According to a SHRM report, it was reported that roughly 1 in 3 employees will leave their jobs within the first year in the public sector jobs in Australia. With that, turnover over the past 12 months has cost Australian companies an estimated $3.8 billion. Hiring is no overnight task. It can take months of reviewing resumes, and scheduling interviews can take at least 6 months to learn the business after they are hired.
GHD, an Aussie engineering, and architectural services company, was experiencing the same type of turnover and decided to take matters into their own hands. How did they do it? Through implementing digital tools in their hiring process.
Through the power of this tool, GHD was able to:
GHD implemented an AI platform that would use historical hiring data to better track internal patterns. This included employee satisfaction, employee behavior, and to better gauge future employee movement.
Everyone is motivated differently in the workplace. Whether it’s better pay, flexible hours, or a change in the work environment, everyone has a price. By having these metrics in place, GHD was able to better understand why their employees were leaving and could engage those employees better, to keep them.
It’s hard to believe, but humans aren’t perfect. Implementing a digital tool into their hiring/retention process, allowed for making hiring decisions faster and reduce human error. This process includes using collected data to analyze the organization of employees most likely to leave and creating a list of roles they will need to fill should those employees leave.
What’s great about establishing any digital tool into a process, is that it’s meant to be constantly changing and finding new ways to improve it. It’s not supposed to be a one-and-done type of implementation. This tool collects new data every day, to expand their hiring search to more companies, more resumes specific to what they need, and cater to the needs of their new hires.
English writer Theodore Hook once said that "the best way to predict the future is to invent it,” and GHD did just that. They installed a tool that helps them look into the future, without having to take a time machine or go into an alternate universe.
A 2018 report from Global Talent Monitor showed that 40% of employees who left their jobs were due to job dissatisfaction. Likewise, 28% of employees are actively seeking a job and 42% are open to new career paths.
People like feeling valued and crave structure. Having this tool to analyze their strengths and weaknesses, it puts the employees in a position that better fits them into new roles they may not have known about. It’s like taking a personality test to maximize your potential in the organization, without filling out any of the paperwork.
Humans are naturally innovative. We are looking for new ways to solve problems to make our lives easier. Instead of sitting around and accepting their fate, GHD took an innovative approach to employee retention, through the power of a digital tool.
Former Campbell’s Soup CEO Doug Conant was quoted saying, “to win in the marketplace you must first win in the workplace." That starts with your employees. Companies need to show that they are valuing their team by putting them in opportunities to both succeed and expand their skill set. GHD was able to do that by creating a digital platform that allowed employees and the company to:
