Improving recruitment efforts at a large utility company

Background

A large utility company was planning to expand their operations and add hundreds of new field employees within a year. However, existing field employees were simultaneously leaving the company at a high rate. This added significant costs and hindered the organization’s capacity to scale operations.

The utility company needed to understand why their current employees were leaving and how their turnover rates compared more broadly to industry trends.

They asked Carolina Demography to conduct an analysis of their employee data to help them identify, recruit, and retain field level employees across their operating region, to ultimately help with their long-term growth strategy.

Approach

Looking for potential opportunities

Through analysis of the utility company’s employee databases and conversations with their executives, Carolina Demography developed a profile of employees most likely to stay (and, conversely, those most likely to leave).

We identified employee and job characteristics associated with increased turnover and evaluated how employee characteristics and job characteristics interacted to create unique probabilities of turnover.

We also synthesized external demographic and economic data to identify challenges and opportunities to employee retention efforts with respect to the size and characteristics of the potential employment pool, local wages for similar positions, and competing employment opportunities in the broader economic landscape.

Armed with this report, the utility company was better able to identify both potential opportunity targets for recruitment efforts and patterns concerning employee turnover.