High turnover. Low retention. Or high attrition. Three ways to say the same thing: You’re hiring too many people who turn out to be unsuccessful in their roles.
Throughout my career and with Equalture, I’ve seen organisations that hired for a wide variety of different roles in bulk: drivers, security guards, operators, technicians, customer support specialists, retail employees, and many more. Regardless of the role, almost all organisations involved in volume recruitment (hiring a lot of people for a similar role in a short amount of time) face one common problem: they work extremely hard to hire as many people as they can for a particular role, only to see most of these hires leave within the first six months. In other words: Poor retention (or high turnover/attrition).
In this blog post I will explain what causes high attrition rates & how to solve it.
3 characteristics of volume roles making it hard to ensure low attrition rates
Volume hiring, despite not always being perceived as difficult, is a very challenging segment of recruitment due to its interplay of urgency, skill requirements, and reliance on training. The following aspects make volume recruitment challenging:
- Urgency. Volume hiring means bringing in many people for the same role, often in a very short period. Falling behind on hiring for these roles can directly impact your business. For instance, not enough customer support agents lead to long wait times, and too few technicians delay installations. Both scenarios result in unhappy current customers and potential new customers walking away. That’s why recruitment for these roles is pretty urgent in most cases, which can hurt quality.
- Reliance on training. Volume roles usually require training provided by the hiring organisation, rather than specialised prior experience. For example, a Customer Support Agent might undergo six weeks of employer-specific training, while an Operator learns machine operations and safety protocols. If training one person costs €1,500, hiring 250 people yearly results in €375,000 in training costs alone, excluding salaries. Therefore, retaining trained people is important, making the selection process even more critical.
- Competencies over prior experience. Training is essential, competencies are crucial. On the Equalture platform, the top three competencies for volume hiring are learning ability, flexibility & problem-solving. Evaluating competencies accurately is far more difficult than just verifying an educational qualification. It’s vital to accurately assess competencies, not guess. If you lack tools for this, my advice would be to implement a psychometric assessment ASAP, as competencies can’t be accurately gauged through a phone call or interview alone.
Quality vs. quantity: What usually happens (and goes wrong) in volume hiring
When attrition rates spike during training for a role (meaning that a lot of hires drop out quickly after they started), especially in volume hiring, the logical first step would be to examine why these mismatches are occurring in the hiring process – i.e. are we looking for the right competencies, did we assess those correctly, and so on. However, under intense pressure to reach targets, quantity often overshadows quality. If a recruiter needs to make 50 hires this month but has only made 15 so far, improving the process is not the priority any more.
This creates a harmful cycle where neglecting or simply not having the headspace to investigate process improvements forces even higher recruitment numbers to compensate, which will only get worse over time.
What we would have seen if we had made time to examine the process
If we had taken the time to look into the process, we would have noticed that volume hiring is challenging due to its workload. From my experience with large organisations, the common cause of high attrition rates is the inability to properly connect performance data with candidate and employee data. This problem reflects a broader issue: the lack of teamwork between recruitment and HR departments.
Solving the retention issue: Combining Recruitment and HR data
Let’s look at the differences between recruiters and HR managers. Recruiters focus on candidate and hire data (such as competencies), while HR managers are focused on performance data (such as who is (not) performing well). Recruiters have to prioritise hitting hiring targets, while HR managers prioritise retaining hires.
What many fail to grasp is that recruiters and HR managers need each other to succeed. Recruiters can’t succeed if retention is poor because it escalates hiring needs beyond manageability. At the same time, meeting hiring targets becomes impossible when even more hires leave in the first six months.
Conversely, HR managers can’t succeed if recruiters focus only on quotas because it compromises hire quality and, consequently, retention rates.
You need each other’s support, insights, and crucially, each other’s data! And that’s exactly what is missing in most organisations. Sure, we know who stays and who’s leaving, but we have no clue what the patterns between these two groups of employees are.
How to do it right: A great example from a global Telecom organisation
At Equalture, we assist one of the largest Telecom organisations globally with their volume hiring needs, focusing on roles such as Customer Support & Retail/Sales.
Before they introduced Equalture for their candidates, we had existing employees complete our total suite of game-based assessments, capturing cognition & behaviour (45 minutes to complete). By comparing their game scores with their job performance, we identified patterns—specifically, which competencies distinguished top performers from low performers. This led to the development of our initial Competency Profile, outlining competencies to seek in hires and generating fit scores (high/medium/low) for each candidate.
They hired hundreds of people, most of whom were rated as high or medium fit, though some were low fit. The real breakthrough came next.
For many volume roles at this telecom organisation, new hires undergo several weeks of training. After a couple of months, we analysed data from over 250 hires, focusing on their competencies (captured by Equalture) and their job performance (tracked by the company). Our platform, with the help of our Organisational Psychologists, quickly identified that scores in three specific games predicted whether someone would successfully pass the training and perform well in the role, or if they would fail. Essentially, we confidently advised them that by only hiring candidates with a medium or high fit score, they could significantly increase the likelihood of training success. Only 8% of all medium and high fit candidates could still potentially fail the training course. This would mean a decrease in attrition during the training course of 59%!
What you need is a tool for accurate insights into competencies and insights into your employees’ performance. Sometimes, when combining two things, the outcome can be magic.
