Firms are increasingly using statistical analysis to find out which employees are more likely to leave, and using this information to improve personnel management and target employees for interventions to make staying more worthwhile. Firms do this because replacing employees who leave can be very expensive, making the analysis and the responses cheap in comparison. It says a lot that Wal-Mart, a firm known to be careful about its expenses, is investing in such analysis. It is probably less surprising that Credit Suisse does so, given the importance of keeping staff in banking, or that some human-resource analytics firms do, given that they can use these results to keep their own staff and sell the methods to client firms.
