Forty Résumés, One Address

An employer told me last week that they'd received forty résumés for one opening. All forty listed the same address.

Somebody was playing the numbers game. Fire off enough applications and something eventually lands. That employer's pipeline wasn't full of candidates — it was full of noise. And somebody on their team had to sit down and work through all forty before they even understood what they were looking at.

I've spent twenty years placing people in retail, restaurants and hospitality. I've watched this get worse every year. And I'll say something you don't often hear from someone who runs an AI company:

AI has made hiring worse before it's made it better.

The tool we're using is a hundred years old

Here's the part nobody wants to say out loud. We are still judging human beings off a résumé — a format that has been the standard for close to a hundred years.

That was already a weak signal. Now it's a broken one.

Easy Apply means a candidate can click two buttons and apply to a hundred jobs. Half the time they don't know where they've applied. Candidate pools are saturated. Bots are filling them. And anyone can now produce a résumé that perfectly matches a job description, because the tools to do it are free and take thirty seconds.

So the employer with forty identical addresses isn't an outlier. That's just what the top of the funnel looks like now.

Meanwhile the question that actually matters — will this person still be here in six months? — is one a résumé has never been able to answer.

We're still judging people off a document that stopped telling us anything useful.

The number that should worry every operator

Forget annual turnover for a second. The number that actually tells the story is how fast brand-new hires disappear.

That isn't a workforce you're building. That's a bucket with a hole in it. And it's getting worse, not better: the share of new hires still employed at three months fell from 93.9% in 2024 to just 84.6% in 2025. In one year, early quitting jumped by more than half.

Retail runs about 60% annual turnover — you're replacing your entire workforce roughly every 18 months. Each frontline worker who walks costs around $7,000 once you add up recruiting, training, and lost output. A company with 10,000 frontline workers can lose $40 million a year to this — and because 43% leave in the first 90 days, most of that money is gone before those people ever became productive.

That isn't an abstract labor-market statistic. That's a description of what a general manager's week actually looks like. Constantly hiring. Constantly training. Constantly covering a shift for somebody who left.

And every one of those hires runs through the same broken screening process.

It is also the sector where the technology everyone is talking about has arrived the least.

What actually happens in the first 90 days

When someone quits inside the first three months, it comes down to one of two things.

Most of the time, there was a genuine failure on our side — a lack of training, or nobody clearly set the expectations of the role. The rest of the time they were never really interested in the job to begin with. They had one foot out the door from day one and were waiting on an offer somewhere else.

In my experience it's about a seventy-thirty split: roughly seventy percent of early quits come down to training and expectations we didn't get right, and about thirty percent to someone who was always looking for something better.

The research backs that up. In the same 2025 frontline study, workers pointed straight at the first few weeks — unclear expectations, no real onboarding, and never knowing where they stood. A separate recruiting analysis found that the most common reason new hires gave for leaving inside 90 days was a mismatch between how the role was described and what it actually turned out to be.

That first number matters, and I'd rather say it than pretend hiring is the only variable.

Most of the time we didn't hire wrong. We hired fine, and then we failed them.

The variable almost nobody screens for

If you ask me the single biggest reason people stay or leave, it isn't pay. It isn't the generation. It's the manager.

A manager needs three things: the ability to sell, the ability to be empathetic, and the ability to communicate.

When a manager has all three, they give a human being a sense of relief, stability and confidence. That creates attraction. That creates longevity. When you communicate clearly, set expectations, and get someone to agree to those expectations, you create continuity.

The manager is also the one doing the training. They're doing the follow-ups. They're making sure somebody actually learned a process rather than being shown it once on a busy Tuesday.

So when there's instability at the top, that instability runs all the way down. In an industry that's already a revolving door, it compounds — and the pressure, the burnout and the mental health toll land on everyone still standing.

A manager needs the ability to sell, to be empathetic, and to communicate. When they have all three, they give a person a sense of relief, stability and confidence. That creates longevity.

Employers have already noticed, even if their hiring process hasn't caught up: leadership and social influence is the fastest-rising skill in the entire dataset.

Now ask yourself a question. When did you last screen a manager for empathy and communication? Almost nobody does. We check whether they've managed before. We check how many people reported to them. We don't check whether they can hold a team together on the worst night of the month.

Loyalty isn't dead. The trigger changed.

Everyone says workers aren't loyal anymore. I don't think that's quite right.

