This might just be me and my own immaturity, but in my experience, employees often count their eggs before they hatch, and once I start negotiating them down, I create a scenario where I can't get them fully aligned with my goals. They become a simple exchange of cash for labor and not someone who grows loyal or feels a sense of fairness, ownership and excitement about the role.
Maybe I am naive, but I feel like this creates a dynamic that hurts otherwise promising prospects.
They become a simple exchange of cash for labor and not someone who grows loyal or feels a sense of fairness, ownership and excitement about the role.
You've hit upon a fundamental tenet of Marxism: alienation [0]. You haven't said whether or not you offer equity as part of your compensation. If not, then it is somewhat unreasonable to expect that sort of loyalty from your employees. If so, then you have a challenging task of convincing people to buy in to your vision at a potentially high personal risk.
Today's economy is rife with alienation. So many people are constantly changing jobs or dropping out of the workforce [1]. Meanwhile, they're struggling inside a system that produces rampant cost disease [2] and staggering inequality, as illustrated by the dreaded "elephant graph" [3]. Overall, I think there's a growing sense of discontent with capitalism and this can manifest in suspicion towards employers.
Now I'll grant you that it's entirely unfair to lay all this at the feet of just a single employer such as yourself. I don't intend for this to come across as some kind of blame game. I merely hope to provide a larger context for ideas that many people may not even be consciously aware of but contribute to their feelings and instincts nonetheless.
at-will employment basically guarantees a lack of loyalty. You have no loyalty to me, so why should I have any to you? Everyone is a mercenary out to maximize their personal gain at the expense of everyone else. Not a world I particularly want to live in, but it wasn't my choice and it's a hard thing to change.
Luckily, most people out there aren't purely capitalistic, do-whatever-it-takes-to-make-a-buck sociopaths, but they're definitely out there, will play you like a pawn, and it might be a while after (or never) until you realize what happened and what role you played in their twisted little game.
To me, it's sad that we have humans literally dying because they can't afford better health insurance in this country while others play pricing games having ships full of oil sail around to manipulate the market into paying them more, or toiling to shave off a tenth of a millisecond for their high-speed quote stuffing system. The idea of money has become so remote and intangible in some cases that I hate how it's also used for things people actually need.
