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Retention Strategies For Technology-Based Organizations

RETENTION STRATEGIES FOR TECHNOLOGY-BASED ORGANIZATIONS
High-tech consulting firms are in fierce competition with one another to get these highly sought after intellectual assets – the smart young techies. These firms go to great lengths to attract and to maintain these highly sought after resources; retention is a focus area for many of the human resource departments. Public records show successful firms, such as Accenture, Booz | Allen | Hamilton (BAH), and Science Application International Corporation (SAIC) as having turnover rates well below the national average of 20 percent. So what are these firms doing that make them so successful?
In this paper, we will identify the positive attributes that have contributed to retention, show the significance within the three high-tech consulting firms, present publically released statistics on each of the companies, temper these statistics with privately gathered data for the purpose of analysis, and provide a logical conclusion as to why the successful firms are successful. The agreement with the authors of this paper and the interviewees is that the non-publically released data will be used for academic purposes only.
High-tech consulting firms have a "dirty little secret"; they calculate retention rates to show the best possible results and they downplay the issues they are having with attracting and retaining technically qualified and highly motivated you minds. On the surface these firms appear to have things under control; they boast of below national average turnover rates and about how great their companies are to work for – but a closer look at these sites and you will quickly realize that there is a tremendous effort focused towards recruiting potential employees going way beyond what first meets the eye. The chart below is just a snapshot of the focused marketing developed into these sites; oddly enough there is not a huge difference between them. A more in-depth discussion will follow....