Hiring and Retention Problem

I have been thinking about hiring and retention problem from sometime now. This issues are coming to every industry but are magnified in tech industry (and specially in bay area). There are two problems:

• Hire right people
• Attrition (retain right people)

If things were in my hand, I would probably address them in the following way. (Of course, this has to follow after the good hiring process is established about which a lot has already been written by others) :

Hiring

• An ‘Assistant’ title for the first 6 months to each of the newbie that gets hired (just like Assistant professor), irrespective of their level i.e. for engineers, directors, product manager, sales alike. (Treating execs with assistant title might be a stretch).
• Untill tenured, they should be given mentor(s) and their progress should be closely watched
• First goal should be 6 months to see if there is an overall fit. Once ‘tenured’ give them their actual title. In case decision can be made that it is not a good fit (both ways), its time to part ways.
• Note: This might be a good idea to take good feedback about the company, the product, the processes from the new hire during their ‘assistant’ phase to get outsider’s perspective. Everybody wants to get feedback from outsider’s perspective but nobody either takes it or gives importance to the feedback they got, and that is a problem to be addressed.

An ‘Assistant’ title for the first 6 months

I understand it is difficult to implement since in today’s world the applicant will have lot of ‘permanent’ opportunities elsewhere. But, this is a chicken and egg problem. You will have a rockstar team, if everyone in your team would have passed through this type of tenureship tests.

Slackers

Slackers follows broken window theory, it spreads fast and hence its important to control it as soon as it starts. You can either motivate the slacker to do real good work or you let the slacker go, and the choices that you have to make will depend on the individual slackers. I have come to realize that passionate is the key to success, and I look for the same in others. I suggest you do the same and look for passion in their work, if there is passion, there is hope. And, find a way to motivate them. Otherwise, its time you part ways. Its not always straight forward, there are variety of reason someone is not putting the heart, soul and mind to work. But, identifying that someone is dropping the ball and working closely with them to figure why can be the key. But at the same time we have to understand that slackers are infectious, and the more you delay to treat them more difficult it will be to control later and it spreads.

If there is passion there is hope.

Retention

What does a company lose when good employee leaves?

• Domain expertise
• Contextual history of all the decisions made (This is highly underrated)
• A drop in team’s morale
• Time and money to train new employee (probably the onlyquantitative thing in the list).

All these issues above are exponential to the number of years a person has been working with the team times the passion and the passion and dedication with which he/she had for the she was doing. So, the issues are huge when a senior personnel leaves your team.

But why do they leave? The reason a lot of people leave their current employer are:

• Money: this is where we can do something.
• Culture fit: They should have left long ago.
• Company politics: Time for company to introspect. Blame the CEO.
• Personal reasons: Unavoidable.

Money

What if instead of regular inflation rate pay hikes of 3.5–4%, we increase the salary of everyone by 5–7% pay hike every year, If this is followed along with firing slackers, I bet your net balance sheet will look the same. And profits, team morale will always remain high.

5–7% pay hike every year

Stalemate

A twist to retention write up above. Folks who have worked in your company for a long time (say 7 years). Reduce their yearly pay hike to attrition rate, enroll them into some kind of rotation program within the company so that they can sharpen their skills encourage them to take a sabbatical somewhere else.

encourage them to join a rotation program or take a sabbatical

Just my idealistic thoughts.