Let’s stop pretending that turnover is some tidy little transaction.
Someone leaves, someone else slides in, the new hire gets a mug, a MacBook, and a Slack emoji, and we all move on. Just another Monday in corporate America.
HR checks the box, Finance updates the spreadsheet. Badges are issued. Credentials are given. Maybe some introductory meetings, or a welcome lunch, or branded swag bag, if the company pretends to care about engagement or invests capital in stuff like building employer brands (they need content, and new hires are probably happier on Day One than they’re ever going to be again in their entire tenure, as a rule).
And everyone pretends like it’s just the natural rhythm of business.
But turnover isn’t just a cost center. It’s a symptom. Of bad hires. Of misaligned expectations. Of broken systems. And while we’re all busy pretending that backfilling a role is as simple as rerunning a job ad and scheduling a few interviews, we’re ignoring the very real, very expensive reality that most people mentally check out long before they ever hand in their notice.
And you’re still paying them. Not just in salary, but in lost productivity, missed opportunities, and the collateral damage that a disengaged employee leaves behind.
The High Cost of “Good Enough”
Let’s talk about the ones who don’t leave right away. The new hire who looked great on paper, nailed the interviews, and showed up on Day One ready to go… only to realize a few weeks in that the job was 70% Zoom fatigue and 30% navigating corporate bureaucracy.
They’re not going to tell you they’re miserable. They’re not going to walk out after the first month. They’re going to stick around long enough to not look flaky on their résumé, milk their benefits, and keep the “open to work” banner off until they can quietly sneak off to something better.
Meanwhile, you’ve got a warm body filling a cold seat. They’re technically showing up. But they’re not there. They’re coasting. They’re phoning it in. And let’s be honest — you probably already know exactly who I’m talking about.
Gallup’s 2024 State of the Global Workplace report found that nearly 60% of employees are “quietly disengaged.” That’s not just a vibe shift. That’s a business crisis. Because you’re not paying for a 40-hour work week.
You’re paying for a ghost. A very expensive ghost. It’s like watching a Bersin keynote – and similarly, companies just don’t seem to be able or willing to get the message, even after hearing the exact same thing again, and again, and again.
The Zombie Employee Economy
Let’s do the math.
Say you bring on a mid-level hire at $75,000 a year. Within six months, they know this job isn’t it. But instead of bailing, they stay. They coast at 70% effort for another year while looking for something better.
That’s $22,500 in lost productivity, and that’s just the direct cost. Add in the ripple effects: stalled projects, missed deadlines, decreased team morale, clients who start side-slacking their complaints. Suddenly, that “average hire” becomes a six-figure mistake.
And then you still have to replace them.
According to SHRM (so, taken with a grain of salt), replacing an employee costs between 50% and 200% of their annual salary depending on the role and seniority. But that’s just the “visible” cost: stuff like recruiting, onboarding, training, and ramp-up.
What’s never accounted for is that lame-duck period, you know, those few awkward, slow-moving months where someone is technically employed but emotionally checked the hell out.
It’s like getting ghosted, only in slow motion. And you’re paying for the privilege.
The Butterfly Effect of Bad Hiring
Here’s what happens when someone disengages (aka, stuff that won’t show up on your stupid survey). It’s a 6 step process, one that’s as predictable as any in human capital:
- Quality of work slips
- The rest of the team picks up the slack
- Resentment builds
- Team dynamics shift; culture erodes
- Productivity and satisfaction slip.
- Customers and competitors notice; pipeline and renewals drop.
By the time the resignation email hits your inbox, the damage has already been done.
Here’s the kicker: most employees don’t even become fully productive until 12 to 18 months after they are onboard. In startup terms, that’s like two and a half lifetimes.
That means if they leave at month 14 (which is exactly what the data shows is right around the median tenure at the moment), you never even saw ROI. Or probably even any real effort to get there. All you saw was sunk cost. And the only impact? A vacancy.
Multiply that across a few roles a year, and you’re running a hamster wheel, not a talent strategy.
We Don’t Need More Candidates. We Need Better Alignment.
The thing is, as many unqualified applicants as we tend to perpetually complain about and buy specious “AI” solutions to manage, for a lot of roles, there aren’t enough qualified workers on the market – much less active applicants, people with industry experience, or whose location or comp demands are within a thousand miles of where you’d need them to be.
That problem is compounded by the fact that the entire hiring process is designed to measure the wrong things, more or less.
We hire for experience, then complain when they don’t bring fresh ideas.
We hire for pedigree, then complain about culture fit or value alignment.
We hire for skills, then wonder why they don’t have passion.
Here’s the truth: misalignment is expensive as hell. You can’t train motivation. You can’t coach values. You can’t fix a personality mismatch with a LinkedIn learning subscription (or even a sixpack).
Most job descriptions are legal disclaimers bolted onto compensation documentation. They repel more job seekers than they attract. They talk about “requirements” like it’s an arms race, not an opportunity.
