Mentorship Can Combat New-Hire Turnover

Hiring is a painstaking and costly process, so it’s especially troubling to see a promising new-hire leave within the first few months. The most often reason cited is that it “wasn’t a good fit,” but what does that actually mean? More often than not, it means the organization’s onboarding process was weak and that the new employee didn’t feel supported and didn’t have access to the tools and institutional knowledge they needed to succeed. To reduce the amount of failed hires, though, organizations should lean heavily on mentorship. Instead of viewing mentorship as something that happens organically, HR should make mentorship a structured function. This program should be employee-led, and the group of mentors should meet regularly to discuss their purpose, their approaches, and their training content and mechanisms. New-hires should be assigned a mentor on day one, with clearly defined processes for regular meetings and commitments. “We saw that some hires weren’t settling in as well as we’d hoped and feedback showed that sometimes our perception of our team’s engagement with new staff wasn’t the same as the way it was being experienced,” says president and CEO Kevin Peterson of the Long Beach, California-based engineering and design group P2S. “We knew the best people to make new staff feel comfortable were existing personnel, so when one of our staff working groups proposed putting interactive mentorship at the heart of our new hire integration, we told them to run with it.”