From the course: Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh on Creating an Alliance with Employees

Rotational tours

From the course: Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh on Creating an Alliance with Employees

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Rotational tours

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- The first kind of tour of duty is the rotational tour of duty, and the goal of that rotational tour of duty is really to give the person a set of experiences that's gonna allow them to make a more interesting decision about where their career wants to go after that. The idea behind the rotational tour of duty is that it provides scalability to your hiring process. A tour of duty that has to be personalized and individualized isn't a good fit when you're trying to bring in a thousand people at once, and isn't a good fit for people who are just starting out in their careers who know less about what their aspirations are and where things want to go. Many people are familiar with rotational tours of duty because they're practiced by companies like Goldman Sachs or McKinsey and Company, where somebody's gonna graduate from college, work for that company for two years, learn the ropes, and then head off to business school or possibly join another company. The idea behind the rotational tour of duty is it's an ideal way to onboard people into a company. And that rotational tour of duty is very explicit. It's going to end after some period of time, and having gotten them into the company, it's gonna give them the experiences that allow them to then further define a truly transformational tour of duty for their next tour of duty. Some of the companies that are doing a great job with rotational tours of duty are the traditional employers like General Electric. General Electric is a gigantic company, and they hire thousands of new hires straight out of college every year. And the reason why so many companies love to hire people out of General Electric is that General Electric uses its rotational tours of duty to give people incredible experiences. They start off working in one business unit, they rotate to another business unit, and by acquiring all these different experiences, and taking in the General Electric way, it's a great management training program, whether they're going to stay at G.E., or they're going to move on to another company.

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