Millennials' resignation rate is much higher than their peers. Why?

In 2016, Millennials resigned at a rate three times that of workers overall, and twice that of nonmillenials.

Millennials who are not in manager roles resign at a rate of 36.2 percent, while those millennials who have made it to manager status resign at a rate of just 11.9 percent. (Photo: Shutterstock)

Millennials do job-hop, but it doesn’t have to be from one company to another. Employers who want to retain their top performers can to find ways to sate this desire with internal opportunities.

That’s according to the Visier Insights: Millennials report, which finds that millennials do have a resignation rate much higher than that of nonmillennials—in 2016 they actually resigned at a rate three times that of workers overall (29.1 percent, compared with 9.2 percent), and twice that of nonmillenials.

The report does note a bias toward higher millennial resignation rates, since the chief difference between millennials and nonmillennials is the length of their tenure at a company. Workers’ tenure at a company is directly correlated to age, and resignation rates are inversely correlated to tenure (resignation rates are lower with longer tenure).

Related: Millennials on the lookout for better workplace

To eliminate that bias, the report compared millennials with low-tenured employees in many areas, and found that when considering workers with less than four years of tenure, millennials still resigned nearly twice as often as nonmillennials, at 34.5 percent compared with 19.4 percent.

That said, the report identifies some very specific triggers that employers need to forestall if they truly want to hang on to workers rather than constantly replace them.

The manager effect

Bosses might be surprised to learn that among millennials who are not managers, the resignation rate is 36.2 percent, while those millennials who have made it to manager status resign at a rate of just 11.9 percent. (Incidentally, the report also finds that nonmillennial managers also resign at a considerably lower rate than their nonmanager colleagues, at a rate of 8.8 percent compared with 21.7 percent.

(Source: Visier)

There’s a hitch here, though; you can’t just make a millennial a manager and expect them to stay. Says the report: “[T]he resignation rate for millennial managers increases significantly if they are not promoted.” It’s 5.2 percent higher than average, in fact. And millennial men are more likely to quit over lack of promotion than millennial women.

Internal mobility

Then there’s their ability to move within the company, which is plagued by gender bias; according to the report, overall, male millennials move internally 1.5 times as often as female millennials, but male and female millennial managers have the same internal hire rate. Millennial women who are not managers, however, are less likely to be hired into new roles within the company. Therefore, millennial women who are able to get promoted to manager not only have a better earning potential (because managers earn, on average, twice the salary of nonmanagers) but also have more opportunity for internal movement.

(Source: Visier)

Based on these findings, Visier offers several recommendations for thwarting potential loss of employees, particularly overlooked, high-performing talent. These recommendations include:

Overall, Visier suggests, the best way to keep your top talent is to create processes to help identify them and then work to satisfy their desire for recognition and drive for advancement.

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