LOOKING BACK HOME: RE-RECRUITING TALENT

"And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had
I find it hard to tell you,
I find it hard to take
When people run in circles its a very, very
Mad world"

Tears for Fears - Mad World

  I was thinking how mad the world turns when we are heading nowhere. Come on... I know it sounds lame but I'll get to a point, I promise :)

  As I was saying, everybody needs a direction to head on and this is something sometimes difficult to manage when you are leading a team. Some of the main responsibilities of a leader towards his teammates is to handle this individual development. But this is easy to say, now, how we can deal with this? First amendment of employee development: Everybody likes to feel special.

1. Assessment: Schedule a calendar in which you need to talk to your reports individually at least once in a month. Managing means having your ear ready to anything that could lead you to a better guidance with your teammates. To get the most productivity on your team you need to approach every member one to one first, make sure they are on the best possible role to help the group.

HR has to provide with specifically designed (together with managers) development plans towards a particular and measurable model of competencies. Define the necessary competencies by task, not only by role (this is a common error, in order to get the most from a team you need to go to specifics). Only then you will be able to identify the bias and develop the tools to face this better.

2. Open Cross-team Re-Recruitment Processes: Why not democratise the progress of your best talent? Make the measurements collective and accessible to all members of a group. Bring back the 360º's. Make a culture on sharing best practices collectively.

I'm not saying anything new if I mention the sense of belonging is probably one of the most important engines of motivation any human being can have. Make all your team a participant of a process, specially when this internal promotion stays inside a particular working team. This will transgress the expected vertical secrecy through your company and will help building community feeling.

3. Founding Trust: As you can read in one of my previous posts, one of the most common causes of leaving the work is for trust between employee and company. When this divorce occurs, oh boy... Friedrick Nietzche said once “I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you”. 

If you re-recruit, if you promote your people instead of finding the resource outside, you will grow instant trust among everybody. But be careful, even though it is not your fav one, you need to base your recruitment process on pure meritocracy. Make objectivity and logic flourish in your company. Promote only the bests, but promote them, look what's inside before looking outside. This will help create a culture of competition and self-improvement.

4. Grow Culture of Talent: Top Performers need excitement. They need to feel they are doing the best they can in the best place possible. Use your own talent development to convince others to embrace the culture of performance. 

5. Be the first to offer: You might not bear in mind that your best employees are being contacted by other companies several times a week. If you offer first the odds are high talent will stay in your company because of inertia.

6. Get out the rut: An employee excitement cycle is short. It's even shorter if this one is a top performer. Your talent behaves like the overexcited infant, once the sugar rush ends the kid crashes anyplace. Take control of this variable, promote the activity. 

  Some parts of this post were inspired by Dr. John Sullivan's (The Michael Jordan of Recruitment) article in TLNT.

Written listening to "Tears for Fears - The Hurting" album (Rate:8,5/10)