In today's talent market, retention is a current challenge for employers everywhere. But those in particular states are struggling more than others to
Around four million Americans quit their jobs in October 2022, according to the World Economic Forum, which is approximately 2.6% of the workforce. That number is worryingly similar to when resignations peaked in November of 2021 at a record 4.5 million. In an effort to shed more light on the situation, personal finance website WalletHub released a comprehensive list of the states suffering the most from employee walkouts.
"While some states certainly have higher resignation rates, the driving factors behind employees resigning in great numbers are pretty consistent," Benjamin Biermeier-Hanson, a professor at Radford University, said in the report. "Burnout, often as a result of an unsustainable workload,
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When building their ranking, the platform used data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to find the rate at which people quit their jobs in both the latest month and the last 12 months. They then used these metrics to rank-order the resignation rates from highest to lowest. These numbers can vary depending on state-specific labor laws or even the more generalized trend of the Great Resignation, which has seen employees everywhere reconsider
Kentucky, Georgia and Montana make up the top three with resignation rates over 3% — 3.60%, 3.40% and 3.30%, respectively — that have remained constant both in the last month and over the course of the last year. Some states, like Alaska, saw sharp peaks in resignation rates that reached 4.24% over the span of 12 months, but have since lowered to 3%, showcasing a return to normalcy.
"A scarcity of workers is a problem, but perhaps employers could use the occasion to rethink their expectations about work — to consider more carefully the needs of employees and how they can meet them," said Lotte Bailyn, a professor at MIT. "This could be a win-win situation."
See which other states made
