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146 Retaining Top Employees

Involve the Recruiters
A recruiter’s job is difficult in the best of times. Recruiters have
to ensure a constant flow of employees to fit every position the
organization wishes to fill—and often under tremendous time pressure.
It’s not surprising,therefore,that sometimes recruiters will “gild the
lily” to get the hire.They’ll talk up the organization’s strengths,mini-
mize its weaknesses,and (sometimes) completely ignore its failings.
While this is understandable from a recruiting perspective,in terms of
employee retention it becomes a quietly ticking bomb,ready to
explode at some point.
An employee who has been wooed with a less than wholly truthful
picture will have expectations that reality will soon burst,with pre-
dictable retention effects.And it will happen first during the orienta-
tion process.
For this reason it’s very important to keep your recruiters and your
orientation trainers in the real world. Have them swap jobs occasional-
ly—and,at the very least,make sure every recruiter attends at least one
orientation program per quarter. It will help the recruiters stick to the
truth if they have to live with the consequences of their sales pitches.

employee and employer. Cultural integration means more than
just working as an effective team member (which is essentially
a skill that can be taught). Cultural integration represents a vol-
untary alignment of employer’s and employee’s visions for what
each is trying to achieve.
Your orientation program should therefore do the following:
• Set the bar for the employee by explaining the organiza-
tion’s core vision and values.
• Begin to engage the employee in a discussion about his
or her own vision and values, which will be continued in
the performance appraisal process (see Chapter 9).
As we’ve seen so often, at the heart of retention is a sense of
belonging. No one willingly leaves an environment in which he
or she feels at home. Your orientation program is the first (and
therefore most important) opportunity to build such a sense of
belonging. Get it wrong and the relationship may never recover.
Table 8-3 shows how a global design agency defined its