Yahoo!'s Talent Keeps Bailing

A recent study found that while 50% of employees took a higher counteroffer when they said they had plans to leave a company, 93% of them still left the company in 18 months, says Martha Josephson, a partner at executive recruiter Egon Zehnder International.

Instead, Josephson says the key factor in determining whether top talent stays on board is whether the CEO seems to have a plan or not. "If they have articulated the plan for how to turn things around well, and it's a solid plan, then people won't pay so much attention to Wall Street," she says. "But they need to see where the company is headed."

CEO Terry Semel attempted to do just that. During the company's last conference call, he outlined a plan in which the company's highly anticipated Project Panama platform helps close the gap with Google in the bread-and-butter online advertising market.

Meanwhile, Yahoo! will use its huge global user base to try to charge into emerging categories such as social search and video.

But despite the calm tone, management trip-ups continue to raise the question of how solid the company's game plan is. Yahoo!'s contention that its weak results were part of a bigger industry slowdown proved to be off the mark when Google blew away its quarterly numbers.

Such missteps will make investors outside and employees inside more skeptical about Yahoo!'s ambitious plan to put its house back in order.

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