High employee turnover is draining profitability and stability from industries like construction, healthcare, and retail. For PEOs, this challenge presents a unique opportunity: by improving how clients hire and onboard, they can foster loyalty where it matters most—at the very start of the employee journey.
Summary:
Employee turnover stems largely from broken hiring and onboarding systems, not a lack of worker commitment.
Consistent, technology-driven processes help employees feel supported and valued from day one, reducing early churn.
PEOs can transform their client relationships by leading retention efforts and becoming strategic workforce partners rather than administrative vendors.
Turnover is one of the most expensive challenges your clients face. In high-churn industries like construction, healthcare, and retail, recruiting often feels like running on a treadmill: constant effort, little progress.
But just because high churn is common does not mean it is inevitable.
Small to mid-sized businesses are facing a loyalty crisis. Nearly 60 percent of hourly workers leave within their first 90 days. Ghosting, where employees fail to show up or quit without notice, is increasingly common. Employers are feeling the strain from lost productivity, rising costs, and a workforce stuck in transition.
Loyalty is not dead. It has simply been overlooked where it matters most, at the start of the employee journey. For PEOs, this creates a strategic opportunity. By helping clients adopt consistent, technology-enabled hiring practices, you can improve retention and reposition yourselves as workforce partners rather than back-office administrators.
Hiring and onboarding are too often treated as administrative afterthoughts. Yet in today’s labor market, these early stages directly shape employee retention outcomes.
In high-churn industries, the hiring process is usually rushed and reactive. Candidates may receive limited communication, unclear job expectations, or no indication of what comes next. Once hired, onboarding tends to be inconsistent, incomplete, or missing entirely. This lack of structure sends the wrong message: the employee is replaceable.
First impressions matter. When employees encounter disorganization on day one, they expect more of the same and often leave before they ever settle in. Poor early experiences are not just operational gaps. They are business risks that reduce morale, increase costs, and make growth unsustainable.
There is a popular belief that frontline and hourly workers do not value long-term employment. That they are less loyal by nature or unwilling to commit.
In reality, research shows that employees in every sector want to feel prepared, supported, and respected. They seek clarity, consistency, and a sense of opportunity. When they experience chaos or indifference during the hiring and onboarding process, they disengage.
PEOs have the tools and insight to change this. Loyalty does not develop at the 90-day mark. It begins before the employee’s first shift. That is why it is essential to rethink how your clients approach hiring and onboarding.
Most small and mid-sized businesses lack the bandwidth or expertise to build these systems alone. That is where PEOs add value, by offering scalable, repeatable processes that improve workforce outcomes.
By helping clients adopt hiring technology that simplifies and standardizes early-stage workforce management, you elevate your role from transactional to transformational. We move from solving administrative problems to delivering strategic workforce solutions.
This is not about complex software. Practical, right-sized tools that automate critical steps and provide consistency are enough to make a measurable impact on retention and performance.
Many employers are not struggling with workforce loyalty because of bad culture or low pay. They are struggling because the start of the employee journey is broken.
Hiring and onboarding chaos drives good people away before they ever have a chance to succeed. Fixing this is not about adding more headcount. It is about improving the systems that shape early employee experiences.
Loyalty does not emerge on its own. It results from structure, follow-through, and thoughtful engagement delivered at scale.
PEOs are in the perfect position to lead this change. By improving how clients hire and onboard, we can help them become employers worth staying for.
HiringThing is a recruiting and HR workflow platform that creates seamless HR experiences. Our white label solutions and open API enable HR technology and service providers to offer talent software to their clients. Approachable and adaptable, the HiringThing HR platform empowers anyone, anywhere to strengthen their team.