“Nobody stays.”
When you’ve hired three or four people and watched every one of them leave, it’s hard not to start thinking this way.
Maybe people just don’t stick around like they used to. Maybe it’s the labor market. Maybe you keep getting bad hires.
All of those are possible.
But there are two questions I’d want answered before deciding what the problem actually is.
What did these employees think the job was going to be when they accepted it? And what did they discover after they started that they didn’t know before?
I think a lot can be hiding between those two questions.
Maybe the schedule was different than they expected. Maybe the physical demands weren’t clear. Maybe “some overtime” meant something very different to them than it did to you. Maybe the job was exactly what you described, but the day-to-day environment wasn’t. Maybe they expected more training or a different manager relationship.
None of that automatically means the company did something wrong. Sometimes an employee simply decides a job isn’t for them. But if people keep leaving, there’s usually a pattern.
Because if I think I’m accepting one job and discover a different one on day one, you had a problem before I showed up.
That’s why I wouldn’t start a turnover conversation with: “Why are people leaving?”
I’d go back further: What did we tell them they were joining? Is that the same job they found when they got here?