Not Everyone Gets a Trophy, 3rd Edition

CHAPTER NINERETAIN THE BEST OF THEM, ONE DAY AT A TIME

I am not looking around every day hoping to leave just for the sake of leaving. I'll stay here forever, maybe, if it works out. I'm not hoping to leave. Just help me make it work for me.

—Twentysomething

“We have an elaborate recruiting apparatus that gives us a huge presence [in college and university career placement centers],” said one senior executive in a major financial services firm. “We are known for our fast-track program, so we get a huge number of applicants and we put them through this meticulous screening process. After we hire them, we invest a huge amount in them right away over the course of the first year because we truly believe they are the future of the company. Still, by the end of the second year, half of them are gone. Most of them leave to go work for another financial services firm, and the competition is happy to have them precisely because they've been through our fast-track program. It's so frustrating. It seems that that no matter what we do, we just can't keep them.”

I hear different versions of this scenario from leaders and managers in every industry. Leaders and managers are very worried about high levels of turnover among their youngest, least experienced workers—and they are right to be. In most organizations, turnover among new employees has been going up ever so slightly but steadily over the past two decades. Turnover is by far the highest among employees with zero to two years' tenure ...