Imagine a world where your workplace spends a lot of time and effort keeping you from quitting. Google Inc. does this because the company recognizes that if it's going to "win" it needs to have the best people it can find and that employee turnover is highly expensive.  If a company is going to spend all that money luring you in, you'd think it would spend decent capital making sure you do not leave.  

What if executives huddled regularly to look at the performance of employees not as a means of deciding who to toss, but to make sure they are getting the most out of their employees and the employees are happy? Raise your hand if your company is this way....That's what I thought.

Now, imagine that long before you start your professional career, your university invests in some self-analysis; that your school spends time talking with you one-to-one and making sure you do not give up on that school or that you do not give up on yourself. The cost of higher education is such that some universities have realized that staff should be available to meet with students individually to keep them in school.  

I was talking with recruiter Jason Broadwater of West Virginia University and he said the journalism school has re-thought and re-shaped it's response to students when they looked into something called "Predictive Modeling." In this context, the university is creating a model through which staff can predict how a student is going to perform.

Jason told me the university spent a lot of time on recruitment but didn't follow through much with retention. In the school of journalism the drop-out rate was over 20 percent.  As he put it, "that's a lot of revenue walking out the door," and West Virginia has long been reducing it's financial contribution to the state school.  Hence, the university is always looking to enhance it's revenue streams. Jason says by doing a better job of keeping students, cuts to their budget will be less painful, and therefore more students will get degrees. A byproduct is that businesses in and around West Virginia will get experienced and educated employees and the economy of the state will grow.  Also, students who get this attention will help market the school as a place where the staff knows you and pays attention.

A long time ago, a colleague of mine was talking about recruitment but she changed the tenor of the conversation with this: "If your company isn't working to keep you, why are you there? They must take care of the people that they have first, then empower them to be the external face and voice of the company. This way, everybody wins."

Imagine that? 

*Chantal de la Rionda edits the blog