Retention of Key Staff

Organisations spend billions of dollars each year attracting, recruiting and developing their staff. However, research consistently reports:

• 33% of employees plan to leave within 2 years¹.
• Of those, up to 40% have already left and are looking concentrating on finding their next job¹.
• It can cost up to 150% of the employee’s salary to re-staff a skilled position².
• 42% of CEO’s in Australia and New Zealand believe that Attraction and Retention of employees is the most important factor affecting their business³.

The cost and disruption to business of this staff turnover is immense. However, despite such dramatic statistics, the HR community has only recently begun to look for ways to address this problem. In anticipation of this need, TalentDrain was created in 2003 to provide the tools needed for HR Managers to measure and analyse levels of employee engagement and causes of staff turnover. These tools are built around a core model gained through extensive research, and are aimed at gaining

• A deep understanding of why people leave/stay.
• Signigicant cost savings by helping to reduce staff turnover.
• Objective, reliable and valid data - to support interventions targeted in business critical areas.
• Competitive advantage by keeping good performers for longer.
• Increased retention of "talented" people.

Inspiration behind TalentDrain

The founders of the business had all worked for many years within the occupational psychology and testing arena, most notably at SHL (Saville & Holdsworth). At SHL much of their time was spent helping organisations to perfect the process of assessing applicants suitability for employment. Whilst working with organisations in this way it became apparent how frustrated HR Teams felt about the constant treadmill of recruitment and the lack of focus given to retaining staff who had taken so much time, energy and money to recruit.

Our idea was to help organisations reduce undesirable staff turnover using a unique range of innovative products focussed solely on retention. We firmly believe that action based on accurate diagnostics and enhanced understanding would confer on our clients a substantial competitive advantage in terms of HR capital (and ultimately profitability).

Today

At present the majority of employers spend vast amounts of time and money recruiting new staff but very little on retaining these expensive and often talented people. However, the last few years has seen a significant number of notable organisations begin to focus on reducing attrition and developing strategies to improve the retention of key talent. We are fortunate to count several of these organisations as clients. To view some of our client’s experiences please click here.

Future

Our ultimate objective is to support HR teams in shifting the recruitment focused paradigm resulting in a balance of investment between recruitment and retention. As this shift occurs then organisations start to see the tremendous benefits in reducing unwanted turnover and retaining their talent.

Source - 1. International Hay Group Survey: The Retention Dilemma, 2006 2. Vedior Asia Pacific Employment Trends Survey 2007 3. Hewitts, May 2007