Muse CEO: 4 ways to make sure your good hires stick around

The Muse CEO shares 4 ways to make sure your good hires stick around

July 19, 2022 10:52 AM

Kathryn Minshew knows a thing or two about recruiting talent.

As co-founder and CEO of the Muse, a career platform that helps millions of job seekers find their personal best companies and careers, Minshew has spent more than a decade observing what makes a good hire — and what makes a good hire stick around.

For plenty of employers, hiring has never been more of a head-scratcher than it is right now. The Great Resignation continues to stretch throughout 2022, and a report from PwC suggests that 20% of the workforce will exit a job before the year’s end. It all poses one very big, complicated question: How can we win the war for talent?

Kathryn Minshew, CEO, The Muse

Courtesy of Kathryn Minshew

Minshew will answer that query (and many more) during her keynote presentation at EBN’s annual conference, Workplace Strategies Agenda, taking place July 27-29 in Austin, Texas. Below, she shares a sneak-peak of her discussion, and outlines four ways employers must rethink their approach to talent recruiting and hiring to stay ahead of the competition. (Haven’t registered for our conference yet? There’s still time!) Here’s a preview of her data-driven advice.

Prioritize values-based hiring

“My entire philosophy is that job search is a lot like dating,” Minshew says. “There are good matches for almost every candidate and almost every company, but not everyone is a match for each other — and that’s OK.”

With that in mind, Minshew and her team at the Muse are focusing on what she calls values-based hiring, and empowering both job seekers and employers to make smarter decisions about who they’re courting. That means allowing workers to search for available jobs based on the benefits they most desire, or what type of leadership team they’re looking for.

“It gives people the ability to say, ‘I’d like a front-end engineering role with paternity leave and adoption assistance benefits,” Minshew says. “Helping individuals find a company and career path that meets their core priorities also helps businesses hire for the long haul.”

Read more:

5 hiring resources to help tap into overlooked talent

Rethink how to measure hiring success

Minshew is all too familiar with how most companies measure “successful” hiring, and it’s all wrong.

“We always talk about this idea of ‘making a good hire,’ but currently most companies are just measuring: Did we make a hire,” she says. “And those are very different things.”

Most companies, Minshew explains, still use cost-of-hire and time-to-hire as the metrics through which they measure recruiting success. But she predicts that in the years ahead, the most progressive companies will find new ways to introduce quality-of-hire metrics to their reporting.

“There are a lot of ways to measure quality, from tracking retention of those hires to asking the hiring manager if they would even hire that person again,” Minshew says. “A client of ours in financial services recently analyzed and established that, for their salaried roles, a hire has to stay for nine months to be net positive; otherwise they lose money. So for an organization like that, with a lot of data, the next logical step is: Which of our recruiters is better at bringing people who stay for at least nine months?”

Transparency leads to longevity

Earlier this year, the Muse conducted a survey on what they call “shift shock” — the feeling new hires often have when the job they just started isn’t exactly as it was advertised to be. Seventy-two percent of workers reported experiencing this shift shock at some point in their career, and 20% of respondents said they’d give a job that had been misrepresented just 30 days before quitting. Forty-one percent said they’d give it two-six months, and 80% said it’s acceptable to leave a job in under six months.

Read more:

To win the war for talent, employers need to fix what's driving employees away

“This is a big sea change, because when I started working 14 years ago, it was very clearly communicated that if you left a new job in under two years, it was a big red flag on your resume,” Minshew says. “But now we’re seeing that, collectively, almost everyone has let go of that. Almost any candidate can have one very short-term stint and simply explain it as, it wasn’t a values fit.”

Make benefits and culture a conversation, not a transaction

As the talent market continues to challenge employers, employees have become increasingly vocal about the benefits and perks they want. But not every employer can deliver what every individual wants — and that’s OK, Minshew says.

“You have to understand what you can offer,” she says. “Talk to your current employees about what you do really well, what you don’t do really well, and decide that you’re either going to fix it or not, and then communicate why you’re making that decision. Find out what matters most to your employees, and act on that. You have to live up to the promises you make to the market and your employees, and make sure they have the information to understand why you're making decisions.”