How New York Life reduced employee turnover

As the competition for talent remains fierce, HR pros should consider the elements of a successful recruitment and retention strategy.

Those elements may include a strong value proposition and positive culture, where employees have a voice—at least according to Joanne Rodgers, CHRO at New York Life. The insurance company’s employee turnover rate was 7% in 2023, compared to 10% in 2022, she told HR Brew. (The average turnover rate in US businesses was 17.3% between 2022 and 2023, according to Mercer data.) And thanks to some creative recruiting strategies, New York Life saw a 300% rise in internship applications for this year, Rodgers added.

Rodgers spoke with HR Brew to discuss how New York Life reduced turnover, and other characteristics of a successful recruitment and retention strategy.

All answers have been edited for length and clarity.

What does New York Life’s recruiting and retention strategy look like?

One of the things that we did last year was focus on our employee value proposition. And we’ve really been leaning into bringing that to life, both for our internal employees and in the marketplace for our prospective candidates. As it relates to [our employee value proposition], you can really see that coming to life when we think about how we’ve been recruiting. We spend a lot of time partnering with our marketing department and we’re really leaning into social media. We’re really trying to think creatively on how we could bring what I call New York Life’s secret sauce, which is our culture, and how we can make it tangible to prospective candidates. One of the interesting ways we learn, and we set these strategies, is by listening to our employees.

Can you give us an example?

We had our interns come in last year and work on a special project to give us feedback on what their intern experience was like and any thoughts on how we can become more relevant and attractive in that marketplace. They had such great perspective, and quite honestly, they’re the ones that were targeting. We built out an intern experience video, which was all about our interns and their experience working at New York Life. We then partnered with our social media team to target the launch of that video right around the time when we’d usually see people applying to internships. We were really excited and almost like a little surprised to see a 300% increase in our intern applications. It just shows the value of listening to your target market.

How has New York Life sought to improve recruiting and retention?

The voice of our employees is really critical. When we finally have our candidates working with us, we want to know what their experience was like. We spent a lot of time sitting down with new hires in little focus groups talking about their experience, and what we found was our comp and benefits were getting lost when people were applying to roles. So, based on that feedback from those new hires, we’ve since worked to provide stronger marketing as it relates to our comp and benefits for people that are applying to New York Life.

How can organizations stand out as a must-be place to work?

It’s so centered, again, on really just listening to employees, because they’re the ones that are telling you what they need to stay engaged. One of the things that we did was to build out a listening and experience team within our talent management team. There’s a multitude of ways that we are soliciting feedback from our employees [like employee pulse surveys] to gain insight about what their experiences are. But we really are making listening a core strategy, because that’s what organizations need to do to stay abreast of what is important to their employee base, and quite honestly prospective employees as well.