How to Attract Top Talent During a Tight Labor Market When Everyone’s Searching for Green Pastures
How to Entice Employees and Attract the Right Talent in a Tight Labor Market
There’s a reason I wrote the book, Hire, Inspire, and Fuel Their Fire: How to Recruit, Onboard, and Train New Employees to Live Your Culture Out Loud. It’s simply this: You cannot get your culture right unless you attract, recruit, and train the right people. You simply must invest in getting your hiring right like never before, especially in a tight labor market and especially when so many people are considering their career options.
Here are some things you need to consider if you are going to attract and retain the right talent that will help you build the right culture.
- Build an Inspiring Workplace Culture. Okay, so this is something you’re going to knock off by this Thursday or cross off your to-do list anytime soon. It’s an ongoing work in progress that never ends, and, yes, it’s kind of a biggie! But here’s the reality: You need to build an inspiring, creative, purpose-driven, and fun workplace culture if you are going to attract the best employees, because if they really are the “best” they can go work anywhere they darned well please. And surveys suggest that “where they please,” especially when it comes to younger generations, are workplaces that can provide them with a sense of meaning and belonging, that are innovative, that allow for flexibility, that put people first, that don’t treat health and wellness as an afterthought, and yes, workplaces that are highly engaging and even fun. This is, of course, is a chicken and egg relationship: You need great employees to help you build a great culture; conversely a great culture will help you attract great employees. Keep the ultimate endgame in mind here: When you build a rocking, inspiring workplace culture you don’t have to go hunting for employees, even in tight labor markets. You become the hunted.
- Promote Your Culture to the World. It’s one thing to have a great culture, but if you are the world’s best kept secret, then what difference will it make? You need to champion your culture! Talk about your culture on social media, share photos from community events, charitable events, employee recognition events, and teambuilding activities. Talk about your culture in fun, open, and honest ways on your website. Bring it to life through “day-in-the-life” videos, “Top-10 Reasons to Work with Us” lists, employee video testimonials, and so on. Introduce potential new hires to the team they will be ultimately working alongside. Give potential employees a true sense of what it is like to work for you. Create a vison and mission statement, values, and job descriptions that are meaningful and that resonate with people. (There are some great examples in Hire, Inspire and Fuel Their Fire.) And clearly define and communicate your cultural advantage. I’m not talking about your perks or pension plan, I mean what makes you unique and what makes you attractive as a place to work, when it comes to your culture?
- Craft a Fun, Passionate Culture Handbook…with the emphasis on fun! Most culture guidebooks that I’ve read are boring, soul-less reads, so maybe don’t try that approach? Create a culture book that has some energy and personality to it. Take the culture guide for Futurice, for example, a company I visited in Helsinki, Finland. Their interactive guide is conversational, passionate, and full of humor. It includes fun photos, drawings, company trivia, and cartoons. It explains the history of Futurice, why they chose the values they chose, and what it means to live their culture out loud. And don’t be shy about sharing your culture guidebook with the world, as many companies do! Remember, you want potential recruits to learn as much about your culture before they come and interview with you – both to screen out candidates that might not be the right fit, but also to start the culture learning process as early as possible.
- Tell Us Who and What You Are Looking For…and Who You AREN’T Look For. Tell the world honestly the type of employees you are looking for. Don’t just talk about what certification, education requirements, or experience they need, talk about the values they need to possess, in meaningful terms. Talk honestly about the traits of people you are looking for, and just as importantly, clearly spell out who you are NOT looking for. Be blunt! If you are fed up with employees’ behaviors or attitudes in certain areas, add these frustrations to this list! The more you can pre-screen candidates out, the more effective and efficient you’ll be at recruiting the right people for you.
- Think Inside the Box. Don’t forget that the call you’ve been waiting for from an ideal candidate might be coming from inside the house! By that I mean: Don’t overlook your own employees when you go hunting for new talent. This, in fact, should be the first place you look. Internal recruitment is far less expensive and time-consuming. Besides, overlooking a star candidate is one of the quickest ways to demoralize your top talent and send them racing out the door in search of greener pastures. The necessary focus on internal recruitment is also a crucial reason why you need to continuously work on employee development and offer clear career path options for all your employees.
