Rating new-hire risk: green, amber, red
A simple way to decide which new people need more support in their first months, and to check whether you guessed right.
Why rate at all
Most people who leave a support team leave early. On my last team, a large share of departures came after only a few shifts on the job. Each one meant recruiting again, another round of training, and a hole in the schedule.
Support time is limited. No manager can give every new person two 1:1s a week and extra QA reviews. A rating tells you where to spend that time.
The rule
Every signal below is something you can see: whether someone turned up, on time, and did the work. Leave out country, accent, age, background and gut feeling. Once those creep in, the rating turns into bias.
The rating decides how much support someone gets. It isn’t a performance score, and it isn’t a way to decide who stays.
The rating stays inside the management team. People don’t see their color. They see the extra support.
When to rate
At the end of shadowing. By then you’ve seen the person in training and on live work next to an experienced agent. Rating earlier is guesswork. Rating later means their first weeks working alone have already happened without the extra support.
Rate as a management team, and include the people responsible for the shadowing. They’ve spent more time with the new person than anyone else.
The five signals
| Signal | What you’re looking at | Green | Amber | Red |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Timeliness | On time for training and shadowing sessions | Always | Late once or twice | Late often |
| Attendance | Present at every training session | All of them | Missed one and caught up | Missed several |
| Tools set up | Accounts and tools ready by the deadline | On time | Late, with a good reason | Late without a reason, or still missing |
| Engagement | Replies when asked, finishes the modules, asks questions or volunteers information in sessions | All of it | Some of it | Little or none |
| Knowledge check | End-of-training test | 90% or above | 80–89% | Below 80% |
Turning signals into a color
Score each signal: 2 if it’s green, 1 if it’s amber, 0 if it’s red. That gives a total out of 10.
- 9 or 10: green
- 6 to 8: amber
- 5 or less: red
Then discuss it as a team. Anyone can move a person up or down one color, as long as the reason is written down next to the rating.
Treat the knowledge check as the weakest signal. People panic on quizzes. A low score next to perfect attendance and real engagement usually means nerves, so the test alone should never make someone red.
What each color gets
- Green: the standard newcomer support. A weekly 1:1 and five QA reviews a week until they become a veteran.
- Amber: more QA reviews every week.
- Red: more QA reviews every week, a 1:1 twice a week, and more hands-on help from their direct manager.
More 1:1s give people more chances to ask questions. More QA reviews mean problems show up after a few days instead of a few weeks.
Use the colors for planning
The colors also help you plan for attrition before it happens. A training class with several reds will probably lose some of them, even with the extra support. When that happened, I over-hired in the following class.
Manager feedback adds a second signal. Anyone a manager thinks might leave gets marked as a potential leaver, and those people count too when you decide how many to recruit.
Use your own history for the numbers. If about half of your past red-rated starters left in their first months, plan as if about half of this class’s reds will too. The roster and attrition template does this sum for you.
Check that it works
Every few months, compare how often people of each color leave. The roster and attrition template does this for you. If red-rated starters don’t leave more often than green ones, your signals aren’t measuring risk, and it’s time to change them.
On my team, red-rated starters left far more often than green ones, even with the extra support. The rating was finding real risk. It also showed that support alone doesn’t close the gap.
Where this comes from
Want this fitted to your team? Get in touch.