Retaining the young ones

With the appraisals coming to a close and the data pouring in, we’ve been busy with reading into what this data has to say. This year, we went ahead and did a separate analysis for our campus hires. What the data said to us raised some very serious concerns!

To begin with, most campus hires (over 50%) were rated either average or below average. The management had used this chunk to fill the lower grades and push the others higher in the bell curve. What was even more surprising is that while we go ahead and say that our campus batch was performing poorly in their first year, their ratings vastly improved in the second year and reached phenomenal heights in their third. This practice of pushing the new hires into the lower bracket has adversely affected our campus attrition. The attrition reached late 40’s for the campus hires in their third year.

On analyzing the promotion data, we realized that the campus batch who were promoted had an attrition of close to 6% or lower while the ones who were not promoted left the organization in bulk.

This leads to two conclusions:

• Either we hire the worst campus batch (which is not true as their performance rises phenomenally with time)
• Or we use them as scapegoats int he first and second year to fill the bottom (first year witnesses a great number in lower bands, second year views very few promotions)

A lot of companies focus specially on their campus batch because this is where the talent is groomed and losing this batch would essentially mean that we pay for their education and then lose them to our competitors.

In view of this data, we have pushed back the ratings, asking business to justify low ratings for the campus batch. We’ve also provided training related data for them to be factored in to the ratings. Promotion or rather the lack of it, is also being questioned by the senior management.

We’ve been reprimanded for not having brought this to the senior management earlier. We are hoping to take active measures and try retain our young ones.

What steps does your organization take to hold back the campus hires? Any ideas what we can do?