This week, a teacher-turned-engineering leader shares how she built a rotation program that’s kept her org’s non-regrettable attrition at next to zero.
The Rotation Program That Keeps This Startup’s Engineers Learning — and Not Leaving
Back when Krista Moroder worked in education, she learned something important about how to keep everyone engaged. It wasn’t always the kids with bad grades who school leaders worried about most. It was the kids who didn’t have a teacher champion — someone to help them find something that excited them — who ended up slipping through the cracks.
Many years (and a major career pivot) later, she noticed a parallel in her perch as VP of Engineering at a late-stage startup, Checkr. When facing down the threat of turnover in her org, she suspected it wasn’t just the usual culprits like compensation that cause engineers’ “three-year itch.”
“The one thing I've seen across the board is that engineers leave because they get bored,” says Moroder. “Engineers are allergic to monotony — the job itself is literally automating repetitive tasks. If engineers aren’t constantly learning, they’ll leave.” And that’s especially true in the AI age, when eng folks will quickly get antsy if they feel out of touch with the latest tech.
Moroder came to Checkr during a hiring surge back in 2019, which meant many of the engineers on her team would hit the notorious three-year cliff around the same time. So she set out to intervene before then, turning to an informal organizational practice to shore up retention: rotations.
Rotation programs are typically found at bigger companies, offering recent college grads a time-bound tour of different parts of an org before they commit to a full-time role. That’s why we were excited to talk to Moroder — she’s built out a successful rotation program a bit earlier in a company’s life than is typical.
It’s a win-win approach for engineers and the org as a whole: Engineers get a chance to work on new projects and train up on new skills (like AI), while the company can move its sharpest tech talent around to solve its thorniest challenges.
“Folks now point to this rotation program as the main reason they’re still here. They’ll tell us, ‘I've had three careers here,’” she says. As a result of the program, Moroder’s org is incredibly tenured, with non-regrettable attrition around 2% (AKA just one person left) — and 60% of staff engineers and above have been at the company for six or more years.
In this exclusive interview, Moroder breaks down how she stood up this program at Checkr, from how she designed the rotations to how she got reluctant managers on board.
Here’s a preview of her tactics:
- Create a spreadsheet to track everyone in your org. “Every manager should have that spreadsheet, full stop,” she says. “You should know every year what everyone is working on at a higher level. Even if you're managing a 100-person org, you need it.”
- Check in before making any moves permanent. Moroder clarifies that rotations aren’t transfers, but rather a temporary assignment to staff up high-priority projects that folks are interested in tackling. “We don’t approve every rotation. You can't just rotate or move teams because you want to. We have to agree that there's space for it and it makes sense,” she says.
- Give managers a pep talk to give away their people. When Moroder first pitched the idea of a rotation program to managers in her org, some balked at it — they were hesitant to let go of their star players. So she made the case that that was a problem in itself. “If you can't afford to lose someone on your team, that's a succession issue. You need to figure that out,” she says.
Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing!
-The Review Editors
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