Sample frameDay 328·Hiring · Keep

Good morning. Nothing is going wrong today — which is the only condition in which you can see what's actually holding your best person here.

Hiring.

Job Embeddedness

5 min read·Apply by lunch

The question

Take the one person on your team whose resignation would genuinely hurt: can you name three relationships they'd lose by leaving, one way this job fits a life they've built outside it, and three things they'd have to give up that have nothing to do with salary? Most founders can recite what they pay that person to the dollar. Almost none can list what holds them.

The idea

In 2001 a team led by Terence Mitchell at the University of Washington published a paper in the Academy of Management Journal with a plain title: Why People Stay. The question behind it was narrow and unusually practical — what is actually holding the person who never goes anywhere? Working across two organisations, a grocery chain and a hospital, Mitchell's group built a six-dimension measure and found the answer arrived in three parts, each of them split in two. Links: the connections a person has, inside the organisation and outside it — colleagues, teams, a partner's job, a street they know. Fit: how well the job and the place match what they want their life to look like, again on both sides of the front door. Sacrifice: what leaving would cost them, from the half-finished project to the school run that finally works. Together they called it job embeddedness. What makes it useful rather than merely interesting is that all six cells are buildable — none of them is a mood you have to hope for, and most cost nothing. What makes them easy to neglect is that they're invisible while they hold. You find out which cells were empty on the morning somebody hands in their notice, which is exactly too late to fill them.

The framework

01
Links: the count of people who would notice.
Somebody whose only real relationship at work is with their manager is one bad quarter away from gone, and nothing on the org chart will show you that. Links are countable, so count them — don't estimate them. Who does this person work with weekly outside their own function? Who would they message at nine at night about a problem? Are they mentoring anybody, or being mentored? Mitchell's group counted the links outside work as well, which is the half most managers never think about. All of it can be built almost for free — cross-functional work, a real pairing, somebody junior to look after.
02
Does this job fit the life they're actually living?
Fit here isn't culture-deck fit. It's whether the shape of the job matches the shape of the life: the commute against where they've chosen to live, the hours against who they collect from school, the next twelve months against what they told you they wanted in three years. Mitchell's group split fit the same way they split everything — organisation on one side, community on the other — because a person rooted in a place, with a house, a partner's job, children with friendships, is much harder to move than an otherwise identical person on a six-month lease. That cuts both ways, and it is worth knowing which way for each of your people.
03
Sacrifice is something you build, not something you pay.
The instinct is to read sacrifice as money, which turns retention into a bidding war you can't win against anyone better funded. But the sacrifices that actually hold people are mostly non-financial and mostly cheap: an unfinished piece of work they care about, standing they've earned here that wouldn't transfer anywhere, a flexibility arrangement nobody else would grant, a skill they're acquiring on your time, a promise about next year that is visibly being kept. Each one is something they'd have to hand back. Your job isn't to trap anybody; it is to notice how much of this is invisible to the person who would be losing it.
04
You can run this on five people without asking any of them.
Take the five you'd hate to lose and write three columns against each name — links, fit, sacrifice — filling them in from what you already know. It takes twenty minutes and needs nobody's permission. The thin cells are your retention risks, and they're specific in a way that 'we should do more on culture' never manages to be. One person needs a second relationship. Another needs the arrangement that makes the school run work. A third has nothing here they'd be sorry to leave half-finished. Three different builds, none of them a pay review, all of them available this month.

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