Your business is only as solid as your employees. Without a roster of qualified, hard-working, dependable, trustworthy and positive people, your business is at constant risk of crumbling.
This is especially true for American businesses who are under increasing international competition, AND who feel the pressure to provide jobs and develop innovative products domestically. That’s a lot of responsibility riding on a business owners’ shoulders.
If you believe the latest statistics, it’s unfortunately getting harder for American businesses to staff – and keep – that employee roster they so desperately need.
- 56% of recruiters are hurting for skilled or qualified candidates, shows the Jobvite 2015 Recruiting Nation Survey.
- The Associated General Contractors survey reports 86 percent of commercial builders are having trouble filling hourly and salaried positions.
- 65% percent of HR officials at small companies are struggling.
Budget Killer
When an employee isn’t happy – and there are other jobs to be had – they will look elsewhere.
The Department of Labor’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey shows that 58% of employees in today’s marketplace are leaving jobs voluntarily, compared to only 35% who are subject to lay-offs. This is a marked change from a four-year period (2007-2011) where these figures were nearly the same.
Hemorrhaging employees is not only a disruptive problem to your output and culture, it’s an expensive one. The average cost of turnover – or replacing an employee – who earns less than $50k per year is 20% of the person’s annual salary. Folks who earn less than $30k per year cost 16% to replace.
Money is not the only issue. This article says hiring managers are spending nearly a month filling non-skilled positions, and up to 6 months for advanced skill and managerial positions. The author highlights several consequences related to turnover and congested applicant pools:
- Too many unqualified applicants congest the hiring process, making it harder to find qualified applicants.
- While jobs remain unfilled, related tasks are either delegated to inexperienced staff, or not performed at all. In both cases, the company’s overall productivity and profitability suffers.
- Conversely, jobs are filled by people who are a poor fit for the job, either temperamentally or professionally. This leads to poor organizational synergies, low productivity, and overall inefficiency.
- HR teams spend too little time with applicants to determine whether they’re right for the position, resulting in the hire of unqualified or poor fit candidates.
What’s the Solution?
Reducing turnover requires a rock-solid strategy. The first thing businesses should do is streamline their offense. This means finding ways to reduce communication delays, eliminate redundancies, improve malfunctioning software and increase paperless systems. All of these things will boost employee morale because they no longer are bogged down with the little things.
The second thing businesses should do is make sure everyone – from day laborers to upper management – is on the same page. This means ensuring vetting and hiring procedures are similar, and that training and coaching protocols are thorough and make practical sense.
Both of these improvements can be made by implementing a standardized background check program. Helping applicants understand the need for, and processes behind, background checking is an important part of the hiring process. Background checks are one of the most confusing and intimidating components of the hiring process but working with Active Screening helps create a transparent, seamless process that puts both Human Resources professionals and applicants at ease. Active Screening makes communication and collaboration within your business easy, dependable and affordable with our automated and paperless background check tracking system, ACTivate Platform.
If you’d like to learn more about how background checks can help reduce costly turnover within your organization, give one of our talented team members a call today at 1-800-319-5580.
Already happy with Active Screening background check services and the improvements they’ve made to your business? Share your story below in the comments section.