Leadership Excellence: Attract and Retain Great People Part 1
Attracting and retaining talent is a huge issue for every type of organization out there, and a big trouble spot for many corporate balance sheets. Why? The market's flooded with endless bad advice, all of which sounds either cleverly self-serving or cutting edge... but is ultimately self-defeating and phony.
So whether you’re wondering why:
You’ve become “aggressively disinterested” in your own workplace, or…
You can’t find a workplace you like, or…
All the most talented people you’re trying to hire are yawning during their job interviews,
…just read on!
Bad Advice
Naturally, there’s a ton of advice to be found on this subject. Unfortunately, most of it is bad.
Why? Because it’s pretty much all grounded in the nineteenth century idea that employees are basically commodities to be selected from a list of requirements, used and disposed of - an attitude implicit in the term “Human Resources”.
Organizations working on this basis try to slap all kinds of fancy new features on this crashed operating system, from open-concept workplaces to new recruitment initiatives for millennials to social media network-based recruitment. This keeps consultants busy, but the point they’re all missing is that the Human Resources approach is based on a flawed program.
But that’s alright. There’s an analogue solution of elegant simplicity.
Back to Basics
If you really want to excel at drawing talented people to you, motivating them and getting them to stick around, there’s no getting around the fact that you have to dump this industrial-age claptrap. The emerging economy is starting to punish organizations that objectify their workforces, and so is the talent pool.
So, what’s the alternative? Let’s go back to basics for a moment. Forget for about organizations, companies, employers and employees. Let’s assume that none of those concepts exist, and your sole job is facilitation. Human beings are by nature creators, as well as beings with needs and wants. When you approach anyone, you should have two questions:
What do you [want to] create?
What do you most need or want?
Talk to enough people, you can begin to match the creative talent to the people who want what it produces, and to the people who can collaborate to make it better. Sounds almost too simple, right? And it would- after a couple of centuries’ worth of industrial propaganda, we can hardly remember a time when human beings worked for their own and each others’ benefit and not for the benefit of the company, the shareholders or some other organization.
The truth is that the best leaders can take this approach and make it practical and profitable for everyone. This is very much what happens every day in the most flexible emerging sectors, from green tech to app development.
What Not To Do
As you may have seen, when many organizations go talent-hunting, the first thing they do is make a shopping list, representing an imaginary array of traits, experience and training that their ideal employee should have. They then devise a series of hoops through which their candidates must jump to demonstrate that they meet these criteria.
They are, in effect, looking for their perfect commodity and testing to make sure they’ve got it... much as an aerospace company might test a new alloy.
The moment you take this approach, you’re setting yourself up for failure.
All you’ve done is create a series of barriers that prevent you from actually getting to know your potential coworkers and letting them get to know what you’re all about. Why do we say that? Because all those qualifications and years of experience don’t represent ability. They’re conventionalised proxies for ability, just as interviews and tests are proxies for workplace competence.
None of these things guarantees you’ll get the people who can do the job well, let alone the people who can drive your organization forward. All this process guarantees is an increasingly cynical talent pool exhaustedly jumping through your hoops without any idea of whether or not you’re actually what they’re looking for.
Worse, that list of requirements is not based on what’s possible. It’s based on preconceptions about what your organization does now and how it does it. It’s an approach designed to fit a new cog into the machine. If you really want to get ahead, you need the people who can transform whatever processes you assign them to oversee. You need people whose ideas and efforts can help you grow, not remain static.
Two related problems with this approach are over-pitching and feathering.
Over-pitching means requiring qualifications, experience and talent you won’t be able to fully utilise in the position. You can guarantee that anyone whose talents you can’t utilise fully is going to leave as soon as possible.
Feathering means adding requirements that aren’t objectively necessary to be able to do the job, but serve to exclude a great deal of the talent that’s out there. If the people who would be willing to do the job, feel themselves able to do it, but don’t have those extraneous qualifications are driven away, and those who do have the qualifications look and say “What? I could do so much more,” who are you left with?
Check any job board – it’s guaranteed, there will be dozens of postings that have hung around for months or years because of feathering. You have to be willing to take in and train people new to your industry, especially for the lower level jobs, because, and I can’t emphasize this enough, the people with experience don’t need to put up with companies that think that an MA in economics and five years’ experience is necessary to push paper and write e-mails.
HR departments and hiring managers add superfluous qualifications to job listings for several reasons:
As filters for the thousands of resumes that flood in the moment you post on Indeed
As a substitute for proper training and onboarding
As a replacement for finding out if an applicant is actually any good at the specific job
Each of these reasons is understandable, assuming you take it as given that we must solicit candidates through mass-application processes, that we don't have time or budget to train and situate people, and that we won't have a way of knowing if they're any good until they're hired.
Each of these premises is, however, a sign that your hiring process is broken, and that retention will be similarly broken. As much as we may bash industrial-age mindsets, there was one approach from that era that really worked - tapping people with the basic skills who can be further trained and can then grow with the company. In our qualification-crazed society, we've forgotten how to do this, to the point where the entry-level job is disappearing - '3-5 years' experience' has killed it.
But consider - hiring for growth addresses all the deficits in hiring and retention that have appeared over the last three decades, when that model was abandoned. It
taps into the most highly-motivated sector of the workforce
avoids breaking the bank on hiring, because experience and qualifications are expensive
represents low risk to the company
ensures that new hires are trained properly for their specific roles rather than leaving everyone to pick it up on the fly
avoids hiring overqualified people who then become disaffected with the menial work their role requires
makes personnel shortages a thing of the past
allows the best of the new hires to grow with the company, leading to retention and loyalty, and
avoids a revolving door situation in which a given process stops when the person overseeing it leaves for their next gig
Because this approach requires a thorough training process, you will have plenty of time to make sure that they can actually learn the job, eliminating the very risk that qualification creep ineffectively tries to mitigate.
Who to Hire and How
So, if the old process in all of its incarnations doesn’t work, then what does? Again, back to basics. What does your organization/company need? What does it want to build? What are its core principles? What are yours? Anyone who looks at their organization and says “This is good as is” either doesn’t care anymore or is comfortable and incompetent. There’s always room for growth and improvement.
If you want to find talent, then tell the world what you want to do and why. Tip: “We want to increase our profit margins because money is good,” and “We want to execute someone else’s policies ‘cause, like, they pay us” are both wrong answers. If your mission is inspirational, people will break down your doors with good ideas that they want to contribute. If you can’t do that, then give people a problem to solve, a process to improve. Engage their creativity, and they’ll come.
In Part 2, we’ll cover the all-important next phase: what to do when those talented people start banging on your door. Yes, that’s a great position for you to be in as an organization, but ONLY if you know how to handle it…
