Five stages. The score gets worse the longer someone stays.
This is the map we build for every client, adjusted to their own data. The scores below are illustrative — a composite of what we typically see before an engagement starts.
Attraction
+18Job post, interviews, the offer. The only stage most companies actually over-invest in, relative to everything that follows.
Onboarding
−6Day one is usually fine — there's a plan for day one. Week three, when the system access still isn't right and nobody's mentioned who to ask, is where it falls apart.
Growth
−34Performance reviews, career conversations, actual day-to-day management. The stage every company says matters most and measures least.
Exit
−41An exit interview nobody reads, conducted by the person the departing employee has the least reason to be honest with.
Alumni
−58Executives get an alumni network and a reason to come back. Everyone else gets a COBRA letter. Same company, two different goodbyes.
Data that already exists, just never assembled.
Applicant tracking data covers Attraction. HRIS and IT provisioning logs cover Onboarding. Performance management data and manager 1:1 notes cover Growth, when they exist at all. Exit survey data covers Exit, assuming anyone's opened the spreadsheet recently. Alumni is usually a blank page, which is itself a finding. We don't ask clients to start new data collection before we can tell them anything — the first deliverable is almost always built entirely from what's already sitting in five different systems that have never been asked the same question at once.
The map is the diagnostic. The services are the treatment.
Once a client's own version of this map exists, the next conversation is almost always about which stage to fix first — usually whichever one has the steepest single drop, not the lowest absolute score. A gradual decline is a culture problem. A cliff is usually one specific, fixable thing.