I’ve never been afraid to talk about turnover or hiring at SEER, I started 5 years ago writing about the stuff, never been afraid to go open kimono, after all it is the TRUTH! For me, I write about turnover for a few reasons.
- Personally, its a record of my growth, change in perspectives, etc as I grow up. Its funny to see how I felt about turnover at 25 people vs 100 people.
- Not enough people write about this and share their feelings or data publicly, I’ve never been worried about that transparency, b/c the open honest data speaks for itself.
- It helps future hires know our approach. Some people might say its bad PR for SEER, I disagree, I think we owe it to future hires, current team mates, and to ourselves to take a data driven and heart driven look at turnover and the impact of our decisions.
That post from 5 years ago still gets play- and people are still saying it helps them. About 18 months ago I wrote this part where I looked more for the data side, and learned a ton of lessons.
In that post I even talked about my early days when I wasn’t a student of the interview, how I had involuntary turnover at the 60-65% range in the early early days. I trusted everyone in the interview, didn’t dig in, and as a result within weeks I knew I made a mistake. I knew I had to fire quick if I wasn’t going to be good at hiring, that sucked, and I vowed to get better.
Turnover is scary and managers need to realize that, as we have all the whole story locked up in our brains, but the friends of the people you let go don’t.
So here I am 18 months later, more data, let me show you what i am tracking to see if SEER is truly getting better at hiring.
Here is a snapshot of my data set, there are some small discrepancies, but overall I feel very confident about the numbers.
(I’ve deleted the exact #’s so people don’t spend time trying to figure out who is who as that was not my intention at all, but just to be really transparent, you’ll have to trust me on that).
First the categories.
Raw vs Adjusted Quits - If someone left to start a family or take care of a sick family member, I first hope they enjoy the time starting a family, or that their sick family members are doing better. But that, people who move for sig others jobs, to move back home, or to totally leave the industry are different than someone who moves b/c they wanted to work at a competitor, or they were a bad match for SEER, or were recruited away. Some people overlap both categories, like we have had someone move, who we both knew this wasn’t a match, those are the people who I put in the bad match category. I wasn’t sad to see them leave when they moved, which is different than those I was.
I defined a lot of my categories above
Mutual bad match is one where we and that person knew it wasn’t a great match, this happens.
Recruited away is one where someone who we wanted to stay was recruited away and in the exit interview stated such. They were not actively looking.
Fired Culture is for the super haters, sorry to say it this way but spitting on employees while you are angry with them, sexually harassing a colleagues friends, and showing up at people’s houses at 2-3am uninvited wasted repeatedly are just examples of firing for culture.
Fired wrong person / not enough time to train is for the people who I shouldn’t have let us hire in the first place, but I did. They then needed a ton of training to potentially add value greater than their cost, and we had to make the tough call.
Fired my mistake is the introspective view of myself. Its someone I fired who it wasn’t the right thing for us, for us or for our clients, I jumped the gun. I shouldn’t have. I wish this person was here.
Fired performance is someone who has the skills to do a job in SEO/SEM/Marketing/Etc - but we made the mistake of hiring someone competent just at the wrong level at that time (many people have been let go and completely leveled up later in their careers, we knew they would). This also includes promoting someone into a role that was too big for them. We should have taken it slower and give them training and support to grow into it, and given OUR growth @ SEER the amount of leveling up needed was almost insurmountable, much less without official training. it was one of those tough decision, do we train and hope they level up or alleviate the pressure on them, so they can find their next opportunity? Sometimes we train and wait but sometimes we have to part ways.
Question 1 - Are we hiring just to replace who we lost or are we really growing?
Then I wanted to break this down further, some turnover it inevitable, if that comment above was all people who quit for reasons related to not wanting to be at SEER, that would be a bigger problem.
The 50% line would have been break even (I know I could have used a better chart), but in that month I’m able to see it was still pretty bad, as only added net 1 hire.
I recommend you create an acceptable, ideal, and unacceptable range, quarters when you hit unacceptable, you must re-evaluate yourself, you company’s ability to retain, your managers ability to work with your team, after all bad managers are the #1 reason why people leave. This will help you keep yourself honest. You must do exit interviews so you can categorize people better.
Note, as Anne Holland once said to me when we had 100% retention (minus involuntary turnover). If no one ever wants to leave that is a problem, she said.
Question 2: Are you not seeing bad matches that are not willing to quit? Are you letting culture issues stay? Managers fire people sometimes, it sucks for all included, but it is part of the job.
Remember firing people is a time for deep-self reflection, most times, YOU missed something in the interview process or YOU promoted someone into the wrong role, or too early, or YOU didn’t give someone the support they needed to do the job at the level you expected. Yes its always nice to remove a burden on other team members or yourself, but you put your team in that position. People don’t hire themselves, YOU DO. People don’t promote themselves, YOU DO!
People are…people. They will interview well, they will say the right things, so hoping to have 0% baseline is not realistic for a company who wants to push the envelope. Again, a highly innovative company might be hire than one who is OK with a certain group being there w/o innovating.
Some big old companies have set this bar at 10%, like GE. With 305,000 employees worldwide, that is 30k firings per year. Its their way of addressing innovation. I applaud them building something that scales (as it has to). Sticking it to though, forces you to fire fire people who might otherwise be good people, so I’d never do that!! Microsoft got rid of their system.
