Unchecked early turnover squeezes warehouse operations and forces operators to slog through wasted money, training time, and labor. Warehouse turnover averages around 50% annually. Most turnover happens in the first 90 days. Here are five ways to stop it and strengthen productivity. By adapting your hiring processes and using a role-specific warehouse assessment, you can find and retain the most relevant candidates to build a better team.
The Biggest Factor: Consistent Teambuilding
Consistent teambuilding is your most important safeguard against high early turnover. When employees feel respected during hiring and onboarding, they are far more likely to stay. Millennials and Gen Z are increasingly dominating the workforce and prioritize:
- good pay
- a safe and team-oriented work environment
- positive workplace culture
- chances to boost their professional skills through workshops or upskilling opportunities
When you pick the right candidates using clearer hiring signals and provide what candidates today want, you’ll build a better team.
5 Steps to Strategize Warehouse Hiring and Retention
There are 5 steps to building a better team. Combat the cycle of churn with a cycle of teambuilding: source strong talent, prepare them well, and give them room to grow within your workplace. These steps work together to make your workplace a more efficient, productive environment with a more positive, attractive culture.
Step 1: Enhance job descriptions and recruitment strategies to boost your transparency.
Up to 41% of employees quit early because the job did not meet their expectations, making misalignment of candidate expectations your biggest hurdle. You must tackle this challenge before any of the following steps can fully succeed. It’s critical to transparently showcase exactly what your positions require and what your team needs. Be thorough and specific in your job descriptions or consider making a realistic job preview to highlight the benefits and challenges of the role.
Step 2: Leverage technology for talent acquisition and retention through efficient hiring.
Utilize personalized warehouse job assessments during the hiring process, mobile-friendly hiring applications, and ATS workflows. These tools efficiently identify the applicants that you should invest the most time in and help streamline your HR’s work. By shifting your hiring process to be more mobile-friendly, you’re opening the door to more applicants, especially more Millennial and Gen Z candidates. Automating hiring speeds up review and helps you identify more strong candidates faster.
Step 3: Implement comprehensive onboarding and training programs.
Quality candidates require quality onboarding to maximize retention. Thoroughly explain all job tasks and provide skill demonstrations and on-the-job training to prepare employees effectively. Retention of your rockstar workers is essential because their knowledge and experience helps them train new employees, keeping the team cohesive and productive. When you hire the best candidates and provide robust training, you not only support retention but also prevent your top performers from becoming overwhelmed or burnt out.
Step 4: Promote positive engagement and workplace culture through good management.
Employees who feel secure and relevant are more loyal to their workplaces. Skilled managers who listen to and act on employee concerns are a determining factor in employee retention. As the brokers of workplace culture, managers set the tone for communication, respect, and conflict resolution. A workplace culture that prioritizes safety, ergonomics, employee voices, and effective leadership attracts more applicants. Happy employees will spread the word of their job satisfaction, helping you network for more employees during those busy holiday seasons.
Step 5: Develop advancement opportunities to promote from within.
Giving employees the option to participate in workshops and professional development opportunities gives you a pipeline for talent promotion. Upskilling employees for higher positions lets you retain your best talent and build a stronger team at every rank. Millennial and Gen Z employees want their hard work to translate into promotions. Offering professional development opportunities helps attract candidates who might otherwise overlook warehousing roles, viewing them as a career dead end.. Show candidates that working with you can lead to valuable career skills, such as automation expertise, logistics management, teamwork, and dispute resolution.
Conclusion
Rapid early turnover is a big challenge in warehousing, but the solutions are strategic and start with better hiring signals. Right now, Millennial and Gen Z employees are becoming the main candidate pool. Attracting them through transparent, modernized hiring practices and clear growth paths will help you retain talent and reduce early turnover.
HighMatch gets you started right by providing you with data-driven assessments and roadmaps to excellent job previews, all backed by our Industrial-Organizational psychologists and 15 years worth of testimonials and expertise. Our collaborative assessments let your unique needs determine the questions and focus, empowering you to effectively leverage modernized, automated hiring.
With HighMatch, you onboard a suite of tools that make your hiring process more transparent and efficient. The quicker you identify valuable talent and offer them a job, the more you reduce the likelihood of them accepting an offer elsewhere. We give you the confidence that our tools will help you find good fit talent that will provide a long-lasting basis for building a better warehouse team. If you’re curious to know more about what our tools offer warehouse operators, check out our blog post on how our assessments boost warehouse retention.
