Recruitment and Retention Best Practices

FountainBlue’s May 6 VIP roundtable was on the topic of Recruitment and Retention Best Practices in a time of Change! Please join us in thanking our gracious hosts at Symantec. Below are notes from the conversation.

Change is an inevitable part of the business world, particularly when you’re leading a tech company in Silicon Valley! Leaders from our Recruitment and Retention VIP roundtable represent companies that are at various stages of M&A activities, divestitures, rapid-growth and fundings. They are challenged with identifying, recruiting, developing and retaining their key talent and high potentials, and have provided the following pearls of wisdom.

Change creates tension and uncertainty for everyone. Communication is key to the retention and recruitment objectives for all organizations.

• Leaders managing through change must collaborate with key stakeholders to strategically communicate what they’re doing, why it’s being done, what the process will be, what success looks like, etc., as this will help key talent make decisions to remain engaged and help others to make the same choice.
• Change may take months to happen, and people potentially affected by the change will be uneasy, so periodic, proactive, and candid communications, delivered by charismatic, genuine and leaders will help everyone through the process.
• When there’s an acquisition, don’t settle on just getting the bodies from the acquired companies, but seek also to sell to the minds and hearts of those people, so that they stay engaged, committed and connected.
• Leaders need to take the high road and message what’s right for the company in the long term, (even if they feel like they’ve been wronged). This will help them leave the kind of legacy they want, after serving for so long at a company, plus it will help those who stay remain successful and committed.
• Be purposefully inclusive in your communications, independent of roles, levels, locations, etc., This will help build that sense of teamwork and common mission during times of change.
• Say and model an ‘all-hands-on-deck’ model of leadership, with a common, constructive, positive and productive message.

Communicating intent and direction is not enough. Leaders must also plan-fully make it easy for key talent and high potentials to navigate changes *and* remain engaged and successful. 

• Have a clear and planned framework for governance, operations, integration etc., so that people undergoing change can be quickly productive and engaged and connected.
• Connect people with each other and with resources so that they can be more immediately successful.
• Provide as much sameness and stability wherever possible, especially when much is happening. 

Clear, collaborative leadership is essential for recruiting and retaining key talent.

• Good leaders make the right strategic decision for a company in the short term and for the long term. Great leaders communicate and engage all stakeholders throughout the change process so that vision becomes reality.
• Great leaders know it’s about getting key people on-board and engaged, and they will ensure that those people (generally starting with the customer-facing people first), get the support, encouragement, reward and confidence they need so they can represent the company well to customers. They know how to build success from that foundation of strength.

Below are some suggestions for recruiting and retaining key talent.

• Adopt a measurement-based standard for success that’s objective – whether it’s looking at revenues or market growth or retention numbers. From those measurement-based outcomes, figure out how to change recruitment and retention strategies so that you get the results you’re seeking.
• Improve the success of your recruitment efforts by following up with new-hires and hiring managers and proactively facilitating their success.
• Consider hiring those who know what’s in the playbook and how to execute what’s in the playbook, but also more closely consider those who can deviate from that playbook, and customize that playbook, based on the individual circumstances.
• Know the culture of your company and hire those people who would fit that culture, rather than focusing on that ‘top talent’ who’s not quite a cultural fit now, but who might later get integrated into that culture.
• Consider encouraging a healthy competition with performance metrics where possible.
  
• Adopt a ‘what’s-in-it-for-me’ (WIIFM) attitude of the prospective employee and speak to what’s important to them.
• Whether you’re choosing the rapid-integration or the longer term, staged integration approach, adopt a strategy that matches your culture, and provide the communication and infrastructure support so that the plan can be well implemented.
• Hire an exceptional talent management team, and let them use their passion and abilities to find and recruit the right people for the company. This will in turn propagate the right energy, message and culture, feeding a virtuous circle so that more people want to work at the company, better products and services are delivered, thereby further growing the customer base and staff.
• Consider using a panel discussion as part of your interview process, asking questions such as ‘why YOU’? ‘why NOW?’ and ‘why US? It’s also helpful to have each panelist evaluate on specific criteria, including cultural fit, functional fit, experience and technology. 
• Give candidates the opportunity to think on their feet to test their intelligence, their communication ability, their comfort level with ambiguity, etc.,
• Encourage referrals for key positions.
• Message the merits of joining the company to the interviewees.
• Look for four key criteria when hiring: Intelligence, Coachability, Experience and Character. You don’t necessarily have to have direct experience, provided that you’re intelligent and coach-able enough, but if you don’t have the right character, it may never work, and it’s expensive to hire the wrong person.
• Choose to join a fast-growing company (unicorns, pre-IPO companies) in a hot space (mobile, security, platform for example) and potential hires will show up. From there, it’s a question of setting the bar high so that only the best get hired and stay.

Below are suggestions for building a diverse team and robust leadership pipeline.

• Consider hiring new-grads and growing them into key positions.
• Encourage senior executives to sponsor high-potentials so that you can fill that leadership pipeline.
• Request diversity for your candidate pool and support the HR team in delivering that diverse candidate pool for consideration.
• Hire a qualified woman candidate where appropriate and advocate for pay equity. Retaining that female leader will increase the likelihood that more women and minorities will stay and desire leadership roles.

Below are predictions for the future of work.

• Some entitled millennials may get that wake-up call, and learn that it will take commitment and hard work to remain successful at work. Leaders who manage them may be able to work with them from their perspective, on their terms.
• There may be a back-firing on the work flexibility trend. Companies big and small may be expecting more in-office time to facilitate more collaboration and communication and perhaps increase productivity. 

Resources:

• Work with Me: The 8 Blind Spots Between Men and Women in Business, May 27, 2014 by Barbara Annis and John Gray
• Zoom might be a useful tool for communications between people from different geographic locations.
• Google Survey might be useful for getting results from interviews.

The bottom line is that leaders are chartered with recruiting and retaining key people despite inevitable changes. Keys to success in managing change include a standard for clear communication, an emphasis on seamless execution, a track record of measured outcomes, all delivered by a principled and collaborative leadership team. 

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