Why retention starts before the offer letter.

Hiring is the easy bit. Of the people Marshall Harmony places, 82% are still in role at twelve months, and that figure was not earned by a good first day. It was earned by everything that happened before it.

Most businesses treat retention as something you work on once somebody has started. An induction, a probation review, maybe a survey at the end of year one. By then, half the battle is already decided.

Retention starts when you are onboarding at the very beginning, before they have even started. It is getting them to understand how committed you are, how much you are looking forward to them joining you, sending them little things, getting them logged on to systems. That journey begins straight away.

The interview is a preview

Candidates read your process as a preview of the next five years. Meeting the receptionist. Meeting other team members and understanding what their careers have looked like. Engaging properly with the hiring managers. All of it gives them a vibe of what it is going to feel like to work there. If the process feels chaotic, slow or cold, they will assume the job is too.

The offer is the only negotiation you get

The offer stage is the only chance a candidate will ever get to negotiate, so it matters that they use it wisely, and that employers respect it. It is far harder to negotiate a pay rise once you are in the building than it is right at the beginning.

Getting a new job sits alongside buying a house, buying a car, even getting married. So treat the offer that way. Do not assume an instant yes. Give people room to think, be excited for them, and remind them why they were looking in the first place: what was broken where they are, and what is not going to be fixed.

The quiet weeks between yes and day one

This is where placements quietly die. Too many businesses make the offer and then expect the person simply to appear on the start date, without checking in on what has been happening in between. If it goes quiet, that candidate could be having conversations you do not even know about.

Keep the momentum going. We sit on people to make sure they are going to start. We keep in contact, wish them luck, prep them, and we do the same with the client. It is not complicated. It is just rarely done.

The first 90 days is when the decision is made

The first 90 days is when somebody realises what it is actually like to work for you, and it is when they decide whether they are staying or whether they are going to start looking at something else. If you do not engage with them and show them they are going to be part of something special, it all goes wrong.

Proper onboarding is not sitting someone in a corner with paperwork. It is introducing them to everybody in the business, walking them round, the simple things like where the kitchen is, and then working closely with them and asking whether they are happy with how things are going.

The conversation most businesses have too late

Catch-up conversations. One to ones. How are you getting on? Checking in on people, checking their mental health, checking everything is good. The businesses that skip this are the ones who wonder why people leave, and the answer is usually that nobody was checking.

Why we stay in touch after a placement

Once somebody we have placed starts, we pop in with a goodie bag, which is a nice little touch, and we keep in contact to understand what is going right and what could be going wrong. It means that if there is anything they are concerned about, they have another party they can go to.

We do not just leave people. A lot of the people we place go on to become clients, which is exactly how we know they have stayed.

The cheap thing almost nobody does

Employee surveys. Ask your people how it is going, listen to what comes back, and act on it. It costs almost nothing, and almost nobody does it.

Hiring is only half the job. If you want the person you chose in January still doing brilliant work the following January, the work starts before the offer letter, not after it.

If your hires keep leaving at month six, the problem is probably not the people. It is the problem underneath the hire that nobody has solved. That is the work Marshall Harmony does.