Chapter 102Retaining and Career Pathing People

What about after a new hire has been with the company for 90 days? How do you retain a great hire? Well, assuming you have the right foundation in place, you're most of the way there. That means that the culture is right, the employee is on a great team, they are solving interesting problems, and they can connect the dots between the work that they do and business outcomes. But, that isn't quite enough. Having a career trajectory is important and people want to know what comes after the role that they are doing now. Early stage companies often fall into the trap of thinking that people will just be satisfied to contribute in their current role for a long time if the projects are interesting and the company is growing. We had that issue at Return Path too, initially giving everyone the title of software engineer even though it was clear that there were big differences between people's skills. Now, of course, we paid people differently based on their experience and responsibilities, but there was no published career path in Engineering that people could track against, and it started to cost us as more senior people realized that in order to move to the next level, they had to move out of the company. We learned an important lesson that even if titles weren't important to us, they were important to people who wanted to know where they were at in their career progression and the next level they could aim for as they improved their ...

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