UNSCRIPTED — EPISODE 325 • TALENT & RETENTION • RERELEASE
Dave Sarazen, VP of Customer Service at Multivac, shares the recruitment and retention strategy that halved technician turnover — from veteran hiring programs and structured career paths to apprenticeships, intentional communication, and the leadership practices that made it all stick.
This episode was originally released in 2024. It is returning as part of UNSCRIPTED’s July rerelease series — revisiting some of our most valued conversations while new episodes resume in August.
Technician turnover is one of the most costly and persistent challenges in field service. Finding and training skilled technicians is expensive, time-consuming, and disruptive to customers. Losing them before they reach full productivity is even more so.
Dave Sarazen, VP of Customer Service at Multivac — a global manufacturer of packaging and processing equipment for the food and pharmaceutical industries — has lived this challenge. And over the past several years, he and his team have developed a strategy that cut their technician turnover in half. This episode is the story of how they did it.
Stop Chasing Experienced Technicians
One of the most counterintuitive shifts in Multivac’s approach was to move away from targeting experienced technicians entirely. Dave is direct about why.
“We’re not looking for seasoned technicians anymore. I think there’s potentially a lot of bad behavior that’ll come along with a seasoned technician who’s been in a particular industry for twenty or thirty years.” — Dave Sarazen
Instead, Multivac focused on individuals with strong soft skills, a service mindset, and the capacity to learn. Technical skills, they found, could be trained. Attitude, empathy, and professionalism could not be installed after the fact.
This shift led them directly to one of their most successful talent sources: military veterans. Today, 31% of Multivac’s field service workforce are veterans and the results validate the approach.
A Veteran Hiring Program That Works
Recruiting veterans wasn’t just a goodwill initiative at Multivac. It was a strategic decision rooted in what the role actually demands. Field service technicians need discipline, composure under pressure, respect for process, and the ability to represent an organization professionally in high-stakes customer environments. Veterans, Dave explains, bring those qualities as a baseline.
Multivac built the program deliberately — engaging with military organizations around the country through job fairs, building referral networks among existing veteran employees, and creating an environment with a culture and values that resonate with the people they were trying to attract. Being a privately held, family-run company with a strong culture turned out to be a genuine advantage in that appeal.
“It is a career versus a job — and that is something we emphasize in recruiting and as they begin with the organization.” — Dave Sarazen
Transparency in Recruiting Drives Better Retention
One of the simplest but most impactful changes Multivac made was to be completely honest with candidates about what the role involves. Field service is demanding — travel, variable hours, customer pressure, and time away from home are realities that cannot be glossed over. Organizations that hide these realities in the recruiting process create a mismatch that shows up as early attrition.
Dave’s approach is the opposite. Set clear expectations from the first conversation. Explain the demands honestly. Let candidates self-select out if it is not the right fit. The result is a workforce that arrived with open eyes — and stays.
Career Paths and the Apprenticeship Model
Retention also requires giving people somewhere to go. Multivac invested in building structured career paths that offer field service technicians multiple progression options — not just the traditional climb toward management, but lateral moves into specialist roles, training functions, and technical leadership.
Alongside this, they developed an apprenticeship program that creates a sustainable internal pipeline. Rather than waiting for experienced talent to appear on the external market, they grow it from within — pairing new hires with experienced technicians, building skills incrementally, and creating a sense of investment in the individual that pays back in loyalty and performance.
The Workload Sweet Spot
One of the most practically valuable insights Dave shares is around workload. Too few hours and technicians will leave for more opportunity elsewhere. Too many and they burn out. Multivac found that the sweet spot sits between 52 and 57 hours per week — enough to keep technicians engaged and financially motivated, not enough to erode their personal lives.
“If you only give a technician forty hours a week, they will leave. And if you do eighty, ninety, one hundred hours a week, they will leave. We will burn them out.” — Dave Sarazen
Coupled with this is intentional schedule management and a clear policy on respecting time off. Burnout, Dave notes, is one of the most common and preventable causes of technician turnover. Leaders who treat time off as negotiable are contributing to the problem.
Communication, Recognition, and the Role of Leadership
Across every aspect of Multivac’s retention strategy, Dave returns to the same underlying principle: people need to feel seen, valued, and informed. Regular regional meetings, management dinners, structured recognition programs, and transparent two-way communication channels all contribute to a field team that feels connected to the organization — even when working remotely across six regions.
And when the culture is not working for someone — when an individual is undermining the team or pulling down performance — Dave is equally clear. Removing underperformers is not a failure of retention strategy. It is what makes a high-performing culture possible in the first place.
The headline result: technician turnover cut in half. The underlying truth: it happened because the organization decided to treat field service as a career — and built everything around making that real.
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