Attracting and Retaining Top Talent As A Leader

Ahoy again legends. Welcome back to Episode Three. 

On this episode, we're gonna get stuck into a current topic that a lot of leaders are struggling with, it's hit a lot of people pretty close to home, almost all of my clients have faced this issue either now or face it in past or are going to face it sooner than they expect. And that is the talent war. 

Right now there's a massive, massive war between corporates, from sector to sector, within the sector across states and countries battling for talent. COVID to get back into that topic, that would be boring, and everyone's heard it to death. But one of the byproducts of that (COVID) and locked borders in Australia and locked borders across the planet has meant a war for talent. In Australia, the current forecast from AFR and others is that at about 5 million people short of what we'll need in the next five or so years, you know, that's a lot of people, a lot of skilled labour, we need to get back in the workforce. 

So if you're a leader, you might be going, ah shit, what does that mean for me, like, what are we going to do, we can't just continue to pay people more. And you're right, pay will be a driver of how you can attract and retain top talent. But it's not the only thing you need to do. So I'm going to take you through a few key issues on the current state of the world, what it means for you as a leader, how you can attract talent, if you're struggling to fill those current positions, including how we've done that ourselves, and then what you can do to retain top talent. Cool. So let's get stuck into it. 

Now, as I mentioned, the current state of the world is a shortage. I mean, as I said, almost every client I'm dealing with is saying, we just can't get people, we cannot find good people. And we can't even find anyone to come sit in the chair to do the job. It's a real struggle. And that means productivity hits, that means impacts to the rest of the team. That means you're having to fill in those jobs as a leader, it's a number of impacts that hang off of that, which is really problematic. So what does it mean for you, as a leader, we've got this real inflection point in a lot of people's journeys where they haven't had to face this kind of talent, a war before, you know, some people were here in Australia through the mining boom. And that kind of created some sense of what talent wars could look like. But not many people have had to sit through this level of talent shortage. 

So what does it mean for you as a leader, and for me, what I've said to most leaders is you have a choice. You can, obviously, the conditions are the conditions, but you can accept that you're a victim of this and that, you know, there's nothing you can do and just adopt that mindset of you know, it's all just gonna be really hard, and I'm just gonna have to suffer through it. Or you can choose to be someone who finds a little bit of an edge where you can then takes back as much control as you possibly can. Now, that's easy to say, right? And you might go Travis, you haven't sat in it, you don't know what it's like, well, that's not true. I've sat in a number of clients offices, as I've struggled with this, we ourselves went through some talent acquisition challenges, and had to, even with our kind of unique approach to how we recruit people and how we list our ads had to modify that a bit to get good people. 

Great. So the first bit for you to take away from this is do not operate in that victim mindset because you're just going to relegate yourself to fate. And that's not a good place for any leader to be in. Yes, it's a real struggle. But no, you don't have to let it decide for you. What's going to happen in your own organisation. Cool. So if we accept that you're going to take back control of this, you're going to own it, you're going to make sure that you get the people you need as best you can. How do you attract talent? That's the question I get is how do you attract talent? Now, we're not a recruitment agencies. This isn't our specialty. But we've been around it enough to know that as leaders, there's some tactics you can employ, to employ good people. And there's some things you can do, which we'll talk about after around how you retain good people. 

So how do you attract good talent? Now, I want to give you three kind of quickfire strategies. You know, we could do a whole masterclass on this, but just three quickfire strategies on your drive into work that you can start thinking about, and the first and most powerful one to start with is stop being a boring corporate entity. Stop having these boring a$$ ads that say that we value honesty, integrity, trust, respect, yawn, yawn, yawn, yawn, that like that's table stakes, man, what employee expects to go into an organisation and have a company that doesn't respect them or a place where a value of innovation isn't there. That's nonsense, why bother with that, instead make it more human. Like for us in our ad, we broke away from the kind of traditional consultant and coach approach and we you know, we were hiring for a marketing coordinator. We put in the ad was marketing coordinator in brackets "because kick a$$ marketers wasn't search friendly". And like immediately go, Oh, that's a little bit different, Hey? And obviously, for you that language might not fit, but it doesn't mean you have to be boring. 

Then once you got into our ad, there was some great things around little traditions we have like, we love cake and memes. And we, you know, have fun where we can and it's not boring, crappy, made up forced fun, it's actually what we're trying to do and how we live, you know, dogs come into the office, we talk about the culture of the place beyond just the job itself, we assume that if you're applying for the role, and when we take you through an interview, we'll discover if you're the right fit, then once you get into talking about the job, don't just list all the duties list the stuff that they're going to deliver the goals, they're helping you achieve, how they drive the vision and the organisation forward. Get really focused on what that could look like for them. 

