What is the business strategy behind underpaying homegrown talent? It seems like most firms follow this policy and it leads to high turnover rates that they’re supposedly trying to avoid.

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They can afford to do this because entry-mid levels are cheap to replace, and the firm will benefit from those that suffer to get to the top and the promised payout because the firm underpaid them on the way to get there

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Well there’s two sides to it, firms don’t hire that many experienced folks at the junior to mid levels because there’s a pipeline with cheap talent from recruiting. The added $ they pay for experienced hires is not that much in the grand scheme of overall regular consulting churn

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The savings of keeping everyone’s salary below market over time outweighs the costs of turnover.

Or perhaps no one actually bothers to do the analysis.

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Because of the 2nd part of my answer.

Because you are implying that the business is making these decisions. It's not - it's the executives that are making these decisions.

For those individual executives, they are often only there in the short term, not the long run. Therefore, they are only worried about short term effects as opposed to the long run of the business.

In the short term, being cheap often works. Your clients are either too intertwined with you to change or they don't notice the drop in quality, and you have a few extra bucks in your pockets.

Over time, the drop in quality and infrastructure are easier to see and have more significant impacts on the business... but by the time these impacts are felt, the people who cut the costs are often long gone.

Consulting firms are actually a lot better than most businesses in this regard. Oracle, Schlitz, and Blockbuster all come to mind as companies who chose short term thinking over long term for the short term benefits provided to those executives.

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If you rise up from the ranks and you aren’t leaving, the firm doesn’t need to pay you significantly more to retain you. It might need to do that to attract talent from other firms where people are in a similar situation.

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I’ve found the homegrown talent is always favorited and treated better in every way imaginable other than their salaries. Just a side note

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Totally agree with your question. Which is why I left my firm after 3 years for a 50% raise!

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Same, and then I did it again after 5!

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Side note: is this the reason a lot of the home grown talent (not all, just a lot) acts kinda like snooty dicks to everyone who comes in from outside? They seem to often have little clicks and act like jackasses, maybe 60% of the time

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Uhm...💵💵💵💵💵💵💵💵💵💵💵

Loyalty is never rewarded

Homegrown talent doesn’t always have the expertise that experienced hires are expected to have. Especially if your bouncing project to project doing PMO type work.

I don’t think that’s what it’s about, most of them don’t do PMO. They’re also favored by management and everyone else in general. Just luring in talent costs money, have to give someone a raise to get them to come to your firm. If every firm raised everyone’s salaries every time a new person came in with a new higher salary, they’d all be at astronomical levels by now

The strategy is you pay as little as you have to. Unfortunately all the big firms know what each other pays for talent, definitely at entry level. There’s no reason to compete on salary amongst like firms (big 4). If one firm starts to pay significantly more, all the others are going to match and all the firms end up losing by paying more for the same talent.

Then once you get people in, you try to find the lowest raise you can give without losing the people you want to keep. Again, this is in a lot of ways consistent across service lines/firms. Some types of work (staff aug type stuff) you don’t necessarily need SMEs so no reason to pay premium salaries. Yeah, you might lose your best people but really big 4 at least compete on volume more so than niche expertise. Of course there are exceptions, but when they’re determining salary bands for various levels I would guess this comes into play.

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