The days of working at one company for twenty or thirty years — the way the baby boomers did through the manufacturing era — are largely gone. That's true. Gen Z came up differently. Their formative years ran through COVID. They communicate differently. Attention spans are shorter. That's a product of how a generation was raised and educated, not a character flaw.

But loyalty still exists. It just has a different trigger now.

People stay when a company gives them hope and something to work toward consistently. When they know they're making an impact. When somebody has actually helped them figure out what they're interested in and good at.

And in frontline work, the strongest version of that is a visible pathway.

Show someone that working hard, showing up every day, keeping a positive attitude and doing more than the bare minimum leads somewhere specific — and you've given them a reason to stay. But you have to build a culture that actually allows it. Otherwise it's a poster on a break-room wall.

How you give a dishwasher a mission

People push back on this. A dishwasher, a cashier, a server — those jobs don't come with an obvious mission.

You establish it on day one. You say: here's what you can become. And then you point at real people around them who started exactly where they're standing and worked their way up.

That's the American dream. Anybody with a dollar and a dream. You demonstrate work ethic, communication, leadership and vision, and you move.

Any good company can offer a mission and get people to buy into it. Most just never bother to say it out loud on somebody's first day.

What we do differently — and the number behind it

At The Reisner Group we've placed thousands of store managers, department managers, associates, selectors, servers and cashiers.

Sit with that contrast for a second. The industry loses nearly half its new people in three months. We keep well over half of ours for a year — in retail, restaurants, and hospitality, the hardest-churning industries there are. That gap isn't luck. Here's how, and it runs against most hiring advice you'll hear.

We tell candidates how hard the job is.

In the interview, we describe the horrible situations that could genuinely happen. Not the recruiting-brochure version. The real one.

If we're placing someone in retail, we'll say: there may be a day when somebody has an emergency in the bathroom, and you are the person tasked with cleaning it up. You have to be willing to do that. It's part of the industry. There are random, public-facing situations you will not see coming, and you'll have to handle them with a line of customers watching.

If you're not willing to do something like that, maybe this job isn't for you. And it is far better for both of us to find that out in an interview than in the first ninety days.

When people understand the expectations — when they already know what could happen — they're mentally prepared for it. That alleviates the shock factor that causes so much early turnover.

When people know what's coming, they're mentally prepared for it. That alleviates the shock factor.

The part most hiring conversations skip

There's something else driving turnover that rarely shows up in a business article, and I think it deserves to.

You don't know what's happening in somebody's personal life. There could be a death in the family. Somebody sick. Car trouble they can't afford to fix. A relationship falling apart. People arrive mentally checked out, and it flows straight onto the floor.

You need a system of support for that. Somewhere a person feels they can actually say what's going on. The employees who stay longest are very often the ones who'll tell you: I love working here because my manager actually cared, and helped me through something that had nothing to do with work.

Every culture is different, and there's a line between work and personal life that's worth respecting. But pretending people leave their lives at the door is one of the quieter ways we lose them.

EQ is the measurement problem of the next decade

Soft skills are the ones AI will have the hardest time replacing. Emotional intelligence. Leadership. Communication. Teamwork and collaboration. Adaptability and flexibility. Resilience.

That is not just my read of it. An analysis of more than 2,800 workplace skills could not find a substitute for the three that frontline work runs on.

The hardest one to actually measure — and I say this as someone who has spent years trying — is emotional intelligence. It has four pillars: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management. Cracking that is genuinely difficult, and I won't pretend anyone has fully solved it.

But here's why it matters more every year.

EQ is the thing of the future in the age of AI, because IQ has pretty much been thrown into the machine.

Anybody can find an answer faster than ever before. Do you need to be book-smart the way you did yesterday? No.

What matters now is how well you use AI to be more productive — and how well you can adapt, communicate, lead, be likable, read a situation, and connect the dots on where opportunity actually is.

None of that is on a résumé. It never was.

And the churn everyone is bracing for is smaller than it was two years ago, not larger — which says the problem is not that the work is changing faster than people can keep up.

What I'm tired of hearing

Go to any industry conference and you'll hear the same sentence: we can't find enough good people. I don't think that's the real problem.

We're at the mercy of the same handful of channels — Indeed, ZipRecruiter, LinkedIn, a company careers page. There's almost no matching on personality fit or culture fit. There's no attempt to match a manager's personality with a candidate's. And almost nowhere shows a candidate a pathway: if I start here today, where can I be in two years, and what are my odds of getting there?

There's a lot of work to be done. But it starts with admitting that judging people off a résumé stopped working — and that adding more résumés to the pile was never going to be the fix.