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By Mel Kleiman
If you’re having a difficult time attracting enough quality front-line workers and retaining them long enough to realize a return on their investment, you’re hardly alone. Hourly employee turnover rates historically run from 70–120 percent per year in most industries.
As an employer or hiring manager, you may wrongly assume that there is nothing you can do to control or mitigate the enormous drain on profitability caused by turnover. This chapter will provide suggestions on how you can reduce turnover by recruiting and hiring the best hourly workers.
The best employees don’t just walk in and ask for a job — usually because they’re already working. If you want the best, you have to know what you need, where to look, and how to recruit them.
Attracting and retaining the best hourly workers requires understanding the demographics of today’s hourly workforce. If you are just targeting young people, you are overlooking responsible adults who are seeking hourly work. If you are just recruiting for full-time positions, you are overlooking a large population of workers who prefer part-time employment. If the statistics below surprise you, you don’t know today’s hourly labor pool.
The following suggestions comprise a step-by-step system for hiring the best employees to revitalize any hourly employee recruiting program, reduce turnover, and improve profits.
First ask yourself if there are alternatives to hiring. In most cases, employers start recruiting because a position is vacant or growth dictates an increase in the number of positions. Perhaps you can restructure the job or even eliminate it. Other possible alternatives:
Recruiting hourly employees is easier and more efficient when you have a job description that specifies the key attributes the ideal jobholder will possess.
Looking for an employee without knowing exactly what you need is like going grocery shopping without a list: You spend more time and money than you should, you don’t get everything that you need (while simultaneously splurging on things that you don’t really need), and you usually have to go back and do it again.
The job description helps you avoid getting more or less than you need and wasting time and money on unqualified applicants. It is also a useful legal document. A written job description that lists the mental and physical capacities required, and why the job exists, is the best defense against claims of discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
If the job description is a grocery list, a job analysis is the recipe. Designed for real (rather than governmental) use, this document directly reflects the job today and its potential for the future.
An effective job analysis starts with the reasons the job exists (why it’s essential to the company) and the objectives of the job. It then lists the responsibilities of the job holder. When writing the job analysis, don’t assume that the job must be done exactly as it has been done in the past. Get input and opinions from employees, supervisors, customers, and others who interface with the position.
To brainstorm this list, consider:
Make the analysis specific to the site and to the shift being worked, because different conditions require different qualities and abilities. Distill the essential job functions and critical requirements and the detailed profile of the qualities and abilities best suited for the job, using the CAPS approach described below.
Once created, revisit the job analysis every time you hire for that position. Review it to ensure it’s current and reflects any technological, environmental, structural, or managerial changes that have occurred or are anticipated.
To write the job analysis, think of a job’s requirements as falling into four primary categories, easily remembered as CAPS:
For each category, list and then rank, in order of importance, the factors that would make a job holder exceptional. Include examples and situations to illustrate when each quality is required.
Capacities: If an applicant lacks the required capacities, nothing else matters. That person simply cannot do this particular job. Therefore, when creating a job analysis, the first and most important thing to identify is the capacity requirements. There are two types of job-related capacities to consider:
Employee attitudes affect every company’s success. Good employees make customers happy and grow sales. On the flip side of the coin are poor employees who upset customers, lose sales, and compel shoppers to go elsewhere. By defining the attitudes that are most important for a jobholder’s success, you can gear your hiring efforts toward those desir- able qualities. For example, an above-average hourly worker in a service industry displays these winning attributes:
Personality: It’s difficult to find an applicant with the right personality when hiring, because there are actually four personality dimensions involved. In addition to your new hire’s personality, be aware of the job’s personality, your personality, and your company’s personality. Few, if any, applicant personalities will align perfectly with all three, but the closer the match, the better the fit.
Most important is how closely the applicant’s personality matches the job. For instance, some qualities you might be looking for include attention to detail, working with people, and assertiveness, or competitiveness.
People tend to do well at things that they enjoy doing and that come naturally to them. Successful people do things well even if they don’t really like to do them because they’re able to manage their own personalities.
When looking at personality, you will need to determine if you believe the person will manage his or her own personality to get the job done.
Notice the key is managing — not changing — one’s personality to get the job done. Social scientists tell us that about 60% of one’s personality is genetic and that most personality traits are embedded by age nine. In other words, personality is part of our basic wiring; it can’t be taught and it doesn’t change much over time.
Skills: The ability to read is a skill; the ability to learn to read is a capacity. Employers who always put skills before capacities when hiring make a big mistake. A person with the right capacities and attitudes can be trained in the needed skills. The desired capacities and attitudes, however, cannot be taught. Remember, the preferred rule is to hire for attitude and train for skills. Of course, some jobs require a certain skill level. And frequently there’s no time to train new employees because you must hire immediately. In these cases, your top two priorities become capacities and skills.
Skills are the easiest job requirements to identify and verify. If you need someone to drive a forklift, operate a cash register, or do data entry, you can easily test for these abilities. If you absolutely require certain skills, or if you do not plan to train new hires, then testing for required skills should take place very early in the hiring process — and always before interviews — so you don’t spend any unnecessary time with unskilled applicants.
Excerpted from Creating the Workforce — and Results — You Seek: A Thought Leadership Anthology on Workforce Management from the Workforce Institute at Kronos. Copyright 2010 by Kronos Incorporated. Reprinted with permission from The Workforce Institute at Kronos Incorporated.