Hiring and Retaining Talent: Your Company Vision is Critical
Refresh, remind, and engage your current team in a change of vision or mission; this is vital to a company’s success.
Talent acquisition fuels growing small businesses. During the past few years, it has been challenging to find the right talent. For many small businesses, superstars are harder to find, harder to hire and very hard to retain.
Many merely attribute it to the younger generation, not recognizing the opportunity of hard work and earning through patience and learning. That would be a fatal flaw to avoid, at all costs.
Perhaps you have experienced this?
Hiring and retaining talent depends on a variety of business issues. Let me share my favorites, with some complementary (and complimentary) suggestions.
Make sure your hiring pitch is based on a solid, authentic storyline of your company vision that contributes to society in a big-picture way. New-generation talent views their contribution beyond a paycheck and promise of promotion. Rethink your company vision. Vision changes with the times. Get your vision corrected as your company grows older; a blurry vision will not attract solid talent.
Coaching point: Test your revised vision message with some of the younger-generation employees. Get their feedback. Does that vision get their attention? Rinse and repeat until it inspires, motivates, and engages.
How will you know if your new vision is working? For starters, the number of people that apply for an open position based on the job posting content. Secondly, the interview process will speak volumes based on communication, body language, and homework they did researching your company.
Coaching point: Listen carefully and actively (their whole message) to the questions they ask you about your company mission and how it contributes to the “greater good” of society. Your response? “We save lives and protect innocent people so they can pursue their dreams!”
The next part gets a bit tricky but is doable with practice. You need to explain what their “mission” is in their new role. Most companies provide a long, overly complex list of duties and tasks of a position — yawn!
You don’t want to sound like you are pitching a script for a career movie role. Create a big picture; the side of a building mural that drives their imagination. This may sound a bit dramatic, but murals can be inspiring.
Coaching point: Treat this mission like a Marine. Marines need to know the mission objective, why it matters, when it needs to get done, and the “intent” of their commander. Marines are trained and motivated to deliver the “how.” Try and stay out of their way.
Your vision and mission work does not end with attracting new talent. It begins with your personnel. Refresh, remind, and engage your current team in a change of vision or mission; this is vital to a company’s success. Why is that? Current associates are the proof in the flesh of your vision and mission. You won’t fool new hires when the company culture does not jive with your job opportunity offer.
Coaching point: Get your management team fully engaged in the new vision/mission by letting them offer candid input, criticism, and suggestions. Ask them how their department will support the vision through team meetings. You will be surprised when you leverage the brainpower on your payroll!
Lastly, the point of proactive exit interviews is to gain valuable insights if your vision/mission is being productively led by your managers/supervisors. Remember, people generally don’t leave a company; they leave their managers. It’s also important to do exit interviews with retiring employees. I suggest six months before they retire. They will provide invaluable insights.
Coaching point: We do exit interviews for our clients to dig past the emotions to find underlying root causes. The feedback is enlightening for owners. Be disciplined with exit interviews to significantly help you recruit new talent.
Take the extra effort to include exit interviews on every associate departure. While some will be skewed by circumstances and emotions there will be grains of wisdom to consider. The validity and credibility of your stated company culture depends on it.
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About the Author
Paul Boucherle, SSI Contributor
Paul C. Boucherle, Certified Protection Professional (CPP) and Certified Sherpa Coach (CSC), is Security Sales & Integration’s “Business Fitness” columnist. A principal of Matterhorn Consulting, he has more than 30 years of diverse security and safety industry experience including UL central station operations, risk-vulnerability assessments, strategic security program design and management of industry convergence challenges. Boucherle has successfully guided top-tier companies in achieving enhanced ROI resulting from improved sales and operational management techniques. He is a charismatic speaker and educator on a wide range of critical topics relating to the security industry of today and an accomplished corporate strategist and marketer whose vision and expertise in business performance have driven notable enterprise growth in the security industry sector.
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