Remember its good to have a quarter or two where you have 0, but if as you get bigger some firings mean you are not leveling up, as you ask your entire company to pivot or level up, its only inevitable that some people may not.
“What got you here, may not get you there”
Question 3: Why do they quit?
You can make your own categories, but fight your desire to put people in categories that make you feel better about yourself. I do this, I stack the # of quits graph on top of one another!
Additionally you should also create a baseline.
At SEER I see we are on Raw at an average of around 5% and adjusted at around 2%. For adjusted we’ve held down Under 2% for 20 months, I’ll take it. For raw, we are also under 5%, I don’t know how that stacks up to other agencies, but it feels right to me. A spike or dip may happen, the overall trend will tell you if you are getting better or not. We are in a highly competitive industry with a LOT of recruiters calling, so consider that.
Note: One thing to be careful of, is your numbers can be artificially low, so keep an eye on if people are just putting in “their 1 year” and leaving. If you’ve made a lot of hires recently, this could make this seem smaller than it is.
So that leads me to the next chart. You have to discount people who are staying their 1 year, so this is how I am doing it…any ideas on how to do this better?
The thing I care most about is that this is going down over the 5 quarters that matter most, however if we don’t keep growing we could run into a position where people want to advance in their careers and we don’t have roles, which is OK, or that we are not creating stronger Individual contributor tracks causing people who don’t want to go into management to leave.
I bet you feel different about your company at 25 than you do at 100 or 200, or 500? People may opt out of that kind of company as you grow, that is also OK. You may now realize and they may realize that something is different. I tend to believe, and have blogged about the fact that growth is a retention strategy.
For every 1-2 few who opt out and leave b/c they enjoy the smaller company, there are maybe 6-7 who enjoy the opportunities growth opens up to them, allowing them to stay at a company and level up in their careers.
Note, people who are quitting in their first year, is a major red flag, if you see more than a few of these you should start digging in immediately, are you not setting expectations right?
Questions I can not answer yet, but have the data in the right format.
How many people who have been here for 12 months make it to 24 months trended out. How is our retention of year 2 employees, year 3, etc, etc. I feel like getting that info will help us understand roles / opps for people who have done 18+ months at SEER. Any ideas?
Firing in clumps happens, its scary, but in an industry that constantly evolves, and in a company that constantly attracts talent, our clients deserve working with people with tenacity, they might not know everything about every change at Google, but they are constantly learning, improving and getting better.
You can not improve what you do not measure, and I think any exec in a growing company must evaluate this. We need benchmarks, I am just now making these up, but we should have benchmarks to make sure our lack of patience at times does not lead to us making rash decisions.
Also to make your company better exit interviews are key.
I’ve said it several times, but former employees, are some of SEER’s best referral sources, for business and for team mates. I wrote about it here in a post about 5 ex-employees I still have tight bonds with.
People leaving or getting fired is part of life, how we treat each other after is up to us. Whats most awesome is that is what my role and our managers role is, people will come and go, that is inevitable, how we treat each other on the way out, how do we set people up for their next opportunity that is all that TRULY matters!
NOT EVERYTHING IS going to show up in your spreadsheet!! That is why the combination of heart and data is always the way to look at turnover.
Managers remember to check the qualitative parts too, how do people leave? Are people referring you employees or business, how much notice are you Of our last 6 departures we had:
- (1) 3 months notice
- (2) 2 months notice
- (3) 1 month notice
- (1) 3 week notice + consulting
I wanted to look back and see if we are really loving the employees who leave, like I said in that post, well in the last 6 weeks (as you saw) we have had a good amount of departures, some aren’t recorded yet but when I went to check that gut I found all these opportunities to ask, are we trying to do the right thing? Given what I saw below, I think we are getting better every day!
Here is me, introducing one to a client for a job opp in SF!
A little birdie who just left, referred us a new team member:
The adios emails as people leave are often pretty touching!
or this one:
or this one
Heck even some we had to let go the first one, and someone who mutually realized we weren’t the right fit even wrote us days ago!
Heck, sometimes we even refer them business for their new consulting business or keep them on as consultants!
Being a good “boss” is about one of my core beliefs, Kaizen.
You must seek to get better everyday, you need to repeat yourself more, and just when you feel like everyone in your company knows how you feel about something, repeat it again!
You never become a good boss, everyone is different, every situation is new. Use a mix of data and heart, and you can keep working on being a good boss, but its not a destination, its a journey.
Every hire you make that is wrong is YOUR FAULT! Start with that belief, whether they quit or you have to fire them, start with it being your fault. Look for what you could have learned then work backwards.
Sometimes people leave for family, could you have given them 6 month unpaid leave?
People want to move, could you have let them work remote?
Then ask yourself if that the kind of company you want to build?? If the answer is no, there you have it…management.
No solution is ever 100% so have a guiding principle and stick to it, it’ll make tougher decisions easier to make.
Like Ron Garrett commented on this post, Jeff Bezos says…“Be stubborn on the vision and flexible on the details”. I couldn’t agree more.
I look forward to updating the data and updating my journey, this job is tough, keeping 10 people happy is hard, 100 is impossible, so be prepared to be stubborn on your vision.