Want to retain your talent?

Many studies have shown that how you make decisions has a dramatic impact on not only how effective the outcome is, but also whether your team wants to stay working with you.

You may be frustrated by how difficult it is to find good candidates for your open positions now, but this is going to get worse in the coming years.

Picture of a team engaged in a learning exercise

The percentage of employees looking for a new job:


This Gallop survey also found that 47% thought that now was a good time to find a quality job.

There are currently around 105,000 unfilled positions in Michigan.

The Michigan Department of Technology, Management and Budgets estimates there will be 800,000 unfilled jobs in Michigan by 2024

How is this happening? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' JOLTS report, since January 2015 nationally there have been more jobs created than candidates being hired.

What does the future look like?

It currently costs around $15,000 to fill the average vacancy1, based on the average wage in Michigan ($22.5p/h) and average time (43 days) to fill a position. 


Over the next few years, the length of time needed to fill vacancies will increase. If the wait time doubled and you had to increase wages to $25 p/h to get noticed, then costs jump to around $21,000.


A $6,000 increase is painful, but imagine how stressful it would be waiting 86 days to fill a position. Who will be willing to pick up the workload for 3 months? A couple of other points for consideration:

  1. What will it cost you in additional overtime?
  2. Will your customers suffer?
  3. Will the other employees stay?

A July 2018 survey2  showed that 67% of employees sometimes, very often or always feel burnt out at work. 


In 2024, if there are 8 times more vacancies...

If the Michigan Department of Technology, Management and Budgets' projections of 8 times more vacancies are correct, what if it takes 8 times longer to fill vacancies?


The real question is what are you going to do if you can never fill a vacancy?

Real results

A client felt embarrassed about having the same positions open on the website month after month. They felt like they had to remove the postings and then re-add them at a later date, to "keep them fresh".

A review of their hiring and on-boarding process revealed issues in three key areas:

  1. Design of the job descriptions was functional and did not inspire candidates to apply
  2. Selection processes were focused the organization's needs, not what the candidate was looking for
  3. Selection processes did not offer the candidate a realistic view of what the job was like, leading to a high drop out rate

A redesign of the process to focus on organizational purpose focused on these areas:

  1. What would inspire the candidates to apply?
  2. Hiring managers had to keep the organization's purpose in mind and take time to understand if the candidate was interested in that vision.
  3. Requiring candidates to shadow staff so they knew what the upsides and more importantly, the downsides of the job were.

The result was a 20% increase in retention of new hires.

Its more than just a job

You will be disappointed if you assume that paying your employees a fair wage is enough to keep them working for you. There are a lot of other employers out there who are prepared to offer more.

We can help you transform your business into a purpose driven organization where employees feel good at the end of the day about what they have achieved. That keeps them coming back.

Don't wait for your employees to leave, call us at (248) 781-0150 to start a conversation and learn how to keep your business secure.

1 (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey)

2 Gallop Research  Employee Burnout, Part 1: The 5 Main Causes By Ben Wigert and Sangeeta Agrawal (July 2018)

3 Our calculator is a little more conservative as it takes into account the wages you save by not employing someone. However, it does not factor in the overtime you may have to spend. Click here to use it