By Lisa McCann

Are your employees engaged or are they leaving after less than a year?

Every organization struggles with employee engagement. But have you ever attributed a disengaged staff with hiring the wrong types of people from the get go? Companies customarily focus on growing employee engagement once a new hire has started. Often, disregarding the opportunity to measure and predict the likelihood of an employee’s engagement level BEFORE a hire is made.

Employee turnover is often overlooked as just another industry norm. We often hear companies say their turnover is on par with industry standards. For some of those industries, such as retail or hospitality, their turnover can be as high as 80%. These types of organizations frequently see employees churning every few months and sometimes as often as every few weeks. Why would you want to match industry norms that are so outlandishly high?

If you could predict the likelihood of someone turning over because of engagement before you even hired them, think of the recruiting and training costs your organization could be saving with every new hire you make.

Stop focusing solely on growing employee engagement.

Address the issue of engagement in a new light, start hiring for engagement traits that can be predicted. Employee engagement is often attributed to a company’s ability to grow engagement within its workforce. Consider adding in assessment measures within your recruitment process that can help predict selecting engaged workers from the get go. By blending both measuring engagement pre hire and growing engagement post hire, you can optimize your hiring results to find better employees.

Start focusing on measuring engagement traits.

Assessments can predict whether candidates will become involved with, committed to and motivated at work. We use a measure called “Eager to Engage” that measures a potential employee’s self-report on how engaged they see themselves and predicts their on the job performance. Our partners at HirePayoff have seen a new growing trend within leadership and the importance they place on assessing engagement levels before a hire is made.

“Operating leadership views the concept of screening candidates for employee engagement as critical in today’s hiring. In fact, operations leaders indicate far more interest in screening candidates in these areas, than for the classic skill and ability competencies that frame typical candidate testing programs. Many operating leaders say it’s more “Will Do” engagement than “Can Do” competency in a candidate that shows itself once onboard.”
- Dr. David Jones, Author of Million Dollar Hire

Lisa McCann is the Corporate Marketing Manager at Vancouver-based recruitment company, Mindfield Group.

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