Your top candidate just accepted an offer from your competitor. When you follow up to ask why, she mentions their generous parental leave policy, something she couldn’t find anywhere on your career site.
It’s a scenario playing out across industries. In a recent survey, we found that 42% of job seekers wouldn’t even apply for a position that doesn’t offer paid leave, and 86% are more likely to apply when leave benefits are clearly listed in the job description or on the company website.
Yet many HR teams still treat leave and accommodations as purely operational: a compliance function that kicks in only after someone’s hired. That’s a missed opportunity. When positioned strategically, these programs become powerful tools for both attracting talent and keeping your best people.
In this article, we’ll explore how modern leave and accommodations programs have evolved into critical strategies for improving recruiting and retention.
Why Traditional Recruitment and Retention Strategies Aren’t Working Anymore
In the last few years, the job market has seen several big shifts. Employees ruled the market in 2023. But the power recently shifted back into employers’ hands.
Even so, both retention and recruitment have remained significant challenges for HR over the years. Talent acquisition surfaced as a top challenge for the HR leaders we surveyed over the last three years. And more respondents have named employee retention rates a significant issue in that timeframe, too.
What do those findings reveal for today’s HR professionals? Even as employers wield more power in the job market, recruitment and retention remain challenging. It’s a reality that reminds organizations they still need to offer a robust employee experience to attract and maintain a workforce. Job seekers and employees care about much more than their salary. They care about how they’re treated during life’s most vulnerable moments.
Meeting the Expectations of Today’s Workforce
That’s why there’s so much power behind your organization’s leave and accommodations program. It can make a powerful recruitment and retention tool. If it’s mismanaged, however, it can wreak havoc on your company culture.
According to our 2025 Leave and Accommodations Report, 40% of employees who were disappointed by their leave experience started job hunting. Another 14% said they quit outright.
Accommodations create a similar impact. The same report found that two-thirds of employees who encountered a negative accommodations experience no longer felt valued or supported by their employer.
These findings give us a window into the modern employee’s expectations for the workplace. Today’s workers want to be treated with dignity. They want a positive work environment. When they need support from their employer, they expect it to be delivered effectively, efficiently, and compassionately. When an organization fails to meet those expectations, it’s natural when an employee feels disappointed. They may even be willing to walk.
This change represents a shift in the ethos of employment. The employee value proposition was once rooted in compensation. Today, however, employment isn’t so transactional. Employees want a more relational experience — one built on values like trust and empathy.
The Recruitment Advantage: How Leave Benefits Attract Top Talent
Let’s take a moment to talk about recruiting. Your organization’s leave policies are a key element of the hiring process. When we surveyed 600 people actively looking for a job, we found that they were 86% more likely to apply to a position when paid leave was clearly listed as a benefit. Nearly half (42%) said they wouldn’t apply for a job unless it provided paid leave.
Paid leave wasn’t the only type of leave on job seekers’ minds. In fact, the three most desired benefits were all forms of leave: flexible time off, mental health days, and parental leave.
That’s why it is so important to showcase your organization’s leave offerings. Leave benefits signal your organizational values. They will help attract the best and brightest candidates — employees who know the type of organization they want to work for.
Leave benefits help employers appear as competitive as possible to potential talent. It’s important to get specific about your leave offerings when educating candidates.
While most organizations offer basic leave benefits like medical leave, bereavement leave, and parental leave, far fewer offer more niche types of leave, according to our recent report. Only 29% offer caregiver leave, for example. And fewer still (18%) offer sabbaticals.
These benefits can provide your organization a competitive recruiting advantage, but only if you talk about them. If your company offers specific leave benefits, highlight them in candidate materials like job ads, job sites, and more.
Best practice: If you’re interested in seeing how your leave offerings stack up to those of your competitors, do a quick audit. Tally up the leave benefits you offer to candidates and then investigate what your competitors advertise. You may be able to spot a few items that give you a leg up with job seekers. Be sure to highlight them throughout your recruiting materials.
