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It's almost certainly better to just fire low performing staff and get in high performing staff, even if they have to be paid more. American mediocrity has been given free reign for the last few decades and desperately needs to be put back into its place. Giving these people training just means they know more stuff, it doesn't fix the fundamental problem with them that they are mediocre. For that replacement is the only solution.
EDIT: Actually thinking more about it, training them so they leave of their own volition and go be mediocre at your competitors so you can then hire higher caliber humans may well be cheaper than redundancy etc. so maybe it's not so bad an idea after all...
The old joke goes that if you want to get rid of someone without firing them, give them awards and hope they can parlay that into a new gig somewhere else. Sometimes, even getting them poached by some other division within the same company is sufficient to get them out of your hair, if you're into perverse middle-management incentives.
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Does the hedge fund thank employees who stick around?
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I agree but for a different reason. Basically job hopping is endemic to the American labor market. Nobody trains because you aren’t going to keep the guy you trained, he’s just going to take that certificate and put it on his resume and be gone long before you recoup the costs of training him.
I used to work at a nursing home and it was this all day long. They foolishly had a training program for CNAs. People would take the trading and be gone within a month because they had something on their resume that was valued in the market. They go to a hospital and make the same money or sometimes more, have fewer patients and more PTO. It was stupid, especially since the company couldn’t protect itself from that kind of thing. Labor laws are such that you can’t insist that people you train stick around long enough to pay back at least the cost of the training. They were basically training the nurses for the hospitals around them for free. And this happens all the time. You train someone, and he gets poached. Then everyone stops trying to train and focuses on poaching from places that are still foolish enough to waste money training. Everybody then complains that entry level work doesn’t exist, but takes full advantage of the few entry level jobs out there.
Agreed with @Botond173. You can absolutely do this. Well, not "insist", but you can include either clawback provisions (retrospective "if you leave within X years, you have to pay us back for the training", which they have to agree to when they sign up for the training program) or delayed comp that only vests after some number of years (prospective, acknowledging that they're worth more now, but you only have to actually pay it out if they stick around for X years). They're both pretty common.
Disagree: other employers can pay the clawback (probably with their own terms and conditions attached) or buy out deferred comp.
They can, but a) it makes it more expensive for them, and thus somewhat less likely and b) it provides you with some form of protection/compensation.
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There’s a $20 bill on the sidewalk for people who can solve this coordination problem.
My money is on the Amish.
Capitalism is the best alignment strategy known to mankind.
Pay people less while they are still in training, then once trained provide them (slightly less) pay and benefits as compared to what they could find elsewhere with their new skills and all your retention issues largely disappear.
If nursing homes are all on the brink of insolvency or something then perhaps we need a larger discussion on how nursing homes are funded, but that's hardly a good reason not to train people if those are skills you require.
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Why?
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Given that apparently the majority of these guys picked up the necessary skills quickly and managed to get better jobs elsewhere it's hardly charitable to call them all mediocre based on the very little you know about them.
To the OP, I think you've buried the lede in your post: somehow the majority of your workforce have all managed to find better jobs in a short span of time. Make your job roughly (or even slightly less) attractive than the "better" jobs they have and you'll have much less churn, people as a rule of thumb prefer stability and don't want to pay the costs of switching jobs if their alternatives are all about the same.
If you don't want to compete as an employer that's your prerogative, but it's no mystery why people would leave if apparently nearly every job is a better alternative to yours.
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