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Board OntologyHR

Involuntary Turnover Rate

Annualized rate of company-initiated separations as a percentage of average headcount. Complement to `hr.voluntary_turnover_rate`; together they form the total turnover picture per the Mercer US Turnover Survey methodology. Common pitfall: lumping one-time RIFs into the steady-state rate, which makes the trend unreadable. Best practice is to report steady-state involuntary turnover and call out any RIF events separately in `hr.board_actions` with the headcount delta. — HR KPI anchored to Mercer US Turnover Survey 2025.

Rogue ID: hr.involuntary_turnover_rate Type: Percentage (%) Domain: HR

Definition

Annualized rate of company-initiated separations as a percentage of average headcount. Complement to hr.voluntary_turnover_rate; together they form the total turnover picture per the Mercer US Turnover Survey methodology. Common pitfall: lumping one-time RIFs into the steady-state rate, which makes the trend unreadable. Best practice is to report steady-state involuntary turnover and call out any RIF events separately in hr.board_actions with the headcount delta.

Formula

Involuntary Turnover Rate (annualized) = (Terminations in period / Average Headcount in period) × (12 / months in period) × 100. Convention: exclude announced RIF events from the steady-state series; report them separately with headcount delta. Per Mercer US Turnover Survey methodology.

Why it matters

A read on performance-management cadence and any active restructuring. Sustained near-zero raises questions about management discipline; sustained-elevated raises questions about hiring quality or strategy thrash.

How to interpret

US all-industry total turnover historically clusters in the 18–25% annualized range per Mercer US Turnover Survey 2025 (§Total Turnover); involuntary typically represents 4–8% of that total (verify exact splits against the cited report — distributions vary by industry). Companies with very low involuntary rates (<2% annualized) often have buried under-performers; companies above ~8% steady-state typically have a hiring or onboarding-quality issue (industry folk-wisdom on the upper bound, not citation-grade).

  • hr.terminations
  • hr.performance_watch_count
  • hr.voluntary_turnover_rate
  • hr.talent_challenges

Source

Mercer US Turnover Survey 2025 · section: Involuntary Turnover — published 2025-03-01.

Why does this cite Mercer US Turnover Survey 2025? Read the ontology methodology for the published vs editorial tier system, attribution rules, and dispute process.

Stage relevance

Company stagePriority
Series ARecommended
Series BRecommended
Series C+Recommended
PublicRecommended

Suggested for stages: Series A, Series B, Series C+, Public.

Default owning functions

  • HR

Machine-readable

In-jurisdiction jobs retained

Number of jobs inside a public funder's jurisdiction that were RETAINED across the reporting period — a FLOW, not a stock, and the second half of the created/retained pair SSBCI 2.0 and most US state incentive programmes require. CONVENTION (pinned deliberately — retention has genuinely contested definitions, and two boards reporting incomparable numbers into one portfolio total is the failure this pin exists to prevent): an in-jurisdiction position that was FILLED AT THE START of the reporting period AND is STILL FILLED BY THE SAME EMPLOYEE, in-jurisdiction, AT THE END. Three consequences follow, and they are the convention: (1) BACKFILLS DO NOT COUNT — same seat, new person is not a retained job (that person is `hr.in_jurisdiction_jobs_created` if their first day fell in the period); (2) it is ENDPOINT CONTINUITY, not continuous employment on every day of the period, because endpoints are what payroll records can actually evidence; (3) retained and `hr.in_jurisdiction_jobs_created` are DISJOINT — a job is one or the other in a period, never both, so the two are safe to add. The invariant this yields, which validates the pair against the stock series: retained employees are a subset of the in-jurisdiction workforce at BOTH endpoints, so `retained <= min(hr.in_jurisdiction_headcount[t-1], hr.in_jurisdiction_headcount[t])`. Same FTE-equivalent, employees-only, primary-work-location test as `hr.in_jurisdiction_headcount`; contractors excluded. REPORTED BY THE COMPANY (`production: "primary"`) — retention has no stock analogue and cannot be computed from headcount snapshots at all: it is a statement about continuity of specific roles across a period, not a count at an instant. — HR KPI, I'mBoard-authored (editorial tier).

Key Hires

Field-array of notable individual hires that warrant board-level visibility — typically C-1 executives, director-level functional leaders, and strategic specialist hires. Per-item shape: name, level, role, start status, days-to-fill. Rendered via the T2 collapsible-card gallery pattern. Structural, not numeric — formula does not apply. Common pitfall: listing every hire instead of the strategic few — boards lose signal quickly when this section turns into a directory. — HR KPI, I'mBoard-authored (editorial tier).

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