The Retention Reality: Poor Leave Experiences Drive People Out the Door
Now let’s consider retention. Your organization’s leave policies can have a profound impact on its recruiting efforts. But it’s the actual experience of taking leave that impacts retention.
Our 2025 report provided a snapshot of the effects poor leave experiences can have on employees:
- 51% lost loyalty to their company after a poor leave experience
- 42% felt unmotivated upon returning to work
- 36% started job hunting
- 14% quit
Because a bad leave experience can harm retention efforts, it’s important to understand what caused the most pain. We asked employees who had a bad leave experience to tell us what went wrong. The top reason was confusing processes. A third of respondents said it came down to overcommunication during leave. The next most popular option was pay miscalculations.
In their own words: When it comes to the leave experience, basic processes matter. Employees who need leave are often navigating a crisis. They don’t want to spend time, energy, or bandwidth jumping through hoops to get the leave they need. Hear how paperwork drama colored one employee’s leave experience:
“The paperwork process was horrible and paperwork kept getting lost. And then I would have to get it and fill it out again. Awful.”
The impact of poor leave experiences on retention is a serious threat to organizations, especially as requests mount. Leave requests have risen 53-62% in the last three years, according to our survey. If employers botch these experiences, they have more opportunities to lose people.
That could generate significant financial loss for employers. Recruiting new talent can be costly, as much as three to four times the former employee’s salary.
There are non-financial elements to this cost, too. Teams can be devastated by employee turnover and the loss of institutional knowledge. What’s more, employees talk to each other about their leave experiences; when lots of workers have bad experiences, their frustration will ripple throughout the entire organization.
What Good Leave and Accommodations Management Actually Looks Like
We’ve just discussed how negative leave experiences can harm workplace culture and business outcomes. Here’s the good news: Positive leave experiences can do just as much good as negative leave experiences can do harm. And our data shows that positive accommodations can have the same effect.
When employees encounter a smooth, positive leave experience, 55% said they feel more motivated when they return to work. And 47% said they have an increased sense of workplace loyalty.
It’s the same story for accommodations. More than two-thirds of employees (68%) who have a positive accommodations experience said they feel valued and supported by their workplace. Another 60% said their positive accommodation experience made them feel more productive.
It makes good business sense to offer positive leave and accommodations experiences. But how do you get there? Here are four pillars of good management:
- Clear, consistent processes: Processes are a top driver of positive experiences in both leave and accommodations. They are the key to high-quality, consistent management.
- Supportive managers: Managers must be trained to support employees through your organization’s approach to leave and accommodations. After all, more than half of employees cited managers as a driver of a good experience. Managers need to be deeply familiar with both policies and processes.
- Accurate pay and benefits handling: Fifty-three percent of employees cited correct payment as a driver of their positive leave experience. Don’t let payroll errors ruin an employee’s leave.
- Appropriate communication: There’s a certain balance to be struck when it comes to communicating with employees on leave. Employees don’t want to be pestered when they’re out. But they also need enough open communication to feel prepared for their return.
Technology supports each of these pillars, optimizing leave and accommodations management at each point in the process. HR knows this: It’s why 37% of HR professionals want better tech for leave, and another 42% want it for accommodations management.
When HR opts to manage leave and accommodations at scale without technology, they can easily get overwhelmed by administrative work. Many HR teams are managing twice the number of cases they did just three years ago, without having expanded their team or upgraded their tools. It’s no wonder, then, that the spreadsheets and DIY systems that used to work are failing under pressure.
With purpose-built platforms, HR can manage more cases without expanding their number. A leave and accommodations system automates busywork, centralizes documentation, ensures compliance, and supports personalization. Technology ensures that employees get a consistent, quality experience, no matter how many are asking for support.
