Are You Hiring for a Calling or a Job? It Impacts Retention

April 11, 2024
Richard Finnegan
Articles

The HR profession has rock stars who work in the shadows…and I’m going to introduce you to one. These are industrial psychologists, the academics whose research fuels the smartest thinking to help those who guide HR functions for their companies to make good decisions. The deeper one digs into the work of these academics, the more one finds fresh, helpful guidance that puts traditional thinking into new light.

And often times their great work hides behind a rock, unknown to even the vendors who make their living helping us solve our people management problems.

Hiring and Retaining is Not as Easy as Commercials Would Lead Us to Believe

To get our minds spinning, think about the television and radio commercials for various online job posting services. One that comes to mind has a manager sitting in a restaurant before opening time, and after the narrator tells of the online posting service a smiling, attractive woman strolls through the door, shakes the manager’s hand, and sits down for an interview. The implication is that by using the online posting service the manager has scored a perfect candidate.

The point is that commercials such as these make hiring look way too easy…and the reason is because online services match candidates to keywords, telling you whether the candidate has done the same or similar jobs in the past. But what online job posting does not tell you is how well each candidate did the job, how engaged they were, how well they worked with others…or of course how long they will stay. So we usually rely on person-to-person interviews for that. I recall once reading that interviewers without proven interviewing skills are as effective at choosing employees as a coin flip.

Engagement is Often Based on How Individuals See Their Work

So let us suppose we are seeking candidates for a professional job, say a nurse or salesperson or manager. Dr. Amy Wrzesniewski , a professor at Yale School of Management, has studied how individuals identify with their work and has established three different work contexts which are job, career, and calling. Here are shortened definitions of Dr. Wrzesniewski’s work:

JOB: A job provides you with pay, benefits and perhaps some social perks. It’s primarily about earning that paycheck. People in this category are typically more invested in their lives outside of the office.

CAREER: A job is something you do for others, while a career is what you do for yourself. Career professionals are also working for the paycheck, but they are more driven to seek out opportunities for advancement in the workplace.
CALLING: Those who experience their work as a calling are most likely to feel a deep alignment between their vocation and who they are as a person. They feel a personal and emotional connection to their work.^[i]

You probably know people whose relationship to their jobs fits each category. Doesn’t the thought of a new hire who sees work as a calling sound nearly the same as someone who is highly engaged in her work? And has her attention focused on improving her performance and learning more rather than looking for other jobs online?

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Further Reading: Best Employee Engagement Gauge: 1-Day Survey or 1-on-1 Conversation?

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Those Who View Work as a Calling are More Likely to be Self-Engaged

In my book titled Raise You Team’s Employee Engagement Score[ii], I suggest there are three engagement competencies, that if you can measure three items you can forecast a candidate’s likelihood of engaging herself in your job. Those three competencies are:

Gives Top Effort because concepts like dedication and loyalty must be expressed through each employee’s behaviors, every day.

Achieves Results because above all else our engaged employees must cross the boundary from effort to success; they must habitually get the right things done.

Resiliency because self-engaged employees must overcome obstacles while continuing to stoke their internal self-engagement engines.

I go on in the book to detail suggested interview questions for each of the three competencies, along with suggested probes to push the candidate to provide deeper and more revealing answers.

Self-Engaged Employees can be Two-Edged Sword for Retention

But while hiring employees who self-engage is terrific, we also know any manager can puncture their employees’ engagement like bursting a balloon. In fact, my guess is engaged employees act faster than other employees on manager mistreatments because they bring so much passion, so high degrees of excellence expectations to their work that their frustrations skyrockets when stifled by a poor boss. I’ve indicated here before the myth-smashing evidence provided by Gallup, that engagement is driven by first-line supervisors’ relationships with each of their employees rather than by any employee program.

It is Stay Interviews, then, that provide the structured, post-hire intervention to ensure newly-hired and engaged employees are communicating upward what they both want and need to maintain their high work commitments. And those same Stay Interviews provide each manager with a structure to ask, probe, listen, take notes, and immediately or soon after construct another building block of trust by providing solutions to obstacles those highly-engaged new hires see in their paths.

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Futher Reading: Preventing Surprise Resignations With Stay Interviews

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Stay Interviews Build Trust to Retain the Self-Engaged

If It seems like Stay Interviews are a required bridge for engaging and retaining employees, well…you see right through me because I believe they are. Initially the concept seemed too simple, that supervisors should invite individual employees to meet in order to discuss five questions about their satisfaction with work. “Isn’t that why we do surveys?” some asked. Or “How do we know employees will tell the truth?” But conducting Stay Interviews has proven to open very wide doors toward building TRUST which is the express lane toward engaging and retaining each of your employees.