You are Marina Salgado, HR director of Vértice Consultoria in São Paulo, eleven weeks into the job. The CFO has frozen your programme budget and given you ninety days to prove that one intervention pays for itself. Before you choose it, you have to tell her what is driving your best people out of the firm.
The situation
Vértice sells consulting hours to large Brazilian companies: 4,200 people, most of them billable consultants, and BRL 980 million of revenue in 2025. Voluntary turnover in the top two performance bands has reached 24%, against a professional-services benchmark near 15%. That is about 400 departures a year the firm did not want, and finance costs each one at BRL 180,000: some BRL 72 million a year, more than three times the entire HR programme budget.
That budget, BRL 22 million, has been frozen by the CFO, Beatriz Nakamura, after she found nothing in five years of records that tied it to a business number. If you cannot show a return within ninety days, it will be cut by 15% and the rest handed to the practices. Her review template already scores your function, out of 100: insight quality 12, causal confidence 8, manager adoption 15.
Five years of engagement surveys, ratings, promotions, manager reviews and project-staffing records sit in a warehouse nobody has queried to decide anything. And everyone already has an explanation. The executive committee says engagement: the survey fell last year, and it is the only firm-wide measure it sees. Line managers say HR does not understand billability. An analyst has noticed that exits bunch around the third year. And the staffing records suggest that the people who leave spent long stretches on the most loaded projects, under managers with low review scores. Camila Duarte, finance's business partner, has added one number: each point taken off the 24% is worth about BRL 3 million a year.