How to Increase Turnover and Lose Staff Faster

I've spent much of my working career to date in frontline roles. All of those roles to date have been primarily customer service focused, in a variety of positions, and most of them have been positions with high turnover rates. This is not too surprising; the kinds of jobs a full-time undergraduate student tends to get to pay the bills are typically low-paying, low skill positions. My first job was in a grocery store deli, the second a price-focused shoe retailer, and the third a lingerie chain. I also worked in an independent pharmacy for a couple of summers. None of these positions paid much more than minimum wage, (I recall getting a ten cent an hour raise at one point, and wondering why they even bothered) and turnover tended to be quite high. In all of those roles, the person typically in charge of doing the hiring had little or no training about the process. Generally, at least in the chain companies, there would be a script of questions that the manager was supposed to ask, but some didn't even go that far and had completely unstructured interviews. In all cases, the decision about hiring was largely left to the manager's 'gut instincts'.

Needless to say, this method of hiring doesn't typically lead to great results. In my experience at least, I would say that the odds of a new hire working out weren't much better than a coin toss either way. In some cases, they were definitely worse; one manager I had was a devout Mormon who preferred to hire people who requested Sundays off in order to attend church, regardless of their other qualifications or lack thereof, in one case hiring an eighth-grade dropout (against company policy, no less) who had worked 8 jobs in the past year, never more than three months at a time, and whose only reference, when called, told us that she had been terminated for swearing at a customer. Shockingly, it didn't work out. As you might imagine, this particular manager's hiring record was significantly less than stellar.

There exists no shortage of research demonstrating that people who rely on their guts in hiring tend to make poor choices. There are a number of biases that people can fall prey too, like the halo effect or the similar-to-me bias. Others have their own particular biases which may run afoul of the law; a manager once told me she'd hired a Muslim girl once, and 'it just didn't work out', so I was not to hire any obviously Islamic candidates, in a reasonably diverse area where a lot of Muslim girls wear headscarfs. Rather than follow her discriminatory hiring practices, I left the job. In retrospect, I should have gone above her head with it, because this practice is not only immoral, but highly illegal. At the time, however, the only higher-up I knew how to contact at the company was the regional manager, who was great friends with my manager, and as a nineteen year old university student, I was considerably more uncertain of my position that I am now. At the time, I knew I objected to this practice morally; I also knew it was illegal, but at the time I wasn't aware that, in the case of a discrimination lawsuit, it would be up to the company to prove that they hadn't discriminated against potential applicants, and not vice-versa. Now I know the company HR department would certainly want to know one of their managers was discriminating, but hindsight, of course, is 20/20. I also happen to know that manager is no longer employed with the company, which is probably a good thing, considering.

In short, I'm pretty sure most of my management experience in frontline roles really taught me more about what not to do than what to do in hiring. To me, it wasn't any great revelation to learn that trusting your gut in hiring doesn't get you very far; I'd seen it in action, many times. I understand that some people can be quite hostile to the idea of structured interviews and personality assessments in hiring. While there are definitely issues involved in making sure that the tests you use are actually valid predictors of job success and do not inherently discriminate against any protected groups, I found the idea to be fairly common-sense. As long as you do due diligence in determining what tests you want to use (again, don't use your gut to pick! Use your brain) then I say, go for it.

This article from inc.com discusses the use of personality tests in hiring, specifically in the context of a small business. It's worth the read, I think, if you are considering implementing these kinds of tests, because it covers the do's-and-don'ts pretty well.