The companies employees don't want to leave in 2023

Following a 2022 look at where people stay put, MakeResume went back to LinkedIn to rank large companies by average tenure in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia — who holds staff the longest, and who loses them the fastest.

The work you trained for may feel nothing like writing late-night TV. The 2023 WGA Writers Strike still rhymes with almost every other industry: people want fair pay, some security, and a human response to economic and technology shocks. Hollywood writers stayed in the fight in part because they love the work. They also wanted respect.

Plenty of employers already treat retention as both a people issue and good business. Our 2022 snapshot found that places such as HSBC Bank USA and Neutrogena kept people longer than the short-lived “Great Resignation” narrative suggested. This 2023 update names the very best and worst retention records among large firms in four countries — useful if you are weighing a hop against a stay, or comparing markets with our job-hopping capitals by city.

How did we rank companies by employee tenure?

We analyzed the LinkedIn pages of the top 100 companies by market cap in the U.S., UK, Canada, and Australia, then ranked each business by average tenure to find who retains staff best.

Tenure is a blunt metric. It mixes people who love the work with people who stay because options are thin, and it can be pulled down by recent hiring sprees or layoffs. It is still a public, comparable signal of how long people last once they join. Data is as of June 2023.

Which companies keep employees the longest?

Across the four countries, the longest average tenures sit in energy, distribution, insurance, and steel. The shortest sit in consumer tech, hotels, outsourcing, and resources firms with very young workforces.

• U.S.: the company with the longest average tenure is ConocoPhillips (10.6 years), and the company with the shortest is Apple (1.7 years).
• UK: Bunzl holds onto its employees the longest (10.2 years), InterContinental Hotels Group the shortest (1.6 years).
• Canada: Great-West Lifeco employees stay the longest (10.8 years), Telus International the shortest (1.5 years).
• Australia: BlueScope Steel employees stay the longest (9.7 years) and Liontown Resources the shortest (0.6 years).

Country	Longest average tenure	Shortest average tenure
United States	ConocoPhillips — 10.6 years	Apple — 1.7 years
United Kingdom	Bunzl — 10.2 years	InterContinental Hotels Group — 1.6 years
Canada	Great-West Lifeco — 10.8 years	Telus International — 1.5 years
Australia	BlueScope Steel — 9.7 years	Liontown Resources — 0.6 years

Which U.S. companies have the longest employee tenure?

ConocoPhillips, Alaska's largest crude oil producer, leads a U.S. top ten dominated by energy and engineering firms, with an average tenure of 10.6 years.

The company offers university scholarships to attract younger talent and “challenging and rewarding projects around the world” for military veterans moving into civilian work, according to its careers positioning.

Altria Group, in joint second place, is the only retailer in the top 20. The cigarette company is in an existential pivot toward smokeless tobacco. Employees are used to new problems: from the start they rotate across roles and departments in a “thoughtful and purposeful” process meant in part to surface underused potential.

Which U.S. companies have the shortest employee tenure?

Several of America's best-known brands struggle to keep people. Tesla, Goldman Sachs, Netflix, Mastercard, and Alphabet (Google) sit among the bottom 20. Apple, Amazon, and Meta (Facebook) all struggle to hold employees for more than two years — Apple at 1.7 years.

A few years earlier, Apple was praised for retention tactics. Then, in an effort to keep some engineers from leaving for Meta and others, it offered stock grants worth $50,000 to $180,000. Observers argued the bonuses created divisions, while even people who received them could feel oddly undervalued if deeper workplace issues went untouched. If you are interviewing at those firms, our look at tech-giant interview processes is a useful companion to tenure stats: getting in and staying are different problems.

Which UK company retains employees the longest?

Bunzl, a business-supplies group with 19th-century family roots, has the longest UK average tenure in this study at 10.2 years.

The name can sound like a start-up. The firm was established in the UK in 1940 as Tissue Papers Limited after its owners relocated from Nazi Austria. The family business traces back to a haberdashery started by Moritz Bunzl in Slovakia in 1854.

It tries to keep a family feel across 22,500 employees in an international operation by keeping branches in contact. Incentives run through a range of educational funds, financial solutions, spending accounts, and reduced-price stock.

Which UK firms lose staff the fastest?

InterContinental Hotels Group has the shortest UK tenure here at 1.6 years. Tesco, the country's biggest supermarket chain, sits at a middling 4.4 years. NatWest also struggles to hold people for two years.

Big UK names from several industries compete to be the place people leave. Tesco is the country's biggest supermarket chain. Aware that staff represent the brand, InterContinental has turned to AI tools to understand employee potential.

“Deploying the right people to deliver the true brand experience is a huge undertaking with our focus on increasing employee retention and improving performance in order to maximize customer satisfaction,” says Hazel Hogben, a head of HR at the company. Whether using AI to “capture and analyze employee performance” actually lifts morale is still an open question.

Which Canadian employer has the longest tenure?

Great-West Lifeco has the longest average tenure in this entire four-country study, at 10.8 years.

Grace Palombo, the company's chief human resources officer, was named one of Canada's Top 100 Most Powerful Women in 2018.

“Grace's exceptional leadership has put in place strategies to ensure we have the right talent to meet our current and future business needs,” says Paul Mahon, Great-West's president and chief executive officer. “This recognition is a true testament to our shared values of doing what's right, building trust and partnership, and putting people first in all that we do.”

