In 2022 alone, 50.5 million Americans voluntarily left their jobs — the highest annual total ever recorded by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That tidal churn, dubbed the Great Resignation, washed across every sector from associations to healthcare to hospitality and exposed a deeper truth: Organizations keep hiring for credentials while employees keep leaving in search of cultures that reward aligned behaviors.

If that scene feels uncomfortably familiar, you are not alone. For many associations, retention — perhaps more than revenue — has become an existential threat. Yet the fix is hiding in plain sight: Hire for behaviors, not for skills.

Why Associations Must Lead

Associations sit at a powerful crossroads: They convene diverse industries, shape professional standards, and command outsized trust. By championing a behavior-first talent framework — publishing toolkits, hosting workshops, showcasing case studies — groups like ASAE can help their member organizations escape the skills arms race and build cultures people compete to join.

The Résumé Mirage

Consider an association of shop machinists. A member gripes about regular employee turnover. Picture two candidates applying for the same CNC machinist role on the production floor. One just finished a fasttrack certificate course and lists every -Gcode and -Mcode on her résumé. The other came up through an apprenticeship and is known for shutting down her mill to recalibrate when tolerances drift, always asking why a part failed inspection. Eighteen months later, the certificate holder has left for a rival shop offering 75 cents more per hour, while the apprentice-turned-trouble=shooter is now heading the cell’s kaizen projects. What predicted their divergent paths wasn’t certificate stamps or the number of programs they can recite; it was behavior — ownership, curiosity, resilience — traits that outlast any software patch or tooling upgrade.

How We Built the Skills Arms Race

So why are employers still hostage to the diploma and the keyword? Partly because skills are easy to count. They fit neatly into spreadsheets and feel objective, even when they aren’t. Compensation consultants reinforce the cycle by benchmarking your pay against a peer group that is just as behavior-blind. The echo chamber hums: credentials in, credentials out.

The result is an expensive game of musical chairs. Everyone raises wages to poach yesterday’s hottest skill set, while culture mismatches quietly erode morale and margins. We chase the symptom (turnover) instead of the cause (misaligned behaviors).

Begin at Bedrock: Values → Behaviors → Roles Breaking the cycle starts with a deceptively simple exercise: List the nonnegotiable values that make your organization worth working for. Now translate each value into something you can see or hear.

• The Value: “We own our mistakes.”
• The Behavior: Admits errors publicly and proposes a fix within 24 hours.
• The Value: “We put customers first.”
• The Behavior: Investigates a client problem even when it sits outside formal job scope.

When values become verbs, you can screen for them. And once you know the behaviors, you can reverseengineer the job description, the interview guide, and — yes — the compensation package that will appeal to people wired that way.

Teach Members to Hire Like a Scientist, Not a Gambler

With a few simple trainings, your members can turn their interview process into a scientific assessment. Structured, behavior-based interviewing is less glamorous than AI-powered psychometrics, but decades of research show it is still the most reliable predictor of on-thej-ob success. That only works, however, if every interviewer follows the same script and rates answers against a published rubric. Gut feeling is a great way to choose dessert, not a future colleague.

Teach your members to democratize the process. Teach engineers, finance analysts, even executive assistants how to listen for evidence of those signature behaviors. Peer-level interviewers often catch cultural misalignments managers miss.

Start making all major decisions based on these cultural principles. Hiring, firing, promotion, and more.

Sweep the Stage for Candidates

Your members should remember, the interview runs both ways. High-caliber candidates audit your culture before you’ve even scheduled the second round. A glitchy application portal, a forgotten calendar invite, a silent week of “we’ll get back to you” — each one whispers, this is how we treat people here. Sharp talent walks. Only the desperate remain.

Lead the Charge— or Lag Behind

Associations have always written the rulebooks their industries end up following. When technology disrupts, when legislation looms, it is the association that convenes, codifies, and clarifies. Workforce strategy should be no different.

Three actions for immediate impact:

1. Publish a behavioral competency playbook. Codify the universal traits — ownership, curiosity, resilience — that predict success across your membership. Provide plug-and-play interview guides and scoring rubrics any hiring manager can implement on Monday morning.
2. Certify the process, not just the people. Establish a “Behavior-Ready Workplace” designation that recognizes organizations that interview, onboard, and promote against clearly defined behavioral standards.
3. Crowdsource the proof. Track retention and engagement data from certified employers and publish an annual Behavior Index. Let the scoreboard show what spreadsheets miss: Cultures that hire for fit win on the factory floor and the balance sheet.

The Last Word

The Great Resignation taught us that pay alone won’t keep people from leaving. The solution isn’t bigger bonuses — it’s building a stronger workplace culture, starting as soon as a job opens. Associations can lead the way in helping organizations make these changes. If we mobilize now by equipping our members with behavioral blueprints and accountability loops, the next wave won’t be a resignation at all; it will be a resurgence. It will be about people reengaging and thriving.