Managing A Great Culture Starts With Hiring

The simple truth is that if you don't have a steady stream of the industry's best knocking down your door to come work for you, it could be argued that you don't have an outstanding culture - at least not the best in your industry.  Because, if you did have the best culture, hired only the best, had the best opportunities for advancement, the best perks and pay, the best managers and the best environment, you would have the best of the best wanting to come work there. So, by simple default, if you have to place ads to get new workers, your culture is NOT the best it could be.

Who responds to "Now Hiring" signs and ads anyway? The talentless? The unhappy? The low-performers? The available? Maybe, on occasion, you might get a gem but you have to sift through all of the other resumes to find them.

You see, high-performers, if they were unhappy with the company they currently worked for, would simply do something about it. High-performers would start to knock on doors before the jobs became available. They would be making contact with HR managers or other contacts in your organization and would let it be known that they were looking. They would show initiative.

That's why "Now Hiring" signs and ads are a big mistake: they attract those who don't have any initiative which forces your HR department to sift through the trash resumes to see if there's anything worth keeping. 

But it's not just the HR manager's job to find good people and recruit them. Every manager, every supervisor, every senior executive and every employee should be on the lookout for good people. When you build a Culture of Excellence, the attitudes of your people change. They stop being competitive and territorial with each other and they commit to work together better. That means, recruiting and building a strong culture becomes everyone's responsibility - a responsibility that every high-performer would welcome given the chance.

So ask yourself, do you have a Human Resource/Talent Management department that attracts, recruits and manages high-performers? Or do you have a "now hiring" department that lazily does what every other mediocre organization does and only attracts the mediocre and available?
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Kevin Burns - Management Attitude/Culture Strategist
http://www.kevburns.com

Creator of Filter-Free Fridays™
Creator of the 90-Day System To A Greatness Culture™

Coming Soon Kevin's 8th Book - "Your Attitude Sucks - Finding Your Excellence In A Wasteland of Mediocrity

Subscribe to Kevin's Managing with Attitude Blog by Email

Talent Theft: The New Edge In Business

It's not hard to make the case that the very best people in the industry, if they're not working for you right now, are working for someone else.

It's the same reason that "Now Hiring" or "Help Wanted" signs or ads should NEVER be a part of your recruiting strategy. The people who respond to these ads and signs respond because they are available. There's a reason they are available.

What you want is to steal away your competitors' best people - and there are two very good reasons for that:

1. When you want to hire high performers, you will need to let go of your low-performers to make room. That means that if the low-performers want to continue working in the industry, they will likely end up working for your competitors.
2. When news gets out that the highest-performers in the industry work for you, customers will gravitate to you. Also, once it becomes known that all of your former low-performers are working for your competitors, who would want to do business with them? Bottom-line: if you want to steal your competitors' customers, steal your competitors' best people.

Recruiting is finding the best talent in the industry and then going out, making them an offer and enticing them to come work for you. But here's the caveat: if your organization is known for being underhanded, dishonest and lacking values or ethics, no great performer will ever come to you. You will attract only the talent that couldn't find work elsewhere and those whose morals might be in line with yours.

Instead of viewing recruiting as stealing, start thinking of it in the same way you would run a successful sports team. You hire the best players you can. But that means you have first got to figure out where they are. So that means no more Help Wanted signs. They look amateurish and what high-performer, with incredible success, would be tempted to respond to a window sign or newspaper want ad?

If you want to attract the winners, you have to start managing like a winner. Create that Culture of Excellence first and great talent will be easy to attract. But, if you want to hold onto your mediocre talent because you don't want to hurt good people, then you had better create a strategy that takes them from mediocre performer to high-performer. Invest in them and they will invest in you. Manage.
--
Kevin Burns - Management Attitude/Culture Strategist
http://www.kevburns.com

Creator of Filter-Free Fridays™
Creator of the 90-Day System To A Greatness Culture™

Coming Soon Kevin's 8th Book - "Your Attitude Sucks - Finding Your Excellence In A Wasteland of Mediocrity

Subscribe to Kevin's Managing with Attitude Blog by Email