It’s no secret that employee turnover costs money, but many employers may not realize just how high that cost can be. According to a study released by the Center for American Progress, the average cost of replacing an employee is approximately one-fifthof that employee’s salary—and some would even call that a conservative estimate. According to Monster.com, once ancillary factors such as lost productivity, retraining, or recruiting fees are taken into account, the true cost of onboarding a new hire could be as high as 150% of the departing employee’s salary. To put that into perspective: even at the low end of that scale, replacing one of your salespeople could cost thousands of dollars.
The costs aren’t merely monetary, either. Employee turnover can have a negative impact on employee morale and engagement. Employees departing can have a ripple effect: work once shared by the departed employee may need to be redistributed to remaining staff, causing them to feel overworked. Worse, if turnover is high, employees may begin to take notice, which can negatively affect their perceptions of their own positions. A strong team benefits from established relationships and individuals with experience, and those are only possible with low employee turnover.
With all of this in mind, the question then becomes: how can a business do their best to retain their staff for the long term?
A big part of the answer lies in effective hiring. Though some staff departures are inevitable, taking steps to ensure that you’re hiring only candidates who are a great fit for both a given position and for your business as a whole will pay off immensely in the long run. This requires more than just run-of-the-mill interviewing. Interviews can be unreliable, giving you only a snapshot of a candidate at their most charming and agreeable, doing their best to be the person you want rather than the person they are. Resumes can be similarly misleading, giving you a sense of a candidate’s experience, but not a deeper idea of how they’ll put that experience to use for you. Adding a sales personality test to your hiring process will allow you to take the guesswork out of interviewing and find staff who are a perfect fit the first time around.
Sales personality tests work by establishing an “ideal” personality for a position and then testing prospective hires against it. If the position for which you’re hiring requires a strong ability to close, for example, the test will evaluate a candidate’s suitability using techniques developed by industrial psychologists. The tests can be administered online and taken wherever a candidate has an internet connection, saving you the cost of conducting an in-person meeting. By circumventing one of the major flaws of face-to-face interviewing — that is, a candidate’s ability to exaggerate their strengths in certain areas — sales personality tests provide a truer sense of a candidate’s suitability for a position.
The benefit for you is clear — more efficient hiring and better staff — but the larger benefits for your business are also worth considering: long-term staff provide a vital support system for any new employees you do bring on, a solid knowledge base to draw from, and a sense of stability that will foster a better working environment for your staff. Do yourself and your staff a favour: hire the right person the first time around.
