Face it, we young professionals and recent grads are high-risk. Most of us don't have many commitments that make us feel obligated to stay in one place. If we're not enjoying the job, we're going to go find a new place to work - a new party to rock.
I've worked for one year and four months with the same company that I started with about a month after graduation in 2006. That must seem like an eternity to those of you who are already with your second or third company. After talking with friends who have company-jumped and switched jobs already, I've come up with a plan for managers and human resource teams to minimize the risk of hiring us. Face it, we can bring a lot to the table, but we can leave the table quickly if needed.
1. Don't sugarcoat the job responsibilities and positions. It's one things for us to misinterpret the job duties, and it's a completely different issue when the human resource personnel and managers performing interviews lie about what the job entails and what day-to-day working will be like with the company. Without working for an extended period of time, soon to be college graduates will not know even half of the right questions to ask to make sure that they can handle the job and stick around for at least a few years. Your goal should be to help them out rather than docking them for not asking the "right" questions. Unfortunately, the college student or entry-level employee cannot test drive the company for several months, so the better that you can describe the experience as accurately as possible the better your chances of hiring the right person.
2. Constant Feedback This is going to only be beneficial if you have an open level of communication and a mutual respect with your young employee. Meet with them, and don't just tell them about their performance, expectations, etc. Ask them questions that center on how satisfied they are with the company, what they could change if they would, what's different about the job that is either better or worse than they expected, and so on. Don't just ask the questions to appear like you care and because your company has a plaque on the wall that says you care. Ask the questions, get the answers, and actually take action to correct issues, find a different position, or prepare for them to leave - if that is the case. The biggest benefit from gaging satisfaction and obtaining feedback in person is to use that information to better inform new candidates being interviewed so that they don't form the same perception prior to being hired as the employee who just quit after 6 months of work.
3. Work/Life Balance This is one that most companies just do not understand, and is one big reason that that they have high turnover among young employees. Several months prior to working 8-5 five+ days a week for you, your shining new young employee was going to classes three or four days a week only in the afternoon, and going to the bars Wednesday - Saturday nights. Out of all of your employees, the youngest employees have the social lives that are valued much more than older employees (not to say that older employees don't have extremely busy lives outside of work, we younger employees just haven't developed the appreciation for a hard day's work, yet). Even if you are paying your entry-levels large amounts of cash to stick around late into the night or on the weekends, they will eventually realize that even the extra money is not worth them missing out on whatever their friends are doing. Watch their hours, and just make sure to manage their work-load from your end as best as you can as they learn how much they can handle in a normal forty hour work week.
There's more to this list, but I'll save that for another day.
