[fiddlerwoaroof]

I’ve occasionally wondered if a policy of giving a 10-30% total raise over the first 3-ish years of an employees tenure would pay off: the value of the domain knowledge of someone who walks + the cost of recruiting and training a new hire is probably about $50k+ and, so, it might be less expensive in the long run to just match the raise someone could get by switching jobs.

[bradleyjg]

You need to be careful with lockstep compensation plans. Your high, and even mid, employees will resent that low performers are getting the same as they are.

[fiddlerwoaroof]

Most places I’ve worked had some concept of an “expected raise”: 1-3% a year. What I’m suggesting is making that a bit steeper and still paying performance-based raises on top of that. (I’m not sure what exact numbers make sense here: maybe a total of 10-20% expected raise over the salary offer + up to 10% based on performance?): the goal here is to save money by reducing the amount of domain and operational knowledge that just walks out the door.