I had a resignation come in very late in the school year. Yesterday, a candidate accepted my offer of employment. In the intervening weeks, it seemed like an inordinate amount of my time was devoted to filling this vacancy, so I went back and reviewed the process and the generated some interesting (at least to me) data.
Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:
# of emails sent/received about this hire: 121
# of documents reviewed or created (resumes, cover letters, reference lists, online application data, interview summaries, reference call reports, other miscellaneous HR docs): 101
# of hours spent doing interviews, both phone and in person: 22
# of phone calls made/received about this hire, not including phone interviews: 40 (this is a rough estimate an probably conservative)
My overall estimate is that this hire took 60 hours of my time and probably 30 additional hours from my Manager of Information Systems (mostly in interviews) during those precious summer weeks when time to plan and think strategically about the coming year and beyond is more readily available.
Of course, there are many more direct and indirect costs associated with personnel changes, and most of those are yet to come as the new hire goes through orientation and training. And my statistics don’t reflect any costs associated with what I had to set aside in order to get this hire done. But even though I’ve been doing this for 11 years now, I was reminded once again how costly turnover can be and how important it is to hire quality people who are likely to stay with you, and to take all the reasonable steps necessary to keep high performing people on board. Thankfully, I have not had much turnover in full-time positions because I work hard at keeping people challenged and empowered while supporting their professional growth. I am also fortunate in getting great support from my superiors in these efforts, too.
What do you do to keep turnover at a minimum? If you have a lot of turnover, why do you think it happens, and what, as a school IT leader, can you do about it?
Posted on August 14th, 2009 by Curt Lieneck
Filed under: Managing IT
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