Key Takeaways: Retention challenges often begin before onboarding, making recruitment — not just engagement programs — the starting point for long-term employee success. Traditional hiring that prioritizes speed and skills over values fit leads to costly turnover, disengagement, and misaligned expectations. Strategic hiring requires behavioral interviewing, radical transparency, and team involvement to ensure deeper alignment of values, expectations, and work styles. Moving from “culture fit” to “values alignment” helps organizations build durable, diverse, and high-performing teams. The cost of employee turnover is no secret. For HR leaders, it’s a constant and mounting pressure. The traditional solution has been a reactive one: