DS Cohen & Associates
Retention is not an HR activity. It is a business imperative. Twenty-five years later, we are still learning that lesson the hard way.
I have been attending HR and talent management conferences for over three decades. This year at SHRM26 in Orlando, the conversations felt familiar in a way that should give every business leader pause. The theme that cut through every session, every hallway conversation, every panel was the same one that dominated conferences 25 years ago: how do you identify the employee who is critical to your success but is already considering leaving, or who has mentally exited the building while still sitting at their desk? Here we are: what is old is new again. And we should all be asking ourselves why.
Employers Think They Have the Upper Hand. They Are Wrong.
This is the prevailing belief in many boardrooms and HR departments right now: there are more applicants than vacancies, AI-powered resume screeners are processing hundreds of applications for every posting, and the organization holds the power. It’s a buyer’s market. Why invest heavily in retention when there is a deep pool of talent waiting at the door?
This thinking is dangerously short-sighted, and the data does not support it.
In the United States, employers plan to increase hiring of new college graduates from the Class of 2026 by 5.6 percent, according to NACE’s Job Outlook 2026 Spring Update, a significant reversal after two years of flat demand. In Ontario alone, over one million university and college graduates will be needed to fill labour market needs over the next decade, particularly in STEM and health sciences. The projected growth in non-trades vacancies is substantial and accelerating. The talent pool is not as deep as it appears, and the organizations behaving as though it is, will be the ones paying for that assumption in turnover costs within three years.
And then there is the AI resume screener problem. Yes, AI is processing more resumes than any human recruiter ever could. It is also screening out highly qualified candidates whose experience does not pattern-match to the job description, while screening in candidates who have learned to keyword-stuff their way through the algorithm. Organizations are making hiring decisions based on AI-filtered shortlists and calling it efficiency. What they are actually doing is narrowing their talent pool by criteria that have nothing to do with who will perform, fit, and stay.
Turnover Is Not the Cost of Doing Business.
The retention of your emerging and existing employees is not an HR metric. It is a driver of lasting business success. It’s as important as the marketing budget or salary allocations. It’s just not as tangible. Every time an organization loses someone in the first three years of employment, it is absorbing a cost it rarely calculates accurately. Depending on the role and seniority, replacing an individual in that tenure range costs between 1.5 and 3.5 times their annual salary. In today’s economic reality, that is a strategic risk.
The employees most likely to leave are not always the ones you would predict. They are frequently your highest-potential people, your emerging leaders, the individuals who have options and know it. They leave managers, not companies. They leave when the experience they were promised in the interview does not match the reality they are living. They leave when no one asks them to stay.
The Stay Interview: Your Most Underused Retention Tool.
The answer is not complicated. It requires discipline, not budget. Conduct stay interviews. Have real conversations with your new employees before they decide to leave, not at the exit interview. Ask what is keeping them. Ask what might tempt them away. Ask what they want to learn, where they feel underused, and whether the organization’s values are visible in how they understand decisions get made.
For new hires, this conversation needs to happen before day 15. Most people form a view of whether they will stay or go within their first two weeks of employment. And that conversation must not be conducted by the direct manager. The manager is frequently the reason someone is considering leaving. The recruiter, the HR Business Partner, or the skip-level leader is the right conductor.
Start even earlier. On day one, create the conditions for belonging. A team lunch or informal gathering in the first days, designed to know the new person as a human being rather than a job description, does more for 90-day retention than any onboarding checklist. Employees stay where they feel they belong.
For your established employees, especially those in the first three years of tenure, a formal stay conversation once or twice a year is not optional if retention matters to you. It is the minimum investment in a relationship that is worth, at minimum, 1.5 times annual salary to preserve. Separate the retention conversation from any and all performance discussions.
We Have Known This for 25 Years. The Question Is: Will we act on it?
Twenty-five years ago the conferences all said it. The books screamed it. The research insisted on it. Hire for fit to the company’s values. Develop your managers to conduct meaningful behavioural interviews. Have the conversations early, not after one has made up their mind. Hold the individual’s manager accountable to acting on it. The organizations that actually did those things built sustainable workforces. The organizations that treated retention as an HR activity, something to address in a crisis and forget in a lull, are still plugging the same leaks today. They’re just using Claude to do it.
The talent market is tightening whether employers feel it yet or not. Ontario needs one million skilled workers. The United States numbers are larger still. AI is not currently eliminating jobs; it is creating new hiring risks; not just creating new hiring efficiencies. And somewhere in your organization right now a critical employee is deciding whether to stay or go.
Is anyone asking them any questions? Or are they languishing in their role until a better one comes along outside the organization?
David S. Cohen is the author of “Selecting the Best: Fostering a Workplace Driven by Values for Lasting Success,” amplifies each of the points of this article using a combination of research and anecdotal stories. The appendix contains sample behavioural interview questions. Selecting the Best is available on Amazon and other online book sellers.
