> Retaining new grads beyond a year or two is notoriously difficult.

surely it's not that difficult:

the value to an employer of a, er, "lightly-used second hand" grad with +1-2 years of real world engineering experience is dramatically higher than that of a completely green new grad. if an employer takes the initiative to award market-rate anchored raises commensurate with the value a junior engineer with 1-2 years of experience can produce, wouldn't that solve most of the problem?

(or do junior engineers often switch jobs for reasons entirely unrelated to employers not offering market-rate salary progression? )

Retaining new grads is largely a function of companies being unwilling to recognize that when adjusted for experience salaries often increase 50% a year for new grads. HR departments often think 5% is a generous raise and the gap created over two years is staggering. Even if you get a promotion package with a 50% raise you end up getting something over a 25% raise for leaving (in terms of your newer higher salary).

It’s kind of shocking that we say retention is so hard it’s close to impossible when we don’t acknowledge our own processes lead to a dramatic salary shortfall. I think if we paid new engineers accurately in the first five years of their career the number leaving for new jobs would dramatically decline.

I think youre right for a lot of cases, but there are a few reasons Ive been subject to. You dont know what aspects of the work are persistent across orgs (grass is greener bias but maybe it actually is, its hard to tell), the work can be boring, you might be looking for a better cultural fit. My local team is very small and our tasks disparate, so local cooperation is lacking despite having to be in office. Processes may look smoother elsewhere, or you might just feel undervalued. You mention paying a competitive salary, that also seems hard to do via raises for some reason. Switching jobs can be such a waste but its your best chance to earn and learn more

> It’s true that if you can say “you can hire from {top N colleges like MIT}” then this would be attractive.

I'm not even sure this is true. The big tech companies that they are targeting can already hire from the top programs.

> Trouble is, this won’t scale beyond the top 10

This is the rub. How many graduates do the top 10 programs put out annually? That's a very hard cap on this sort of system, even if employers get on board with farming recruiting out to a bunch of undergrads. Picking very loose numbers of 10,000 grads annually, an incredible 10% adoption rate of the program, and $10,000 charged per placement. That's... 10m in revenue per year.

Thanks for your input! I agree with all your points. Right now, we're just doing things that don't scale and hoping it works out. A year after the first two batches graduate, hopefully we have enough data points to workout tangible benefits.

If you take away “universities where everyone wants to hire from but very few can”, I am personally dubious of what else there is left.

Also you might want to look to understand what went wrong at Triplebyte which wanted to provide a one interview-only experience for experienced candidates but it never worked. Companies still did their interviews. The company also had to pivot their business model from this and explained in detail why they did it [1]

Triplebyte was targeting a very valuable and hard-to-hire group of experienced engineers. You are targeting the easiest to hire group. Consider what will make you succeed as a business where Triplebyte could not, even though they solved for a much bigger pain point for hiring managers.

[1] https://triplebyte.com/blog/rethinking-triplebyte

Why would that be attractive to employers?

Why would it be a problem if opened up to more schools? I’d love to hear the subtext here made explicit.