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Why Employee Turnover is the Single Most Revealing HR Metric
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Recruiting & Hiring

Why Employee Turnover is the Single Most Revealing HR Metric

Turnover Metrics Your C-suite Wants to Know

Tracking employee turnover is critical in determining the effectiveness of your people management strategies, but it’s broad metric that only tells a piece of the story. You can unlock the power of your turnover data by gaining a deeper understanding of who’s leaving and when. This and other KPIs will enable you to optimize and determine the effectiveness of your engagement and retention initiatives and drive action to improve performance.

Critical Turnover Metrics to Measure

Overall retention rate

Your overall retention rate can provide excellent insight about the health of your teams, departments, or the company as a whole. The overall retention rate percentage is calculated by dividing the current number of employees by the number of employees at the start of your measurement period (typically annually), multiplied by 100.

Overall turnover rate

If it’s high, your overall turnover rate can be an indicator of problems within the entire organization or with specific departments or locations. The percentage is calculated by dividing the number of employees who left over a specific period of time, by the average total number of employees over the same period, multiplied by 100.

Voluntary turnover rate

People quit all the time. It’s just part of doing business. If you don’t already, you should schedule exit interviews with departing employees. This data can help with future employee engagement and retention by providing answers to questions such as: Why did the employee leave? Is there anything we could have done to prevent the loss? What level of impact will the loss have on the team, department or organization?

Involuntary turnover rate

Much like people quitting all the time, people get fired and laid off, too. It’s an unfortunate fact of life, and a costly one for organizations, but sometimes an employee just isn’t a good fit for the organization. You may run into poor performers, people displaying troubling behavior, or you might be undergoing a reorganization that dictates the loss of some employees. Regardless of the reason, keeping track of exactly why someone was let go is important information to have in the case of potential litigation or unemployment filings.

Retention rate of top talent

The hiring process is expensive, so you want to make sure you keep your super-stars engaged and employed… with you. Calculating the retention rate of your best performers, and finding out what’s keeping them with your company, will help you ensure that your compensation package is competitive, as well as show you where your best managers are.

Turnover costs

If your staff turnover costs are excessive, you’ve got a problem. Like we said, hiring people is expensive and time equals money. When calculating the cost of turnover, you need to remember a few things, including:

  • The amount of time you spend filling vacant positions
  • Overtime that co-workers and management use to make up for the former employee
  • Time spent on recruiting and hiring tasks (job postings, resume screening, interviewing, onboarding)

Use our turnover calculator to see just how much employee turnover is costing your organization.

The Power of Paycor Analytics

The answers to HR’s most pressing business problems—everything from troubleshooting a recruiting pipeline to predicting labor costs, overtime and turnover—are in their company’s HR, payroll, ATS and time systems. Paycor Analytics takes the complexity out of workforce analysis and planning by empowering HR leaders with high-impact, easy-to-consume, real-time data insights at your fingertips. We provide answers to a host of pre-built questions about your workforce and displays trends and predictions, so you can take action by making complex, business-critical decisions every day.

Want to learn more? Click on the button below for a visually engaging experience of how you can make the most of your HR data.