What walks out the door when experienced people leave.
Only 13 per cent of Australian organisations capture what their experienced people know. The rest pay twice, once to lose it and once to hire it back.
Every organisation I speak to says much the same thing after someone senior leaves. We did a handover. It went fine. Months later they find out it did not go fine at all.
A two-week handover does not transfer 30 years of knowledge
When an experienced person leaves, we book a fortnight, tick a checklist and call it done. What we actually lose is everything that was never written down: who to ring when the system fails at 6pm, and why a process that looks pointless is the one holding the place together. None of that fits in a handover document.
Only 13 per cent of organisations capture what their experienced people know
That figure comes from AHRI and the Australian Human Rights Commission in 2025. It means almost nine in ten employers watch decades of knowledge walk out and keep no record of it. Then they pay a recruiter to find it again, and pay a second time to train it back in. The knowledge was already theirs. They just never kept it.
The same employers say they are short on skills
In that same 2025 survey, only 56 per cent of employers said they were open, to a large extent, to hiring people aged 50 to 64. So half the market complains about a skills shortage while skipping a workforce that has decades of exactly those skills. The capability you are trying to recruit is often sitting in the over-50s pile you passed over.
If you are short on skills and closed to over-50s, it is worth asking which of those two problems is the real one. When someone senior last left your team, what walked out that you only noticed months later?
Carrying this risk right now?
I offer a free 30-minute conversation to talk through what your organisation stands to lose, and what can be captured before it goes.