We tell candidates what they’ll be doing, not what they’ll be part of. We need to be candid about what we do well as a company, sure, but also, what we can do better. We shouldn’t run from our negative online reviews, but address them directly. We shouldn’t build an employer brand when we could be building a referral network and a retention strategy. We shouldn’t be focused on filling reqs, but building careers.
But that’d be way, way harder to do then hiring some agency to slap together a careers site and an Employee Value Proposition (EVP) on those job listings they “programmatically” post to the same job boards as you’re already using, but with a bit of a margin and a lot of opaqueness built in.
That’s why you end up with people who are good at checking boxes but bad at giving a damn.
Hiring Like It’s QA, Not Just TA
There’s a better way to hire. One that looks more like quality assurance than desperate triage.
We overlook job descriptions – maybe because they’re regressive, or about as sexy as comp surveys, or because we conflate them with job ads, which don’t really work all that well when they’re neither advertising or even describing said job.
Sure, there are tools out there that rewrite job descriptions to make them gender neutral, optimized for search or LinkedIn click throughs. There are myriad screening tools that stack rank candidates against JDs based on whichever white-labeled algorithm they happen to be using. There are platforms out there that purport to blend behavioral science with organizational psychology and psychometrics to find that elusive “fit” with company values, mindset or mission.
Those are the mediums for which we’re looking for fit. But as long as the job search uses the job description as its basic currency – as do applicant tracking systems, almost any recruiting-related LLMs, hiring managers and HRBPs – then the problem isn’t actually the medium.
It’s the message.
You want to know what drives someone when no one’s watching; not how well they can BS their way through a “tell me about a time you overcame adversity” question, or what percentage the algorithm tells you they match based off their resume and some bulleted compensation document.
Because here’s the thing: even the best tools or the most effective recruitment advertising can’t guarantee a perfect hire. Nothing does. But they do give you a fighting chance to avoid spending the next 12 months financing someone else’s job search, or at least getting context and nuance instead of stack-ranked results and algorithmically generated “analytics.”
If you can’t be real, you’re going to be in real trouble.
Turnover Isn’t Just an HR Problem
In 2025, 44% of employees say they’re actively looking for a new job, according to Gartner. Not thinking about it. Actively looking. That’s actually a relatively low number, but still, only about 10% less than back in those go-go post-pandemic hiring heydays, where candidates, not companies, were in the driver’s seat.
But 44% in a retracting labor market is not a leading indicator of slowing turnover. That’s a slow-motion tail spin in productivity, job satisfaction, engagement and, ultimately, bottom line results – the perfect conditions for a perfect storm.
That 44% would be way, way higher, if not for the fact so many workers are putting off looking for jobs they want, and putting up with working in jobs they hate, because the reality is, the job market sucks, and a shit job is better than no job (in most cases).
And if you’re still calculating the cost of attrition based on recruiting fees and onboarding hours, you’re missing the real losses:
- The time your team spent training someone who left.
- The energy spent covering for them once they disengaged.
- The ideas that never got shared, because they already mentally checked out.
- The deals that slipped, the deadlines missed, the morale drained.
Turnover isn’t just an HR metric. It’s a business KPI. It impacts revenue. Velocity. Customer satisfaction. Brand perception.
Pretending it’s just the cost of doing business is like pretending your marketing budget is “just some ads.”
Why This Should Scare the Hell Out of You
We’ve entered the quiet quitting to stealth job search to rage applying cycle of the labor economy.
People don’t need to change cities to change jobs.
They don’t need to commute to fake engagement.
They can check out with one click and two tabs open: Teams on one side, Indeed on the other.
And here you are, still doing exit interviews like they’ll give you any answers. By the time you find out someone is leaving, it’s already too late.
We should stop asking why people quit and start asking why they stay. We should also be asking questions like:
- What makes someone actually want to be here?
- What makes this job more than a paycheck?
- What makes this team something you fight for, not flee from?
- What value will the person get in exchange for the value we extract?
The Bottom Line: Retention Is the New Recruitment
It’s time to shift the conversation from filling seats to fueling performance. From resume-matching to value-matching. From “what have you done?” to “why are you here?”
Every time someone walks out the door, you’re not just losing talent — you’re losing time. Energy. Opportunity. You’re lighting your budget on fire, one resignation at a time.
And the scariest part? Most companies won’t realize it until their culture has curdled and their pipeline has dried up.
So here’s the takeaway:
- Stop treating turnover like an isolated event.
- Start treating it like a systemic failure.
- Because churn isn’t just a people problem. It’s a strategy problem.
- And if you’re not fixing the root cause, all you’re doing is burning money.
TL;DR (if you’re still coasting at 70% attention)
Turnover is killing your bottom line. Not because people leave, but because they checked out months ago and you paid them anyway. If you want to stop bleeding talent (and dollars), hire for alignment, not just aptitude.
Retention starts before the offer letter.
And you can’t fix churn until you stop pretending it’s just part of the process.
It’s not. It’s a warning sign.
And it’s time we paid attention.