Walk into almost any company struggling to keep people and you’ll find the same exhausting scene: managers fighting fires all day, then running on what I call the recruiting treadmill—onboarding new hires as fast as the old ones quit. They’re sprinting just to stay in place. The longer it goes, the more the exhaustion shifts from physical to mental, because no one can see an end to it.
I understand the instinct. When people are walking out the door, hiring more of them feels like the obvious answer. But it’s a trap. You’re dropping fresh recruits into the exact environment that created the turnover in the first place. You can’t hire as fast as people can quit—all they have to do is set their badge on your desk and not come back. Recruiting also costs far more than retention; most retention fixes cost almost nothing but time and attitude. So when you try to recruit your way out, you spend mountains of money making the problem worse.
It gets harder over time, too. As turnover continues, your candidate pool evaporates. Everyone in that pool forms an opinion about why people keep leaving you, and it’s never flattering—especially among skilled workers, who talk to one another. So the first move is never “hire more.” It’s “stop the bleeding.”
Here’s the line I hear most from leaders caught on the treadmill: “I have to hire four people to find one good one.” I always ask the same thing back—would you buy four cars hoping one of them runs? Of course not. You’d research before you bought. So if your organization is stuck in “hire four to get one” mode, who owns that problem? Not the candidates. It’s your job to tell candidates clearly who you are as an employer, long before they accept an offer.
And the fix is not more hoops. I see companies whose selection process is failing conclude that they need another layer—a seventh interview, one more personality survey. Layers aren’t the problem; the question is what’s working and what isn’t. Your best candidates always have options and people recruiting them. They won’t sit through a bloated process. They read it as a red flag of a dysfunctional organization, and they walk.
The deeper issue is fit, and most companies treat fit as luck. It isn’t—you can define it. One of the most powerful exercises I run is simple: ask employees to write down their top three to five reasons for working at your company. At one organization, the employees hadn’t compared notes, yet one word showed up in nearly every response—community. We built the employer brand around that single word, and from the top of the company to the bottom, everyone agreed: that’s us. From then on, candidates could look at that brand and know whether they belonged before they ever applied.
There’s one more piece of conventional wisdom I’ll flip. The standard story says you wow people with an amazing culture, that raises engagement, and engaged people eventually become more valuable. My experience runs the opposite direction. When you increase an employee’s value first—through deliberate, proactive skill-building—engagement follows. Ask employees what they actually want and you’ll hear it: How do I earn more? How do I fit in? How does my work move the company forward? They’re asking for a path that’s good for them and good for you. Give them that, and you stop needing to recruit your way out of anything.
Four Ways to Get Off the Recruiting Treadmill
- Stop the bleeding before you staff up. Resist the impulse to out-hire your turnover, and fix the environment people are quitting first. Retention is far cheaper than recruiting, and every hire you drop into a broken environment just feeds the cycle.
- Own the “hire four to get one” problem. If you’re churning through candidates, the issue is your process, not the talent pool. Don’t add another interview layer—audit what’s actually working, cut what isn’t, and make sure candidates know who you are as an employer up front.
- Define “fit” on purpose. Ask your employees for the top three to five reasons they work for you. Find the word or theme that repeats, and build your employer brand around it so the right candidates self-select in and the wrong ones self-select out.
- Raise value before chasing engagement. Don’t wait for culture perks to spark engagement. Invest first in making employees measurably more capable and valuable—engagement and loyalty follow growth, not the other way around.
The monster wants you exhausted, broke, and convinced the answer is one more hire. It isn’t. Stop the bleeding, decide who you are, and give your people a path. Do that, and the treadmill finally stops.
Clark A. Ingram is the Founder and President of People Profits, LLC, which focuses on the three greatest human capital problems affecting organizations: employee turnover, chronically open positions, and skills gap. He consults with a spectrum of companies and has consistently reduced turnover by more than 40 percent in the first year and achieved staffing at more than 90 percent. His new book is Churn: Proven Strategies to Overcome Failing Conventional Talent Management and Achieve Zero Turnover (People Profits, March 26, 2026). Learn more at peopleprofits.com.
