TO: Warren Pullman, CEO, Next Level Software Corporation

FROM: Darren Waters, Business Analyst, Wade & Dade Consulting

SUBJECT: Recommendations on boosting recruiting and employee retention & productivity

Our research indicates that if you want to attract top talent, your company needs to appear innovative, which is best accomplished by copying business strategies that are already widely adopted by more fashionable companies. The primary trend you should focus on is constructing a new, modern office park, which you should call a ‘campus’ to facilitate employees deluding themselves into believing they are still enjoying their college glory days.

The primary entrance to the office should be a ten-story slide, as this will make coming to work seem like a fun activity and should assuage any uneasiness your employees may feel when you search them for contraband prior to entering the building. The slide must be too tall and steep for employees to scale, however, so they will be forced to exit the office through a different path, preferably a six-mile maze with moving walls that steer employees back toward their desks. Thus, workers will be encouraged to remain at the office, rather than wasting precious hours at home.

Accordingly, you should provide cots in your employees’ cubicles to accommodate those who choose to sleep at the office. The cots should have mattresses of low but not abysmal quality, so that employees will wake up with enough energy to accomplish their daily slog of work but not so much energy as to be able to effectively reevaluate what they are doing with their lives. Installing individual toilets beside the cots may prove a worthwhile investment as well, as it will make it easier for employees to reach our target of spending 23 hours per day in their cubicles.

The office cafeteria should offer free foods of the greasy, fattening variety, leaving employees feeling sluggish and content to remain seated at their desks for hours on end. You should also have some flavorless foods on hand to serve to any employees who appear overstimulated.

To further encourage sleeping and eating at the office, we suggest locating the campus in San Francisco, where housing and food prices are high enough that being able to live at work can be advertised as yet another perk of the job.

We also encourage you to install an employees-only singles bar on campus. This will foster intra-office dating, thereby increasing the likelihood of employees’ private, romantic lives revolving around work and helping suppress any thoughts employees may have about reentering life on the outside. By also providing an office wedding chapel and a maternity ward in the campus health clinic, you can ensure that even the later stages of employee couples’ relationships can take place entirely within the confines of Next Level Software.

It is possible that, in time, these practices could give Next Level Software a reputation for being ‘cultish,’ which could discourage external applicants from seeking positions with you. To account for this, we recommend providing free on-campus daycare and private schools for employees’ children, allowing you to train and indoctrinate them from a young age to become the next generation of Next Level workers, with higher aptitude and lower expectations than any that have come before them.

We firmly believe that constructing such an office complex is the best way to remain competitive in the tech sector, or at least to convince the public of your competitiveness enough to significantly boost the value of your stock options. We recommend deciding if you want to act on this quickly, as Alcatraz Island just came on the market, and it would be an ideal location (ocean view offices are very hot right now).