What nobody tells you about the war for talent

The innovation blog

Before you make one of your rival’s most prized employees an offer they can’t refuse here’s something you should know: star performers don’t always deliver a stellar performance.

Boris Groysberg, a professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, has researched this issue for years (http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6474.html ). His studies of stock market analysts – and American football players – show that, as he puts it, “Stars whose jobs require them to cooperate and collaborate with other workers have a hard time maintaining performance when they move to a new organisation.” In some cases, this hard time was protracted. Analysts who switched brokerages on Wall Street saw their performance fall sharply and suffer for at least five years.

The tricky bit about hiring ‘stars’ is that you have no idea of the support structures and networks they relied on at their old company to make them great. Groysberg’s research found that this dip in performance was pretty universal among stock analysts, often exacerbated by the new employer’s unrealistic expectations of immediate success. The only group that didn’t see their performance dip were women. Make of that what you will.