Most interviewers err, he says, by focusing on irrelevant information, being too friendly and not probing enough, and by rushing to judgment. “People make their minds up very quickly, and spend the rest of interview confirming it instead of being open minded.”
He recommends asking questions that reveal a candidate’s attitudes toward work and how he or she interacts with others, such as “Describe your best boss and worst boss. What were the differences between them?,” “In what way do you think this job will be a stretch for you or a challenge for you?,” and “What feedback have you gotten during the course of your career and how has it improved your effectiveness?” Questions such as these should reveal whether a person will fit into your company’s culture.
Step 2: Build Community Dr. Beverly Kaye, a Los Angeles–based retention consultant who works with Fortune 500 companies, says that businesses need to pay more attention to employee retention because the tide is shifting: Companies will soon have more jobs available than workers to fill them.
“A perfect storm is coming,” she says. “The economy is on the upswing, there will be demographic shortfall when boomers leave the workforce, and there is a legion of unhappy people biting their tongues. There will be a talent war like you won’t believe. If [businesses] don’t start addressing it now, they’ll be in trouble.”
Lynn Guillory, vice president of human resources at Dallas-based Foxworth-Galbraith Lumber Co., says he’s seeing it already. He recruits continually, “even if we don’t have an opening. We’ve pushed general managers to always be looking for good talent.”
He cares enough about employee satisfaction to call former employees at home several months after they leave to ask why they quit and how the company could be better. Guillory says that he finds that practice more fruitful than exit interviews, when employees tend to be concerned about burning bridges.
In its 2003 “Rewards of Work” employee job-satisfaction survey, New York City–based HR consulting firm Sibson Consulting reported that about one in six employees is at high risk of leaving, and that it wouldn’t take too much to get them to jump ship. Half the workers surveyed said they would take a comparable job at another company for 10 more days of vacation or $1,000 worth of stock that they had to wait four years to sell. Perhaps of greatest concern is that high performers are the employees mostly likely to leave.
What does it take to keep employees energized, motivated, and committed to your company? According to the Spherion survey, 86 percent of workers said work fulfillment and work/life balance were their top career priorities. Only 35 percent said their top goals were to be successful at work or move up the career ladder.
Work fulfillment and work/life balance come from creating emotional bonds with employees, says Roger Herman, a retention expert from Greensboro, N.C., and author of “Keeping Good People: Strategies for Solving the No. 1 Problem Facing Business Today.” “That doesn’t mean we do candle ceremonies and hug each other,” Herman says. “You have to care about your people. If they have family, look at how you might get the family involved. Quite often, companies orient the employee, but the employee’s spouse has no idea where they even work. Look at building a relationship early on. Tell them, ‘We care about you and we want you to be successful. This isn’t just another job. Here we’re looking at a relationship. We’re a community.’”
At Boone County Lumber in Columbia, Mo., that means being closed on the weekends so its 35 employees can spend time at home. “From a lifestyle standpoint, that’s meant a lot to our people,” says vice president and co-owner Brad Eiffert. “There are certainly days when you wonder, ‘What opportunity am I missing by not being here on Saturday?’ but I think it would cost us tremendously in the quality of people we have here. I wouldn’t want to work the shift, and I won’t make other people do it.”
