Employee Retention Over Time

Over the coming weeks I’ll be writing about employee retention. As much as I believe this applies to Product Management jobs, I believe this applies much more broadly and can be used for teaching across teams regardless of industry or job function,

 The Gist

When it comes to recruiting, I’ve found recruiting teams, interview teams, and managers do an incredibly good job of selling the roles they are in charge of. Generally speaking, I see 5 lifecycles for people going through a particular role at a particular company.

The situations laid out above are broken into 2 sections:

Expectations Set Incorrectly

Expectations being set incorrectly generally means there was at least one break in communication somewhere along the interview process such that the newly hired candidate has expectations that are different from the role that they will actually be doing.

In terms of retention trajectory, the company has an opportunity to retain the new hire if expectations are realigned and/or the candidate’s situation changes. Alternatively, the new hire will either leave on their own accord or be found unsuitable for the job, requiring the company to let go of the new hire.

 

Expectations Set Correctly

Expectations being set correctly is the best case scenario, but can have multiple events along the new hire’s lifecycle that can lead to unhappiness, churn, or continued retention. Generally, this is the best case scenario for both the organization and the candidate because there are more chances for a candidate to stick around than to leave in terms of possible scenarios – having a wholly content candidate or a candidate who experiences a change then rebounds are both possible when expectations are set correctly and maintained over time.

Product Management jobs, given their somewhat fluid and cross-functional nature, it’s easy to emphasize the parts of the job that are sexy while deemphasizing the difficult or unsexy parts to others. To me, user research, UX, and technical architecture are fascinating to me while presentations and managing up are less interesting leading to many experiencing at least 1 out of the 5 frameworks I’ve laid out above.

 

What’s next?

Over the course of the next few weeks, I’m interested in exploring the following and will relate it back to my experience working for high growth company like N26, but also having switched to a wholly new industry and what that has meant for my perspective when it comes to this trend. In terms of topics, I intend to cover:

1. How does each of the situations laid out above happen?
2. How do you know when the new hire is going through each of these stages?
3. How does an organization work to fix the problems candidates experience in the above laid out stages.