Introduction

The overwhelming demands that the financial community places on Human Resources to demonstrate its accountability have launched the evolution of staffing performance metrics. Staffing has attracted attention, particularly over the past several years, because of increasingly larger amounts of money being spent to recruit employees. But when vast amounts of money are spent to attract new hires, there is serious pressure to hold on to them.

A significant part of Human Resources’s response to the need to retain employees has been development, in all of its forms—training, mentoring, conferences, and attendance at high profile “executive programs.” Because it costs a lot to recruit employees, it becomes reasonable to spend more to develop them; therefore, the same return-on-investment scrutiny senior management imposes on staffing operations is transferred to development. This is why assessing development and retention has emerged as a critical concern.