Behavioral Science & Employee Turnover Reduction: How One Retailer Went from Triple Digits to Under 20%
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
What One Home Improvement Retailer Learned About Hiring for Fit
A large, multi-location home improvement retailer was losing call center employees faster than they could hire them. Turnover had reached triple digits – meaning they were replacing their entire workforce more than once a year. The cost was staggering: constant recruiting, perpetual onboarding, lost institutional knowledge, and a team that could never reach full performance because it was always starting over.
The root cause wasn't compensation. It wasn't management style. It was fit.
The Wrong Hire Is More Expensive Than No Hire
The wrong people were being placed in the wrong roles – not because hiring managers weren't trying, but because there was no reliable way to identify what "right" actually looked like for each position. Without that clarity, every hire was essentially a guess.
The company came to HR.Coach looking for a better way to hire. What they got was a systematic approach to understanding the behaviors that drive success, and a method for consistently finding them.
The Approach: Behavioral Science Meets Hiring Strategy
HR.Coach introduced the client to MPO (Management by Profile and Objectives), a psychometric assessment tool that identifies individual behavioral tendencies, communication styles, and motivational drivers. But the tool was only the starting point.
The real work was analytical. HR.Coach studied the existing workforce to identify the behavioral patterns that correlated with retention and performance in each role. What did their best call center employees look like, behaviorally? What showed up consistently in the people who stayed, performed, and grew?
Once those profiles were established, HR.Coach redesigned the hiring process – including the development of situational interview strategies that could surface the right behaviors in candidates before an offer was made.
What the Data Revealed
High performers in the call center shared a distinct behavioral profile, and it wasn't the profile the company had been implicitly hiring for. By making that profile explicit and building it into the screening and interview process, the guesswork came out of hiring entirely.
The situational interview strategies proved particularly impactful. Rather than relying on résumés or gut instinct, interviewers now had structured, behavior-based questions designed to reveal how candidates actually operated – not just how they presented.
The Results: Employee Turnover Reduction
Sustainable employee turnover reduction doesn't happen by accident – it happens when the right systems are in place. The numbers speak for themselves:
Turnover dropped from triple digits to under 20% across the call center and other departments
A stable, higher-performing workforce: Less time spent hiring and onboarding meant more time developing the people already there
A repeatable hiring system: The client now had a methodology they could apply consistently, not a one-time fix
The Key Takeaway
Turnover is rarely just a retention problem – it's usually a hiring problem in disguise. When you consistently bring in people who aren't wired for the role, no amount of management or culture work will hold them. HR.Coach's behavioral assessment methodology gives organizations a data-driven foundation for hiring decisions so that fit is built in from day one, not hoped for after the fact.
Read the full case study to see how it all came together.
Is turnover draining your bottom line?
HR.Coach helps founders and business owners solve their toughest people challenges – without the overhead of a full HR department. Let's look at what your best people have in common.
Comments