The best businesses attract and retain talent by following this three-step approach

One of the tougher challenges most leaders have is finding and recruiting the right members for a team. You’ve probably had the experience of setting out to find a great person for a role, and after sifting through a shortlist you pick someone who shows up for an interview and seems impressive. You check out their references: they seem to get on with people, they can tell you how well they performed and what they’ve achieved in the past, so you hire them. After a while, to your horror, you find out they can’t actually do the job and they’re affecting the culture and your team’s productivity. 

A great way to assess a potential candidate is to have your whole team spend some time with them, perhaps in a more relaxed setting like a Friday afternoon drink. If you have managed to develop a great culture in your company, they won’t let anyone who isn’t going to be a good fit get in. It also makes sense to take on new people on a trial basis of, say, six months, by which time you should know whether you want to make their position permanent.

Attracting and retaining talent is an ongoing job for leaders, however, getting the branding, culture and values right can help massively, which is why it is vital for leaders to take ownership of these areas. 

Employer branding

Employer branding is important if you want to become the employer of choice. How do you present the benefits of working with you to attract the people you want? The first thing I observe is that most job ads are so deadly dull it’s no wonder companies struggle to attract candidates. The worst of them are written in dubious jargon; the best are, at best, clear about the job, the responsibilities and the qualifications they’re looking for. But where is the personality of the firm? Where is some sense that this is a human-centred organisation that, while it takes its work seriously, doesn’t take itself too seriously? Where is the language of real people having a chat together about spending the majority of their waking hours in each other’s company?

Take a risk and show some personality in your job ads, in the kind of language you might use over the phone to a friend who you wanted to work with you. Then you might attract enough quality candidates to form a decent shortlist.

According to a 2022 Gallup survey of workers around the world, only 21% were engaged in their daily work on average, while in Australia the figure was an alarming 17%. The most common complaint from disengaged workers was that they had little respect for their boss and considered they were treated unfairly. Business units with engaged workers have 23% higher profit compared with business units with miserable workers. Additionally, teams with thriving workers see significantly lower absenteeism, turnover and accidents; they also see higher customer loyalty.

One aspect we all must consider now is whether to offer remote or hybrid working arrangements. Some research says while basic productivity can be maintained or even increased with the flexibility of working from home, camaraderie and creativity suffer without fairly frequent and extended face-to-face time.

Finding the right mix for your business starts with examining how best to achieve all your outcomes, including financial and human factors. In the modern world, you’re likely to get a better result by including your team in discussions about the options and what would work best, rather than handing down a dictum.

There’s an ongoing shift in these areas towards a more inclusive environment. People want more autonomy with expectations of being part of decisions around working conditions, and they enquire into the values and social purpose of the organisation they work in. This doesn’t look like a trend that will reverse.

Values and culture

In the long run, the culture of your organisation will arguably have more effect on your success or failure than anything else. Culture is how your employees behave when no one is watching. Their individual and collective values drive decision making. Culture drives behaviour, and the end results are the actions taken that determine the success – or lack of it – for your company.

A lot of companies have now posted their corporate values in their tea rooms, their boardrooms and on their websites. We’re all familiar with the chasm that often exists between those values and the typical behaviours that prevail.

In the early days of building a new business, the company values will consciously or unconsciously reflect the founder’s personal values. As you take on more than a handful of employees, it soon becomes clear they don’t all automatically have the same set of priorities in their list. At this stage, you realise you need to articulate your company values and find a way to encourage all employees to operate by them.

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How do you avoid having this operation produce a list of ‘blah blah’ values that get posted on a wall and promptly forgotten? Where do you get the list of values from anyway? One effective way to go about it is to run a workshop with your team, so they feel they’ve been heard and had some input. A good place to start is not with your own personal values but with what your customers value in doing business with you.

Of course, there are also going to be values that, as founder or CEO, you insist are intrinsic to the culture you want to develop within the business. Perhaps it’s being customer-centric, going the extra mile and fostering innovation.

This is best tackled as a two-part process. Firstly, have the discussions and then develop a list of no more than five key values in plain vanilla English. Secondly, have a go at turning those listed values into the hot chocolate version, with more memorable short funky phrases in the vernacular of your organisation.

If they’re written in a way that reflects the spirit and personality of your company, they are far more likely to be remembered. The values your people live by guide the decisions they make. The company culture will shepherd their behaviour, for better or worse. Develop and nurture these guardrails to the actions they’ll take, as they’ll determine your company’s future.

This is an extract from Startup, Scaleup or Screwup by Tom Williams.

Tom Williams is the principal at Innovation Consult and a business growth coach.