How to Find, Hire and Lead Great Talent

I don’t believe in the war for talent.  Yes, there are some specialized skills that are challenging to acquire but since most people are dissatisfied at work for largely the same reasons involving company culture, managers and rewards, even ‘hard to find talent’ is open to making a change.

FINDING GREAT TALENT

You can hire great people without making extravagant offers or breaking the budget by following three simple rules:

• Be creative: Everyone out there’s looking for the same hard to find profiles, but what you really need is someone who can succeed in the job.  If you can’t get the exact skills you are looking for in your price range, look for transferable skills or consider bringing in a contractor to meet your short-term needs while searching or training someone (see my blog post on HR and the Gig Economy).
• Be flexible: There’s no shortage of qualified and hard-working people out there who, because hiring them feels risky, are often overlooked: moms returning to the workplace, remote workers, people who want to change careers, young professionals looking for growth opportunities, people not currently employed, semi-retired people, etc. 
• Have a talent pipeline: One of your jobs as a manager is to have a rolodex of potential talent you’d like in your team should the right opportunity arise.  If you have an opportunity to travel to events, talk to people, connect with interesting profiles on LinkedIn, and keep people in mind who applied for previous job postings. 

HIRING GREAT TALENT

So, those are some tips for finding and making yourself attractive to great talent, but the trickier bit is knowing who to hire.  Again, a few simple rules have served me well over the years:

• Have an audition: Ask your candidates to prepare a presentation to showcase how they approach work.  AI may help identify talent in future, but so long as LinkedIn keeps showing me Spanish speaking sales jobs I’m not holding my breath.  Profiles can be gamed but a solid presentation can’t be faked.  Inviting people who will be working with the person you hire will enable them to weigh in on and buy into the decision.
• Don’t be Goldilocks: I wrote a short post about Goldilocks Syndrome here.  You should always wait until you find someone who can succeed in the job and complement the team, but I’ve seen job posts with completely unrealistic expectations.  Similarly, don’t immediately write off people who seem too senior, as they can bring invaluable experience to the team.  Instead of ticking skills boxes, hire people who can learn, play well with others, and think on their feet.
• Hire people who can grow: According to the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, if you are selecting from a pool of candidates that all share a basic level of competence it doesn’t really matter who you hire, because they will learn on the job.  I totally buy into that, having learned coding on the job early in my career and pretty much everything else at an advertising agency in Tokyo.  An audition or trial period will help you assess growth potential.

LEADING GREAT TALENT

So now you’ve hired someone and it’s your job to help them be successful and grow professionally.  A few tips:

• Let people be stars:  Managing ambitious high potentials can be challenging, especially when they think their work is better than it is – it takes humour, lots of listening and putting your own ego on mute.  There’s also a body of thought leadership that is pro-team and anti-star, which I find interesting but limited.  In my experience, everyone has star quality if you help them find and express it at work.  
• Be dream compliant: At the recent Club Talentsoft event, Co-Founder Alex Pachulski predicted that organizations will need to become dream compliant and help people connect with opportunities (more about the event and his presentation here).  Money aside, the best way to keep ambitious self-starters happy is providing opportunities and encouragement to try things, grow, take responsibility and make visible contributions, and be recognized. 
• Expect people to move on: People leave bad bosses, but good people leave good bosses, too.  If you lead in a way that attracts high potentials and performers to work for you, and give them opportunities to grow, chances are they will at some point receive a better offer.  That’s OK, first because you want what’s best for them, second because they’ll go the extra mile for you to wrap up and/or transition projects before they go, and third because it creates opportunity for others on the team.  Voluntary attrition helps keep the team fresh.

Look, most of what we thought we knew about talent management has turned out to be wrong, and everything we think we know today probably will, too.  I believe part of the reason is a tendency to over-engineer talent strategies, but fortunately, basic leadership principles never change: 

If you hire people who love to learn, encourage collaboration and new ideas, recognize contributions, and weed out trust-destroying behaviours, you’ll never have trouble finding, hiring and leading great talent.

Is HR Ready to be GIGantic?

In my most recent post HR and the Gig Economy, I talked about how the workforce is changing as managers staff their teams with more contingent labour.  HBR also wrote a thought-provoking article Run Taskrabbit Run, exploring a not-so-distant future where businesses no longer have employees.  Since my very talented former colleague Stacy Chapman, the CEO of SwoopTalent, has predicted that more doomsayers will write more about this topic… challenge accepted.

I'm actually not a doomsayer, at least I don't think I am.  I personally see the gig economy as an opportunity for HR rather than a threat, at least in the medium term (y’ know, before HR gets replaced by chatbots), because contractors are people.  For too long HR has let procurement own services talent as the proportion of contingent workers steadily increases.  It’s time for HR to step up and reclaim the people agenda.

Here are some of the challenges HR needs to be ready for to stay relevant in the gig economy:

People Data: I know we’re all still high fiving about moving to the cloud, but to prepare for the gig economy, your HR solution needs to track data for contractors as well as employees.  You need to know where your contractors are placed, when, for what, and how much they cost.  You also want to know if they are effective, which will be a challenge since they aren’t included in your performance appraisal process.

