Over time, organizations invest substantially in their employees. It is a major challenge for organizations to retain skilled employees once they have been hired and trained. In addition to reasons like lack of growth opportunities, low pay packages and inability to adapt to the organization, high turnover has also been identified as a cause for higher attrition rate. The ease with which employees can now change jobs, move and change functions and industries, has reduced employees' loyalty towards organizations. The corresponding costs to the firm with regard to employees' quitting the organization and the subsequent hiring or replacement of employees can be quite significant in terms of personal, work-unit, and organizational readjustments (Thomas and Terence, 1994). According to studies by both the US Department of Labor and Merck (Ken Jacobs, 2007), investing in staff is far less expensive than replacing them, which is estimated to cost about one-and-a-half years of a departing staffer's annual salary. An organization with high attrition rate not only has to bear high costs for hiring new employees, but also faces interruptions in customer service, loss to company's knowledge-base, and reduced goodwill. Organizations therefore have to make retention a top priority to reap the best results in terms of attracting the right people, achieving higher productivity, and gaining competitive advantage, amongst others.
Being in a fluid environment and in an era of war for talent, retention has gained so much importance. A special award, `Hays Human Resources Award for Innovation in Recruitment and Retention' has been instituted to honor the organization adopting the best practices and strategies, as a part of The Personnel Today Awards 2008, scheduled to be held on November 27, 2008, at Grosvenor House, London. The award recognizes effective approaches to selection, recruitment and retention of employees at all levels from school leavers and graduates to senior positions.
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