William Gallagher
New employment research says the technology industry is the poorest for retaining staff and Apple struggles the most — but the analysis is close to nonsense.
Staff retention is genuinely an issue, and Apple has had sufficient problems with it that former head of retail Angela Ahrendts saw fit once to boast of having greatly raised the figures. Now research from resume.io calls out Apple for being the US company with the shortest average retention of staff at 1.7 years.
As the research does note, Apple has been paying out up to $200,000 in stock bonuses to select engineers to get and keep them in the company. But the research is also clear about its methodology, and that's where the problem is.
"Resume.io analyzed the LinkedIn pages of the top 100 companies by market cap in the U.S., UK, Canada and Australia," said the researchers. "We ranked each business based on its average tenure to find the companies that are best at retaining their staff."
As a source for general statistics, LinkedIn is problematic because all of its data comes from individuals and it is up to them whether they post at all. It's also up to them whether they are accurate.
Plus it's up to the individual whether they go on LinkedIn, and people who are not looking for work arguably have no reason to join the platform. People who've been at Apple for life and intend to stay will not be diligently updating a LinkedIn profile, if they even have one.
So there is, for instance, a LinkedIn account for Craig Federighi but it says he's a "hairstylist at Jajah" in Mumbai. There's at least one Tim Cook, but it isn't the one at Apple. There is no Phil Schiller.
Consequently, the people at Apple whose tenures stretch into the decades and so would help skew the average higher, are not included in this LinkedIn-based research at all.
More significantly, the research includes people who are working in retail. That industry famously turns over staff as people move between jobs, or they take up such positions part time.
Apple has an enormous retail workforce and so does the joint second-place worst company, Amazon, which purportedly retains staff for an average of 1.8 years.
But sharing that joint second place spot is Meta, which opened its first physical retail space in 2022.
Charles Martin
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Malcolm Owen
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11 Comments
The study may be flawed but I can tell you first hand that it's directionally correct. Apple is a sausage grinder for engineers; many people quit or are fired before they even make it two years. And unlike other companies, if your manager doesn't like you, they will do nothing to help you find another position in the company under a different manager--you're just gone.
IMO you don't need a survey to know that Apple has had a brain drain, the problem is that they've lost a lot of their top engineers and replaced the with less than average ones, which hardly surprising with the state of Universities in the West, Apple needs to recruit from the Asian countries!
It's clear with the lack of innovation and poor upgrades over the last 2 years 😏
Listen: I get it. Trying to fill a website each day with compelling "news" about a famously secretive company is hard. Really hard. But that's still NO EXCUSE for an 11-paragraph article based on analysis that your sub-head states is "close to nonsense." Why would you publish an analysis of "nonsense analysis?" Review some accessory instead. Or maybe start a new ongoing series of articles that compare an "official" Apple accessory with a knock-off sold at a fraction of the price--what are the differences? I don't know, but there have got to be better ways of filling the ether than with "nonsense."