Which Canadian company has the shortest tenure?

Telus International has Canada's shortest average tenure in this ranking, at 1.5 years. Shopify is also near the bottom, with an average of about two years.

Telus, established in 2005, offers “Employer Solutions” among its services and even publishes its own take on staff retention. One employee put it this way on Glassdoor: “the company has all the bells and whistles but they're at the whim of their client. You may request time off, but if the requirements of the client aren't met — it's rejected.”

Shopify also offers retention advice despite that two-year average. The Ottawa-based company laid off over 1,000 staff in 2022 and thousands more in May 2023, after restructuring its employee compensation scheme. It is known for gaming-oriented leadership and an employee e-sports team. A video-game metaphor for HR landed poorly: billionaire CEO Tobi Lütke described layoff decisions as “looking at side quests and figuring out which weren't contributing to the main ‘game’ story of the company,” according to one ex-employee.

Which Australian company keeps staff the longest?

BlueScope Steel has Australia's longest average tenure in this study, at 9.7 years, across more than 8,000 employees and contractors at 35 sites.

The company recently scored a retention win by offering personalized gift cards after a hard Covid and post-lockdown stretch, according to an O.C. Tanner write-up.

“The initiative's success was not so much in the design or the tool. It was more in the delivery. It was so stakeholder heavy because we were delivering a message to every employee, where every employee and manager would be impacted, so we had to make sure every aspect of the messaging was 100% aligned,” says BlueScope HR manager Rebecca Roberts. The scheme was reportedly touching enough that security guards celebrated with cartwheels.

Which Australian businesses have the highest turnover?

Australia is home to the four shortest average tenures in this entire study. Ansell, Novonix, Atlassian, and Liontown Resources all fail to keep employees longer than an average of one and a half years. Liontown Resources is shortest at 0.6 years.

Sarah Larson, former head of talent management and development at Atlassian, recommends pre-empting exit interviews with “stay interviews.” Larson herself left after 2.7 years. LinkedIn data put average tenure at 1.1 years — a figure that could have been pulled down by a round of layoffs.

Should you stay at a company just because tenure looks good?

No. Nobody should stay somewhere that makes them miserable. At the other extreme, hopping every 18 months is a weak career strategy because it can read as a lack of commitment and it limits how deep your skills get.

Staying under 18 months “sends quite a few negative signals,” says Amy Zimmerman, a hiring manager at Relay Payments. “Number one, you lack commitment. Number two, you lack perseverance. It tells me that if the going gets tough, you get going.”

A couple of two-year roles can show you can adapt. Three to five years is “wonderful,” says Randstad's Jaya Dass. Full company-level figures sit in the interactive table below. Checking out without leaving is a different pattern — if that is your current mode, read what quiet quitting actually describes before you confuse withdrawal with a plan.

Your employer is responsible for conditions and should take a genuine interest in your professional well-being. Your happiness at work is still not theirs alone. Up to 80% of employees treat work as something to endure. Teachers of a Berkeley program called The Science of Happiness argue you can still improve the lot you have by building a two-way sense of purpose, engagement, resilience, and kindness.

Whether you write sitcoms or spreadsheets, staying for several seasons still takes craft. Occupation-specific resume examples help you show both adaptability and commitment. When you do move, a tailored file in the resume builder and a short cover letter beat a dump of every job you ever had. Aligning materials with the next role is how you look for a place you might actually want to keep — not only a place that happens to have a long average tenure.

How was the employee tenure study conducted?

To find which companies employees did not want to leave in 2023, we analyzed LinkedIn pages of the top 100 companies in the UK, U.S., Canada, and Australia and compared average tenure.

First we collected the top 100 companies by market cap using CompaniesMarketCap.com for each country. Then we analyzed each company's LinkedIn page and collected median tenure when available, ranking businesses by that average.

The data of this analysis is correct as of June 2023.

Note: Some companies were excluded from the analysis as their main headquarters were not in the country at study as a result of trading in different exchanges.

Frequently asked questions

Which company has the longest employee tenure in this study?

Great-West Lifeco in Canada, at 10.8 years on average, has the longest tenure of any firm in the four-country ranking. ConocoPhillips leads the U.S. (10.6 years), Bunzl the UK (10.2), and BlueScope Steel Australia (9.7).

Which company has the shortest tenure?

Liontown Resources in Australia, at 0.6 years. Other short tenures include Apple in the U.S. (1.7 years), InterContinental Hotels Group in the UK (1.6), and Telus International in Canada (1.5).

Does short tenure always mean a bad employer?

No. Fast-growing tech firms, recent layoffs, young workforces, and contractor-heavy models can all pull averages down. Tenure is a signal, not a culture audit. Read reviews, talk to people who work there, and weigh pay and growth against how long you actually want to stay.

How current is this data?

LinkedIn tenure figures were collected as of June 2023, from the top 100 companies by market cap in each country via CompaniesMarketCap.com. Rankings can shift after hiring waves, rebrands (see the Elevance Health correction), or layoffs.

Should I avoid applying to companies with short tenure?

Not automatically. Short tenure can mean rapid promotion as well as churn. Use it as one input next to role quality, manager, and your own timeline. If you already hop often, a longer-tenure employer may help the next resume read as more stable.