The Rising Turnover Trend

We’ve been talking for a few months about the potential for widespread employee turnover this year as the economy improves. It looks like that time may be upon us.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that for the first time in 15 months the number of voluntary resignations has surpassed the number of people laid off or dismissed.  The chart below, from the Wall Street Journal’s coverage of the story, demonstrates the significance of this trend in the past year.

We explored some of the studies on the topic in this post earlier in the year.  The Wall Street Journal says this is being driven by people eager to grow.  The natural turnover of talented people looking to advance their careers hasn’t occurred for the past couple years. This has caused a backlog of people waiting for economic conditions to improve so they can make a move to advance their their careers.

A Dice.com study found that many top IT people migrated from small companies to larger, and presumably safer, organizations when the economy became unstable. Now that growth has returned, many of the best will be looking for those entrepreneurial environments again.

The staffing leaders interviewed by the WSJ see this as the beginning of a new era in recruiting:

“We’re preparing for a massive reshuffling of talent at all job levels in all industries”    – Adecco Vice President Rich Thompson

“The idea of moving when the world was already in uncertainty was quite scary, but those hang-ups are disappearing, and employees are becoming more receptive to recruiter calls and beginning to tap their networks again for signs of opportunities”   – Peter Cappelli, director of the Center for Human Resources at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.

“Employees feel disengaged with their jobs, which is going to lead to a lot of churn as we come out of the recession,”  – Brett Good, district president for Robert Half International

Are you seeing signs of this in your organization?  If so, let us know.  There is a lot we can do to build a pipeline of people with the specialty skills you need so you can respond quickly when an unexpected opening occurs.