Taking Action: Build a Leave Program That Recruits and Retains
It may feel like an overwhelming goal to create a leave and accommodations program capable of recruiting talent and slowing your turnover rate. With the right tools and a few deliberate steps, your organization can achieve just that. Here’s how:
Start With Immediate Wins
Don’t expect to overhaul your program in a day. Start by making a few small but powerful adjustments.
- Audit your organization’s current offerings and make them visible in high-traffic recruiting materials, like job ads and your applicant website.
- Establish or refresh manager training on leave and accommodations. Offer it quarterly, not just during onboarding.
- Review HR’s processes for clarity. Can an employee understand how to ask for support in three steps or fewer?
- Fix pay calculation issues. Nearly a third of employees cite this as an issue, and it adds a lot of stress to an already stressful time if there are errors.
Move Onto Medium-Term Investments
Next, begin to tackle a few bigger goals for your program. These items may take more time, but they’re key steps in transforming your program.
- Evaluate whether your team’s manual tools like spreadsheets and email are keeping up with growing caseload.
- Consider gaps in leave offerings. Are there any popular programs — like caregiver leave, mental health days, sabbaticals — your organization could add to its suite of benefits?
- Build and automate return-to-work processes so managers are prepared and employees feel welcomed back.
Look to Strategic Transformation
Finally, begin to think about the future.
- Integrate leave and accommodations management. These two functions are deeply intertwined — in fact, 43% of accommodations are related to leave. Managing the two with a single platform is not just more efficient but is also a good business practice.
- Leverage modern technology with compliance guardrails. Artificial intelligence has a place in leave and accommodations management. But it’s best to tap it through purpose-built platforms, like AbsenceSoft’s Compliance Engine.
- Build personalization into your processes. Save time with automation, and use your team’s extra bandwidth to provide human support to employees.
- By tracking a few simple metrics, you can streamline your workload and sharpen your approach to leave and accommodations management.
- Make leave program quality a leadership priority, not just an HR admin function.
Sharpen Your Competitive Edge with AbsenceSoft
In any labor market, employees will remember how you treated them when they needed your support the most. Great leave and accommodations programs are not just retention insurance. Increasingly, they’re also your organization’s competitive advantage in the recruiting process.
See how AbsenceSoft helps organizations deliver consistent, compliant, and supportive leave experiences at scale. Schedule a demo with a CLMS-certified specialist.
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Leave benefits significantly impact recruitment success. Research shows that 86% of job seekers are more likely to apply for positions that clearly advertise paid leave benefits, and 42% won’t even apply to jobs without paid leave. The most desired leave benefits include flexible time off, mental health days, and parental leave. To maximize recruiting impact, organizations should prominently feature their leave offerings in job descriptions, career pages, and other candidate-facing materials. Consider highlighting unique benefits like caregiver leave or sabbaticals that competitors may not offer.
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Poor leave experiences drive significant turnover. AbsenceSoft research shows that 40% of employees who have a negative leave experience begin job hunting, and 14% quit outright. The top causes include confusing or unclear processes, pay miscalculations, excessive communication during leave, and delays in restoring building or systems access upon return. Additionally, 51% of employees lose loyalty to their company after a poor leave experience, and 42% feel less motivated when returning to work.
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Purpose-built platforms like AbsenceSoft transform how HR teams handle growing caseloads. These systems automate administrative tasks, centralize documentation, ensure compliance with federal and state laws, and support personalized employee experiences. Features like the AbsenceSoft Compliance Engine™ track 200+ leave laws, while automated workflows, self-service portals, and integrated payroll calculations enable HR teams to manage more cases without expanding headcount. This is critical as many teams now manage twice the number of cases they handled three years ago.
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Positive leave experiences are built on four key pillars: clear and consistent processes, supportive and well-trained managers, accurate pay and benefits handling, and appropriate communication. When these elements align, 55% of employees feel more motivated upon returning to work, and 47% report increased workplace loyalty. Employees especially value supportive managers (cited by 56% as a driver of positive experiences), correct payment (53%), and transparent processes that help them understand what to expect (48%).