The Tale of Two Hires: What a Candy Bar Can Teach Us About Employee Lifetime Value

Imagine for a moment that you run a corner store in a sleepy town in Maine. You sell newspapers, gum, and a peculiar brand of imported chocolate bars that melt too quickly in the summer. One day, two high schoolers walk in looking for a job.

The first, let’s call her Sarah, is energetic, sharp, and asks, “How often do people buy these chocolates?” before she’s even handed an apron. The second, we’ll name him Mark, is polite and well-meaning but just wants to clock in, clock out, and go home.

Now, if you were thinking in terms of cost-per-hour or training budget, maybe the difference between Sarah and Mark wouldn’t seem like much. But if you were thinking like a behavioral economist—or a business leader who’s read just a little too much Peter Drucker—you’d be thinking about something else entirely: Employee Lifetime Value.

We tend to think of employees the way we think of furniture purchases. What did it cost? How long will it last? Can we keep the receipt? But people are not furniture. They’re more like compounding investments—variable, unpredictable, shaped by context, culture, and the quality of the espresso in the break room.

Employee Lifetime Value, or ELTV if you like acronyms that sound like cable channels, is a deceptively simple idea. It’s the total net value an employee brings to your company over the course of their time with you. But “simple” and “easy” are two very different words. Simple ideas have a tendency to sneak up on you.

Because here’s the catch: ELTV isn’t about who you hire. It’s about how you make that hire matter. It’s about whether Sarah gets bored and leaves in six months, or becomes your best store manager in five years. It’s about whether Mark stays for a decade, quietly consistent, or whether he plateaus and creates a culture of “good enough.”

The difference between a low ELTV and a high ELTV is rarely a function of raw intelligence or résumé polish. It’s a function of onboarding. It’s how fast you help someone get from zero to productive. It’s whether your systems treat people like inputs or like investors. It's whether your company celebrates learning or just survival. And here's the kicker—it’s almost entirely within your control.

Back in 1996, a study looked at the productivity curves of software engineers. The least productive engineers didn’t just produce less—they sometimes produced negative value. They created bugs that others had to fix. That’s a chilling thought. But the top performers? They produced 10 times as much as the median. Not 10 percent more. Ten times. That study may be nearly three decades old, but its implications echo just as loudly today. Because even as work has changed—from cubicles to Slack threads—the gap between average and exceptional has not.

We make a mistake, I think, when we design workplaces to accommodate the average. We build orientation manuals, create evaluation forms, and design compensation packages with the "middle" in mind. But the middle doesn’t drive the business forward. It maintains. If you want lift-off, you invest in potential.

Imagine Sarah again. You don’t just hand her a task list—you give her an effective onboarding experience. One that explains the “why,” not just the “what.” You give her context, tools, feedback loops. She starts noticing patterns—certain bars sell better when placed near the register. Sales tick up. She gets promoted. She trains others. The whole culture lifts.

That’s ELTV. And it started not with luck or instinct, but with a process designed to help people thrive.

We don’t often think of HR metrics as stories. But they are. They’re stories of lost opportunity, of sudden leaps, of people miscast or underestimated. Employee Lifetime Value is a story, too—it’s just one that unfolds slowly, over meetings, feedback loops, and the quiet miracle of someone realizing they’re capable of more.

So the next time someone walks into your store—or your Zoom room—looking for a job, don’t just ask what they can do for you today. Ask what they could become tomorrow, if you built the right runway. Ask if you're building a system that deserves their best years.

Because no one ever built a great company on cost savings alone. But they’ve built plenty on people who felt seen, supported, and challenged.

And as for the chocolate bars? Turns out, Sarah moved them to the freezer aisle. Best quarter ever.

‍Download template: World-Class Onboarding for ELTV Impact: A 10-Point Checklist