- Leverage Recruitment Ambassadors. Cast your net wide when searching for employees and use your employees, customers, partners, and suppliers as recruitment ambassadors. Help your employees understand what type of employees you are on the look out for new talent. Create a simple funnel process/system to make it easy for anyone to direct potential recruits to where they need to go. Incentivize the process if you need to and give employees (or customers, partners, and suppliers) recruitment business cards that they can hand out. And if you don’t think this approach can pay off, consider how companies such as Mindvalley have totally transformed their recruitment efforts though, yes, reinvesting all the money they had been spending for on-line recruitment ads and campaigns towards an epic, blowout Halloween bash. Mindvalley is known for their Halloween party so they felt it was the perfect venue to showcase their culture. With that in mind, every Mindvalley employee receives two extra tickets to the Halloween bash, with the proviso that they must invite two wickedly brilliant, talented people who would potentially make great recruits for Mindvalley. And this unorthodox strategy has paid off with brilliant results.
- Prescreen Through Video. Video is just one option but consider a few ways you might screen out the “tire kickers” by creating a few steps along the path before an initial interview. For example, many companies require candidates to submit a video of themselves answering a few questions. The videos don’t just serve as a means of assessing a candidate’s personality, communication skills, and creativity, requirements like these can help dissuade candidates that aren’t truly committed.
- Set Candidates Up for Success. Another company from Finland (those Finns seem to get many things right when it comes to work), Vincit, offer potential candidates their choice as to where they want their initial meeting to take place (options from a drop down menu include a café, over lunch, over a walk, or at a Vincit office) and who they want to be interviewed by (based on video introductions to the potential interviewers). They even send candidates the interview questions in advance. Why? Because they want to set them up for success. They don’t want to just assess how well someone interviews or make the common mistake of hiring candidates who “look good on paper” only to discover later on that they were a horrible fit. They instead strive to get a sense of the real person, so they make it as easy as possible for the candidate to be truly present and to present the best version of themselves. Other companies give candidates homework or access to key culture documents to help them prepare.
- Treat the Interview Like a Date. No, you probably shouldn’t bring wine or flowers, but do consider how every interaction, including how you initially communicate with candidates through to the first interview, sends a powerful message about your culture. If you want new hires to live your culture out loud as soon as possible, then start the learning process early by modeling your cultural norms and values every step of the way! And so yes, it’s not a bad idea to “wine and dine” potential candidates by wowing them at every step of the process. And just as with an effective online dating profile, spend almost as much time in the initial interview talking about your culture as you spend learning about your candidates. Make sure the interview is a two-way, honest conversation that sets out your expectations in clear terms and offers the candidates a realistic impression of your culture and what their day-to-day work will look like. Remember, it’s just as important to make sure the candidates view you as the right fit for them, as it is for you to assess their fit!
- Hire for Attitude First and Foremost. You can train employees for so many things, but as far as I’m aware, personality transplant surgery is still years away from being perfected. So, all things being equal, make sure you are hiring first and foremost for attitude, and even for a sense of humor. As I write about in my book, The Humor Advantage, many companies assess candidates on their sense of humor – not because they are hiring standup comedians, but because they want to make sure they are hiring people that will be easy to get along with, who are creative, or who just have a good all-round attitude. So, for example, in interviews for jobs with Clark Construction, interviewers have been known to ask candidates the following, “A penguin walks in the door right now, and the penguin is wearing a sombrero. Why is the penguin here and what does it say?” They pose this bizarre question simply to gauge if candidates respond in a spirit of levity.
- Hire for Culture Growth, Not Culture Fit. Yes, it’s critical to make sure candidates will fit seamlessly into your culture. The danger of only thinking about culture fit, however, is that you run the risk of hiring clones who won’t challenge your status quo or disrupt you in positive ways. So, instead of culture fit, think in terms of culture growth. Where do you want to take your culture? Who will help you expand your culture in the direction you want to grow?
- Hold Multiple Culture Interviews. Companies that are serious about hiring for their culture often conduct multiple interviews, the first one or two assessing their technical skills, the remaining diving deeper into whether the candidate will be a fit for their culture. Or, ahem, their culture growth. At the company Findaway, for example, potential new recruits have a minimum of ten impression touchpoints with the company before a decision is made to hire them! Now you don’t have to go to that extreme, but make sure you are doing, whenever possible, sperate assessments on how well candidates will mesh with your desired culture.
Finally, as I stress in Hire, Inspire and Fuel Their Fire, don’t forget the importance of the first few days of onboarding. Scads of research shows that many employees are immediately thinking of greener pastures if you don’t get your onboarding and initial training right.
Even taking just 30 minutes to sit down at the onset to discuss goals or taking the time to tailor the onboarding to individual needs, can make a huge difference when it comes to retaining new employees and keeping them engaged.
Michael Kerr is a Canadian Hall of Fame speaker who travels the world, researching, writing, and speaking about inspiring workplace cultures. Michael is the author of 8 books, including The Humor Advantage, The Jerk-Free Workplace, and Hire, Inspire and Fuel Their Fire.
