Direct Hire: The Secret to Better Employee Engagement and Retention

The hiring landscape is constantly changing. Depending on your industry and where you’re located, you may have noticed a recent shift away from temporary work toward direct hiring. When you look at the benefits of this hiring model, it’s easy to see why.

Direct hiring is often a great way to improve employee engagement and retention. While it might seem a bit riskier than hiring temps or temp-to-hire employees, it tends to pay off in the long run.

The Costs of High Turnover and Low Engagement

It’s no surprise that losing employees reduces your company’s productivity. You have fewer team members who can get work done, and those team members are likely to get stressed if their workload rises. Overwhelmed employees are less likely to be able to perform at their best. Your remaining team members have also lost a work friend, which leads to a decrease in morale.

Meanwhile, recruiting the right talent to replace a lost employee can take a lot of time and money. And if your remaining employees are overworked for a while, you might see even more turnover.

Some studies have found that replacing a salaried employee costs an average of six to nine months of their salary. In other words, replacing an employee who made $70,000 costs $35,000 to $56,250 on average. Replacing technical positions and C-suite executives tends to cost even more. Just think about all the expenses associated with turnover: recruitment and onboarding for the new employee, training, lost institutional knowledge, lost productivity, lost engagement from other employees… the list goes on.

The costs of low engagement might be harder to notice since they’re usually not associated with an abrupt event, but they’re definitely there. A Gallup meta-analysis of 456 research studies across 276 organizations found some striking connections between engagement and turnover. It found that business units and the bottom and top quartiles for employee engagement had measurable differences in business outcomes:

• 81% higher absenteeism
• 64% more safety accidents
• 58% higher patient safety incidents
• 41% more quality issues
• 28% more shrinkage (AKA theft)
• 23% less profitability
• 18% less productivity and sales
• 10% less customer loyalty

How Direct Hiring Helps You Build a More Engaged, Loyal Workforce

A 2022 survey of more than 1,200 HR decision-makers and recruiters found that the top three motivators for employees to seek new employment were:

• Needing a higher salary.
• Remote work options.
• Opportunities for career growth.

It follows that if you want to retain employees, you need to offer a competitively high salary, opportunities for growth, and remote work options if possible for the role. All of those things are usually easier to offer to a long-term employee who has been vetted by an experienced staffing agency. 

After all, even a high-paying temp role isn’t the same as having a secure high salary. It might take longer to set up an employee for remote work than a job at an already-set-up desk, and a temp likely can’t take advantage of the best opportunities for career growth that are available to long-term employees at your company.

Direct hiring means more commitment, and that goes both ways. Both you and your employees see a long-term partnership with a good chance of security. 

Even a temp-to-hire model can’t quite offer the same benefit as a direct hire model. Employees are more likely to be swayed away during your trial period if they don’t have a guarantee of the kind of employment they want. With direct hiring, you can offer a guarantee.

Request a Direct Hire Employee From an Experienced Recruiting Team

At LG Resources, we’ve helped over 2,000 business partners find high-caliber candidates for a wide range of roles. We can help you find the best possible direct hire candidate for your team, whether you’re looking for a highly specialized IT professional or someone with great customer service skills.

Clients tell us they deeply appreciate our thorough candidate screening processes. Get in touch with us today to request a top-tier employee.