Thirty percent gone within a year: what Luxembourg's exit numbers are telling HR

"Month 1: onboarding focus” against “Month 6: exit risk”

Thirty percent of foreign workers who come to Luxembourg leave within their first year. Half are gone within five years.

I did not calculate these numbers myself. They come from a Liser (Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research) study on the Luxembourg labour market, reported recently by Delano. But I have watched them play out in individual cases for more than two decades, one relocation at a time.

What the numbers mean for a hiring plan

Do the arithmetic on your own team. If you hire ten international employees this year, a one-year exit rate of 30% says three of them will be gone within twelve months, independent of how strong the offer looked on day one, how qualified they were, or how well the interview process went. By year five, on these figures, half of the original ten will have moved on.

That is not a comment on any individual employee's commitment. It is a description of what happens, on average, to people brought into an unfamiliar country and a demanding professional environment at the same time.

Where the planning usually stops

Companies plan relocation logistics with real rigour: work permit, flight, first week of onboarding, sometimes a welcome package. What is planned far less often is month six, the point where the initial excitement of a new country has worn off and the accumulated friction, an unresolved administrative issue, a partner who has not found work or friends, a child struggling to settle into a new school system, starts to weigh more than the appeal of the original opportunity.

That is usually the moment a departure decision gets made quietly, well before anyone in HR hears about it.

What a longer plan looks like

I am not arguing that relocation logistics do not matter. Getting them wrong creates its own, immediate exit risk. I am arguing that they are necessary and not sufficient.

𝐀 𝐬𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠-𝐢𝐧 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐞𝐱𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐬 𝐩𝐚𝐬𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐢𝐫𝐬𝐭 𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐤, covering the practical steps a family faces in the following months, school enrolment progress, the partner's own path to work or occupation, a functioning social circle, deserves the same seriousness as the visa file. In my experience, this is exactly the period companies stop paying close attention, right as it becomes the period that decides whether the relocation was worth the investment.

A different way to read these figures

I would encourage any HR team reading these numbers to treat them less as a fact about Luxembourg and more as a description of an unmanaged transition. The transition can be managed. It rarely is, past week one.

Source: Liser, Luxtalent report

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