Most employees don’t quit suddenly — they decide quietly in the first few weeks.
In this episode of Built Different, Eric Tilghman breaks down why onboarding is where retention is truly decided. From the interview process to week one in the field, Eric explains how culture, consistency, and leadership alignment determine whether someone buys into your company or starts planning their exit.
You’ll hear how Tilghman Builders approaches onboarding, success ladders, and promoting from within — not to create compliance, but real buy-in. Because retention isn’t an HR problem. It’s a leadership decision.
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TEASER: We can't fake on-boarding. It has to be real, it has to be consistent. You know, like, if they hear me talking all about company culture, but then during the on-boarding process, or during their first week, they see no signs of that, that's a problem.
So that is when you have an employee that quits after, maybe it's 30 days, maybe it's after two years, but it's all because of week one.
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Hi, everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Built Different Podcast, brought to you by Tilghman Builders. My name is Eric Tilghman, the CEO of Tilghman Builders. On this podcast episode, we're going to be talking about mainly onboarding, so, and retention.
So, people leave companies all the time, and we think that it's for certain reasons. We think that maybe the pay isn't enough, or they just, whatever it may be, right? But oftentimes, the reason people leave companies is actually a result of day one, or more importantly, of the interview process, and in my opinion, more importantly, the onboarding process.
We are not perfect at our onboarding process, but we have systematized it, and we do know some things that are very, very important. First and foremost, I mean, the interview process is, it's important to talk about who you are, you know. We talk a lot about company culture, and we talk about, you know, just the things that are important to us.
We ask questions about how they might make decisions, or you know, things like that. And so company culture is kind of brought up immediately. I want to weed out anybody that may not be a good fit.
If you're the wrong type of person for our company, and more importantly, our company's culture, if I don't detect that in the interview process, or JP, or Phil, or whoever it may be, interviewing that person, the person will identify that in themselves. And they kind of almost want to save themselves the embarrassment of joining a team that is too dissimilar from themselves, right? They're going to find me out eventually. .....