What Comes First: The Investment or the Love?

The current jobs market in the United States is in a state of massive flux. The CoVID pandemic has upended many industries and challenged many long held assumptions about the economy in general and jobs in particular. There is significant turnover among employees. This week JTA reported that there are 80 synagogues affiliated with the Conservative Movement seeking new Rabbis, while there are a maximum of 60 eligible Rabbis from the Conservative Movement that are seeking new positions. Just as it is important to fill a job opening it is equally important to fill an open positon with the right person. As Jim Collins writes in his bestselling book Good To Great, companies and organizations need to get the right people (ie employees) on the bus, and also find the right seat (ie role) for those who are on the bus. In order to accomplish this, some companies have adopted an interesting strategy: pay employees to quit. For instance, the software company Trainual offers some employees up to $5,000 to leave after the first few weeks. Trainual CEO Chris Ronzio said about this policy, “It’s important to know really quickly if we’ve found the right people… When you’re interviewing, you really only get a glimpse of the business you’re going to work for and the role.” He concludes that “If someone knows a week or two in that this is not their long-term place or position, it gets more expensive to replace them as they take on more work and responsibility. By offering new hires $5,000, we give them the opportunity to opt out after two weeks if they have any sense of doubt.”

A few years ago, the Atlantic ran a story about Amazon’s “pay to quit” policy. (Interesting to note that Amazon just discontinued this policy a few months ago). In that article it noted that the stated goal of such an offer is to weed out those who don’t want to work there. Amazon doesn’t want unhappy workers. As expensive and time consuming it is to find a new employee, in the long term it is a better investment to cut one’s losses early on, and even to pay some money up front to end a working relationship that is doomed to fail. However, the article also noted that this offer can have an even greater impact for those who choose to stay. Yale Law School professor Ian Ayres suggests that all of the employees who considered taking the offer but decided to stay, have essentially invested $5,000 into their career at Amazon. So not only does the offer weed out unhappy employees, it creates employees who really want their career at Amazon to have long-term success.

One of the more famous questions on Parashas Terumah is why the pasuk says ויקחו לי תרומה (“take for Me a donation”) and not “ויתנו לי תרומה “give to Me a donation” R. Eliyahu Schlesinger suggests that HaShem wanted Bnei Yisrael to be invested in the Torah. He wanted them to serve HaShem out of love, not because He forced them to accept the Torah, but because they were personally interested and invested in this idea. Their giving of money was not a gift; it was an investment and therefore, the word ויקחו is most appropriate. We invest in those things that we love. But we also develop a love for those things in which we invest. Sometimes the love comes first. But sometimes the investment comes first and the love follows.