Now, after that, you look at Okay, how do we shorten the recruitment cycle? One of the big challenges at the moment is that recruitment cycle, it's the oh, you know, well, corporate policy to this recruitment approach is we need to put people through three interviews and they're going to be this far apart, and average time to recruit is 163 days, or whatever the f#ck it used to be, you can't do it, no one's going to stick through a recruitment process that takes months and months and months. It's just madness, man, you got to go back to your recruitment people, to your HR practitioner to people in culture department, whoever helps you with this and you have to say, we are losing opportunities to attract great talent, because we're stuck in our own process, you have to push back on that. 

And if they're not willing to placate or make the change, go to f#cking executive and say, You know what, guys, we cannot fill these operationally critical roles. And recruitment is sitting around here, taking their sweet time. And maybe recruitment doesn't want to take as long as they do, maybe they're bound by the policy too. But someone at the right level needs to strip that back and be nimble enough to adapt to the current context. Shorten that recruitment cycle, get smarter about how you run your interviews, and how you get things in for us when we were recruiting for that role, the marketing coordinator role I mentioned, by the way, we have an amazing person who now is in that job, we did not go through interview after interview after interview. That's bull$hit, no, so let's do the interview and then let's give them a practical sample thing to do. And then straight into it from there, right and you know, with having the sample or the test, or whatever it is that you've got the person in the right talent, and if it doesn't work, then we figure out a way to make it work or we move them along, right. But that wasn't the case. So this person amazing and settled in. 

Great so we shorten the recruitment cycle now pay at market rates. But also make sure you highlight the other perks like for us we talked about it was the cool office, you know, and it really is cool. It's you know, free street parking, it's Flexi work. So you know, it is and not just like bs Flexi work where, you know, we kind of say it, but we don't mean it it is Flexi work. You know, they get a lot of autonomy in the role, all the stuff that people want to hear, but are true of the role and go beyond the pay. If you had just gone to market with pay, trying to attract a marketing coordinator would have been ridiculous. But instead, you know, seek told us we were in the top 10% at attracting applicants, even though we were not the top-paying organisation. And that's because we didn't make it boring. we shortened the recruitment cycle, and we went beyond just pay rates. We talked about the mission and what we're trying to achieve and the type of organisation leaders that we are. So don't forget to include that go beyond the normal $hit that everyone knows comes with a job.

Now, how do you retain top talent? Right? So you go Travis, actually, I've got the other problem. I've got good people, but I'm kind of starting to lose them or I'm worried they're going to jump ship, you know, people are trying to headhunt them or, you know, it's really common. I've had a few and just the last few weeks where they said, Well, look, people are headhunting and our people and they're leaving, or they're considering leaving where they've told me they keep getting offers every week, what the hell do I do? Cool, I've got some tips for you on that. 

The first is, you're going to great, what an easy tip, create the right culture. That's not easy. But if you create the right culture it becomes really difficult for someone to want to leave and to decide to leave. They'll always be a bit torn, create a place that they actually enjoy working to have some level of control over their work, they, you know, feel like they're part of the team. Don't just make it about well, this is what you'll get paid and this is the task you'll do every week because then it's easy to compare this to a higher paying job and go Yeah, well why wouldn't I take more money for the same job? Take that off the table. And part of that has to do with you being the type of leader that they want to stick around with and really enjoy working for. The second is define the growth targets and development plan for those people. If they're being courted or people are trying to headhunt them you have to go well, why is that? What what what might they be missing? What do I need to give them to compel them to stay and this isn't about gimmies and just raises and everything else is about understanding what they want. You know, if they want a new skill and leading agile projects or design thinking or you know how to give better presentations or whatever it might be, you have to get that into a development plan and you need to commit to supporting them in that. You'd be surprised that the net benefit you get for the cost you can actually save. 

So if you said to someone, I'm going to give you an extra 20 grand a year, they go sure, yes, great. I love it. Thanks. They'd bank it, and then that would become a new benchmark for them. Right? They'd forget that they used to be 20 grand less than that. But if you said to them, actually, what do you want the skills to be? How do we look after you what projects would you like to work on and you do that you'd be shocked at the amount of goodwill that buys for a fraction of the cost.

The third and final tip on retaining top talent is ask people what they value, you can go to a lot of effort to try to put people on courses to you know, invest in projects that could be on to give them more money. And maybe they don't value any of those things. Maybe they value harmony, and being in a team that's great to work with. Or maybe they value a leader who's around and can be a sounding board for them. You have to ask people what they value in their work, what they value from you, and what they want to see going forward and roll that into the conversation you have about retention, about making sure they're happy and making sure that you're supporting them. 

Now you still have to manage people, I'm not blind to that factor. And it's really critical that you're prepared to manage people. But you also need to make sure you're doing the right things to attract the right talent, and to retain the top talent. If you can do that and you can have that leadership mindset around not being a victim, but around doing the most you can to influence the situation positively I promise you, you will be ahead of the competition, you'll be ahead of the others in your industry, and you will have as much control as possible in a world where we're in a talent war. 

So that's all for today. If you want to find out more about us, you can jump on LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, or check out our other podcasts episodes. Thanks for tuning in. I've enjoyed chatting with you and I look forward to seeing you next time. Thanks!