Interim Human Resources Director Sarah Allen recently told the Ottawa County Board of Commissioners that while county positions remain highly sought-after, with nearly 6,000 applications submitted for 209 job postings last year, maintaining those employees is challenging.
“Those 209 job postings represent 209 moments when a hiring manager realized that a valuable team member was leaving.”
According to Allen, the new hire turnover rate is almost 21%, those being employees who cleared the application process and accepted county positions but left within 12 months.
“Again, this is a statistic that we started looking at more closely more recently. We were actually a little unpleasantly surprised to see how high it was.”
Allen says multiple variables are likely contributing to the early exodus but explained more research needs to be done to understand why.
“So, this is an area where we are going to be bringing more focus, more attention, and so this is really, like I said, something that was kind of like a little surprising to us and certainly in the area of focus moving forward.”
The report also noted that 80 employees were promoted last year, helping combat turnover among tenured staff by promoting from within.
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