Compliance: There are some legal challenges with making contractors feel too much like part of the team - not to mention employment insurance - but someone needs to figure that out for the business.  Who better than HR?  Not procurement, unless HR also wants to share ownership of core competencies, performance management and employer brand.  Yeah, I didn’t think so.  : )

Organizational development: What is the right employee to contractor ratio?  Where should external skills be brought in on a project or fixed term basis v. in-house?  Most importantly, how can HR add real value to this discussion, rather than just consolidating input from different parts of the business?  Own this!!!

Recruiting: HR plays an active role in recruiting talent but not – typically – in acquiring contractors, besides signing the contract with the agency and/or sending over the NDA.  However, just like employees, contractors have diverse skills and personalities, and some will be a better fit than others.  Does HR really want to leave this up to chance, allow mission critical work to go to the lowest bidder, or fail to consider skills augmentation in a broader company context?

Performance and Engagement: Like employees, contractors need to be engaged and assessed for organizational fit and quality of work.  After all, they perform critical tasks for your company, provide a crutch for your company’s core capabilities, and cost money.  It’s important to make them feel like part of the team, help them succeed and establish some metric to assess the quality of their work.  

Skills Development: If we envision a future where most or all of the workforce is project based, at least in some industries, how will HR shape core competencies in that future?  What will core competencies even mean?  And how do you ensure today that skills for hire are also transferred, and that any skills or knowledge gaps your contractors have are addressed so they can work as efficiently as possible?

Leadership: Managing contractors requires somewhat different skills and perspective than managing employees.  It’s HR’s job to make sure managers are ready to lead a truly diverse workforce made up of employees, contractors and non-humans.

Rewards:  As more contractors are brought in to augment teams, compensation equity and company perqs will take on a new flavour.  There’s no one right answer, but plenty of wrong ones, and it needs to be considered in light of what is best for the business.  Ideally, you don’t want rewards to create a divide between internal and external team members, which is what will happen if contractors get treated like second class citizens.

Collaboration: The right collaboration and project management tools can help teams work more productively.  With the gig economy, having the right tools to streamline processes and tasks while linking work to company goals has never been more important.

Internal support: This one has long frustrated me as a hiring manager.  New employees get the red carpet rolled out by HR, a new laptop, a new workstation, etc., whereas contractors need to go on a treasure hunt to find a place to sit and get signed onto the system.  Which the company pays for in lost productivity, frustrated engagement and an hourly rate to boot.

Employer Brand: Just like employees, some contractors are a better fit for your organization than others.  How do you help ensure your organization attracts the best contractors, and equip them to deliver the best results?

So, you get the idea.  As contractors become part of the mix at work, HR needs to start thinking in very real terms how to attract, retain, engage and develop them.  Or… become less relevant to the business as the workforce changes.

Visual courtesy of Business in the Workplace.

Talent Profiling 2.0

My oldest daughter (9) has successfully lobbied for riding lessons.  A former equestrian myself, I was all for the idea but my husband was harder to convince.

His initial response: ‘No way. What a completely useless skill!’

I bristled a bit at this. I rode horses competitively for seven years growing up, two of them on the school rodeo team, and while I don’t exactly use those skills today they are part of who I am.

‘Oh, yeah?’ I retorted. ‘If I’d married a Texan rancher instead of you I bet he wouldn’t say that to me!’

My husband stared at me blankly. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘You know I used to ride on a rodeo team in school,’ I responded icily.

I knew he knew because he’d laughed heartily at my tales of lining up to tie the understandably depressed school goat. I can still hear its plaintive ‘baaaaah’ each time it got flipped to the ground.

‘Oh, right.’ He still looked confused.

I sighed. This is the man who didn’t realize I could swim until we’d been married for about six years because he thinks an icy cold lake is perfect for a ‘refreshing dip.’

(He's German.)

‘Rodeo’s no cake walk, you know,’ I said sternly. ‘You have to keep your seat, pay attention to your posture, keep your ride in check, and often as not you have to rope a running cow or something from the back of a galloping horse. It’s a real skill.’

He stared at me thoughtfully, presumably trying to picture the woman he married on the back of a racing horse whirling a lasso in the air and yelling, ‘Yeee-haaaaw!’

He seemed to be looking for the right words. Finally he settled for, ‘I find that hard to imagine.’

By now you're probably wondering what my point is, beyond letting the world know I know more about cows and horses than one might assume meeting me for the first time.

My point is that people have histories, skills and experience beyond what you hired them to do. Many of these skills may be completely useless but others could be exactly what you need for a particular project or job.

For example, if you're looking for a project manager you might try asking if anyone on your team knows how to herd cows. Trust me, I've done both and it's a transferrable skill.

One of the best ways to motivate people is to look beyond the tasks they perform for you today and consider how they can develop and integrate other skills going forward. Everybody wins.

All you need is a way to track skills, experience and interests globally and the ability to search against this information  when trying to fill a new job or staff a project.  The global visibility is really important because you may have the skills you need elsewhere in the organisation.

It's called talent profiling and some HR systems do it better than others.  Profiling your internal talent can help you find the right skills in your organisation when you need them as easily as buying a book or booking travel online. 

