21/08/2026
Your best employee resigns. What do you investigate before you start recruiting their replacement?
A resignation is an outcome. The real management question is what happened before it.
Was compensation competitive? Was the employee's workload sustainable? Did they have opportunities to grow? How effective was their manager? Were concerns raised but never acted upon? And perhaps most importantly: is this resignation an isolated case or part of a pattern?
Gallup has consistently found that managers account for a significant share of the variance in employee engagement. That matters because retention problems are rarely solved by recruitment alone.
Replacing someone without understanding why they left can simply restart the same cycle: hire → onboard → disengage → resign → replace.
Exit interviews, employee feedback, turnover trends and management practices should therefore be treated as business intelligence; not HR paperwork.
At Reeds Africa Consult, our recruitment and HR consulting solutions help organizations look beyond filling vacancies to strengthening the people practices surrounding those hires.
Before asking, “Who can replace them?”, ask the harder question:
“What made someone we wanted to keep decide to leave?”
The answer could save your next great employee.
