Companies are good at reducing churn and retaining customers; ironically, they fail abysmally when it comes to the “customers” of their job openings. The results are costly but can be easily fixed.
We’ve all heard the refrain that it’s easier to keep an existing customer than to find a new one. We’ve also heard it said that new employees are costly. In addition to the search effort there’s lost productivity as they get up to speed and even negative productivity early on as co-workers help to train them. It’s much cheaper to keep a good employee than to replace one.
When it comes to customers, companies proactively work to keep them. This includes satisfaction surveys and, in some cases, “save” teams (e.g., the people who try to talk you out of canceling your TV or phone service). Service businesses often have account managers who proactively monitor the client accounts and try to pre-empt any issues. If you wait until your customer is ready to walk, it may be too late. Instead, they do quarterly check-ins and work to ensure their needs are being met by the service. Companies also monitor customer churn; it’s such an important metric that even investors and the board pay attention to it.
As I’ve said many times, all companies sell jobs; their customers are job seekers, sometimes referred to as employees. You can’t take your customers for granted, any of them.
Many companies have HR processes, such as annual reviews, however, they tend not be focused on employee retention but rather other goals. Some do employee surveys, but those are, for obvious reasons, anonymous. And while big companies do measure employee turnover, they are rarely as rigorous or focused on the problem as they are with customer turnover.
A good account manager has been trained to undercover how the client is doing and ensure a long-term relationship with the company. Who is doing that at your company with your employees? Your managers? There’s the old saying, “people don’t quit jobs, they quit managers” which is backed up by a GoodHire survey which found that 82% of workers would potentially quit a job because of a bad manager. So, here’s the question to ask: how much training does the average manager in your company have on how to attract and retain the best “customers” for your job openings? The answer is likely little to none.
If your chief revenue officer came to you and said 6% of our revenue is at risk this year, your company would act. . . . So, when your chief HR officer comes to you and tells you 6% of your revenue is at risk,take a moment to consider just how impactful that is to your business.
I’ve argued that we need to train HR and anyone involved in hiring in sales and marketing techniques (see HR Trains Your Sales & Marketing, but Do Your Sales & Marketing Train HR?). We need to include customer success in that list as well.
Companies should be monitoring employee satisfaction and retention down through the departments to the individual managers. This needs to be proactively monitored and managed so if a manager is struggling to maintain his or her team you can find out before turnover starts to impact that team’s productivity.
If that seems like a hard sell, do the analysis on how much employee turnover costs you (Gallup puts it at one-half to twice the annual salary). Let’s say you’re a company with 100 people and an average salary of $100,000, generating $20M in revenue. Studies have shown the number of people looking to change jobs was nearly 50% in Q2 2024 about 35% globally in Q4 2024. In 2025 HR Digest reported that it was closer to 79% (at least for millennials and Gen Z). Let’s be conservative and say 25% want to leave; given that the average employee tenure is 3.9 years (according to the BLS) that seems reasonable. Let’s also assume the cost is only 50% of their salary of $50,000 per employee at this firm. That’s a total cost of $1.25M, or just over 6% of your revenue!
If your chief revenue officer came to you and said 6% of our revenue is at risk this year, your company would act. If your chief revenue officer came to you and said I’d like to invest in a program that could generate up to 6% in additional revenue, you’d also seriously consider it. So, when your chief HR officer comes to you and tells you 6% of your revenue is at risk (quite likely sending you this very article along with her or his analysis), take a moment to consider just how impactful that is to your business. We don’t think of HR as directly driving revenue (although it clearly can, see What Restaurants Teach Us about Hiring); we do think of them as a cost center. Today HR is telling you how you reduce your costs up to 6% by focusing on employee engagement and retention. Don’t wait because every day you delay is money lost. Whether you want to roll your own program, make use of free ones like The Career Toolkit Development Program, or bring in third-party programs, the time to act is now. Waiting will only cost you more.
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