How a State Correctional Facility Reduced Turnover by Over 80%
See how a correctional facility is reducing turnover, strengthening teams, and improving safety.
Competencies measured
Work Habits
Responsibility, Reliability, Safety, Rules Compliance.
People Skills
Team Player, Self-Confidence, Self-Control, Social Awareness.
The client's challenge
Correctional facilities rely on steady, reliable teams to maintain safety and operations. When officers leave, staffing gaps create instability, increase risk, and affect morale.
One state facility was facing persistent turnover, putting pressure on operations and eroding confidence among the workforce. Leadership understood that retaining officers meant hiring the right people from the start, but they lacked a consistent, evidence-based way to identify candidates most likely to succeed.
The solution
Partnering with our assessment experts, the grocery chain implemented a custom pre-hire assessment focused on identifying candidates most likely to succeed and stay.
Step 1: Defining success in corrections
Two competency categories were identified as critical for officer success: Work Habits and People Skills.
Step 2: Designing the assessment tool
A custom pre-hire assessment was built to measure these competencies, ensuring candidates aligned with the facility’s standards for performance and safety.
Step 3: Proving validity
Assessment scores were benchmarked against employee performance. Results showed high correlations with actual performance and turnover, confirming the tool’s predictive reliability.
The results
The facility saw dramatic improvements across multiple metrics:
89% reduction in turnover — staff departures dropped from 92% to just 10%.
Strong correlations with performance — scores correlated 0.30–0.33 with overall performance, with a reliability coefficient of 0.92 (all statistically significant).
Higher-quality hires — top scorers were rated 22% higher by managers than low scorers (7.10 vs. 5.82).
By integrating data-backed assessments into hiring, the facility transformed recruitment into a reliable system for building a resilient, safe, and stable workforce.
89%
Reduction in Turnover
.92
Correlations with Performance
22%
Higher Quality Hires