For hard to match skills, it's also a great way to find, leverage and develop the 'hard to imagine' talent in your organization.

Bottom line: In organizations that struggle to attract the right skills, developing and retaining talent matters.  And if you only look for obvious skills you may be neighing up the wrong tree.

Beyond Pay for Performance

Are you in a pay for performance rut?  Maybe it's time for a new approach. 

Read more in my latest post Stuck on Pay for Performance? at the Compensation Cafe.

2011: The Year of Visibility

I think it’s fair to say that 2010 was a year of change and reflection for many of us. Jobs were lost, assumptions were adjusted, expectations were lowered and in some lucky cases opportunities were seized.

It all started innocently enough. First came the crash, which occurred when someone unwisely decided to investigate various financial instruments and discovered a mountain of poorly backed debts that had been sold multiple times for vastly more than they were worth. If financial analysts were taught basic physics they would have known that nebulous moving objects don’t bear close investigation.

Then came the inevitable lay-offs and retrenching. Business courtesy flew out the window as recruiters were swamped with resumes and simple compassion for others was consumed by personal worry. Those were the darkest times for many.

Finally, people started rallying and a new spirit of optimism and connection was born. And yet, the world had changed:

Business leaders had discovered that products continue to ship with fewer people.

Well, they were bound to discover it at some point. But unfortunately, this epiphany for business leaders glosses over a number of issues, such as product quality, workforce engagement, customer service and long-term macroeconomic viability.

These are the themes that must concern us in 2011 if we are to recover from the greed, short-sightedness and personal tragedy of the previous two years.

So I am going to make a prediction and call 2011 ‘The Year of Visibility,’ because companies that rely on reactionary hiring, contracting and downsizing in lieu of informed business planning probably won’t be around in five years.

The kind of visibility I’m talking about is the kind that allows companies to maximize business performance and ride out economic cycles with minimum disruption by answering questions like these:

• Do you understand the skills and capacity of your workforce?
• Does the work people are doing align to business objectives?
• Are you able to determine cost and quality of work across organizations, teams and initiatives?
• Can you compare workers to determine optimal fit for job, skills, interests, location, or budget?
• Can you find ‘ready talent’ anywhere in your organization?
• Can you group workers into actionable talent pools to support strategic talent initiatives?
• Are you able to anticipate and avoid critical skills and leadership gaps?
• Can you reduce contingent labor costs by better utilizing existing resources?

With the increasing reliance on contingent workers to increase flexibility and reduce salary costs, workforce visibility has never been more important - to minimize costs, ensure quality and avoid co-employment lawsuits.

That's why I predict that in 2011 HR professionals will be challenged to provide timely, accurate, operationally relevant information about the extended workforce.

Are you ready?

Hard to Imagine Talent

My youngest daughter had her fifth birthday a couple of weeks ago. We celebrated at the local pony club, where she and several friends from Kindergarten rode miniature ponies around in a circle for about an hour, followed by pizza and cake.

A former equestrian myself, I was proud to note my older daughter’s straight back and general competence on a horse. Later that night I remarked to my husband that we should enroll her in a riding class.

His response: ‘No way. What a completely useless skill!’

I bristled a bit at this. I rode horses competitively for seven years growing up, two of them on the school rodeo team, and while I don’t exactly use those skills today they are part of who I am.

‘Oh, yeah?’ I retorted. ‘If I’d married a Texan rancher instead of you I bet he wouldn’t say that to me!’

My husband stared at me blankly. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘You know I used to ride on a rodeo team in school,’ I responded icily.

I knew he knew because he’d laughed heartily at my tales of lining up to tie the understandably depressed school goat. I can still hear its plaintive ‘baaaaah’ each time it got flipped to the ground.

‘Oh, right.’ He still looked confused.

I sighed. This is the man who didn’t realize I could swim until we’d been married for about six years because he thinks an icy cold lake is perfect for a ‘refreshing dip.’

‘Rodeo’s no cake walk, you know,’ I said sternly. ‘You have to keep your seat, pay attention to your posture, keep your ride in check, and often as not you have to rope a running cow or something from the back of a galloping horse. It’s a real skill.’

He stared at me thoughtfully, presumably trying to picture the woman he married on the back of a racing horse whirling a lasso in the air and yelling, ‘Haaaaw!’

He seemed to be looking for the right words. Finally he settled on, ‘I find that hard to imagine.’

By now you're probably wondering what my point is, beyond letting the world know I know more about cows and horses than one might assume meeting me for the first time.

My point is that people have histories, skills and experience beyond what you hired them to do. Many of these skills may be completely useless but others could be exactly what you need for a particular project or job.

For example, if you're looking for a project manager you might try asking if anyone on your team knows how to herd cows. Trust me, it's a transferrable skill.

One of the best ways to motivate people is to look beyond the tasks they perform for you today and consider how they can develop and integrate other skills going forward. Everybody wins.

All you need is a way for people to track their skills, experience and interests and the ability to search against this information when trying to fill a new job or staff a project.

It's just basic talent profiling.

Are you mining the ‘hard to imagine’ talent in your organization?