Employee churn is costly, a toll on resources, and unavoidable for SEO agencies – or is it?
Picture this:
You’ve just spent a good two months prospecting for new hires in the Wild West (that is, LinkedIn and online job boards).
Then, after going through a couple of lackluster interviews, you finally find an SEO professional with the right skills for the job. The next three months are all about onboarding and training.
Six months pass and, suddenly, you have to start all over again. And it isn’t because your choice turned out to be bad for the job, yet something was missing.
Meanwhile, you’ve invested a lot of resources, and you’re left with a hard gap to fix.
SEO agencies (and digital agencies in general) have a significantly higher churn rate when it comes to employees. And an effective hiring process isn’t just about choosing the people who have the right skills for the job.
It’s also about something harder to grasp or measure – alignment.
Culture fit, or the lack thereof, has a real impact on employee turnover.
According to the Society for Human Resource Management, turnover due to poor culture fit can cost you as much as 50-60% of a departing employee’s annual salary.
That means you shouldn’t hire without culture fit as a key focus area.
We spoke with agency leaders from SEO Works and 3WhiteHats to get their insights into how you can test for cultural fit during the hiring process, instill company values in new employees, and ultimately reduce churn for your agency.
How Do You Identify Culture Fit In Candidates?
“Someone can be the best SEO in the world, but if they’re not going to gel with the team, then it all falls apart pretty quickly. It’s incredibly fragile,” says Tom Telford, Managing Director of 3WhiteHats, pointing to the main attributes that define a “culture” – common values, mindsets, visions.
The accelerating digital landscape and remote-first environments have brought new challenges for recruiters, making it more difficult to assess a candidate’s cultural fit. Meanwhile, agencies are experiencing rapid growth amidst the current push for digitization, so this process is crucial for the long-term stability of their business.
While every job posting might receive in excess of 50 candidates, it’s difficult to find people with the right specialized knowledge or skills – and identify from the outset whether an applicant is a good culture fit for your company.
That’s why, as Telford adds, you need a methodology to support your recruitment process.
It Starts with Asking the Right Questions
It isn’t just about making sure someone is passionate, clever, and capable.
“We spend a lot of time making sure that’s the person we want to work and sit next to every day for the next 10 years,” Telford said.
The founders also take the time to make sure their agency is the place that person is going to want to work for the long term, too.
Telford says there are three things he looks for when assessing for cultural fit:
- Money.
- Brains.
- Love.
Knowing how a prospect sees these things in the context of the job can make all the difference between a six-month hire and a lifelong employee.
Even with a great salary, talented people will move on if they aren’t challenged (brains), or if they don’t feel fulfilled in their roles (love). And the business has to be able to support these changes, or as Telford puts it: “It’s just making people feel that they’ve got a big part in the business and influence it. That it’s part x of their life goals.”
So one of the key questions he asks is:
“What do you want your employer to do for you? How would you want us to fit around you and your career?”
This is further echoed by Silicon Valley organizational practices.
For instance, one CEO addresses this directly in his annual employee reviews. He asks employees to tell him one thing that would make their current job their dream job, whether that’s work-from-home days, a raise, or a schedule that starts a little later in the day.
But, remember, it’s never too early to ask questions like these, to help figure out whether the relationship is one that’s going to work within your culture. You need to keep asking these hard questions to maintain a healthy work relationship.
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