone understands their level of performance.  The top producers then compare their compensation package and output with the new arrival, and are upset.  Ask top producers how they feel in a situation like this, they will say “insulted, angry, and that they are hoping for management to step in and correct the error.”  If nothing is done, the top producers know that, even in tough economic times they can be quickly reemployed, and they leave.

Simply put, to not focus on top producers results in a retention problem of the worst kind - the average producers stay.  The poor producers stay.  The superior producers find places where they are welcome.  This kind of retention problem may not show up on normal retention statistics, because many organizations do not have a performance management system that allows tracking of the retention of superior producers.  As top producers are less than 20 percent of the overall organization, high turnover in their segment may not show up as an alarm in the overall retention numbers.

What can be done?  Manage the talent pipeline as if your organization's life depended on it.  Use assessments, applicant tracking, and talent management to keep your organization's efficiency high, and getting higher.