MBA2405 Q&A Wednesday: How do I attract and retain top talent in a competitive market?

0:08Heyo! Welcome to the$100 MBA show, your regular business workout with our practical business lessons. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zenhom. And today is Q &A Wednesday, where I answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you've got a question you want to ask, go ahead and email me over at omar at 100mba.net. Today's question is from Lloyd, and Lloyd asks, Omar, I'm in a highly competitive market, and I have been running my business for about seven years now. My question is around team and keeping my players on my team. How do I attract and retain top talent in a competitive market?

0:46This is such a solid question by Lloyd because if you've been around in business for 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 years, you know this problem. I know this firsthand. I've had team members that have stayed for a very long time, 5, 6, 7 years. I've also had team members that have left after a few months, have been poached by other companies, competitors, non-competitors. You want to keep your team members. You want to retain them as much as possible for two big reasons. One, when you hire anybody, there is an ignorance debt you have to pay off, meaning they have to be trained. They have to be onboarded. It takes weeks, months, even a year sometimes for them to ramp up and be at their best at their position.

1:27So you don't want to pay that debt over and over for the same position. Secondly, just like money, relationships over time compound in value. The longer somebody stays on your team, the more valuable they become to your team because it's a relationship. If somebody's been in your company for one month, they're less likely to stay for three years than somebody who's been in your company for six months because they've had six months to build a relationship with you and fall in love with your culture. So in today's lesson, I'm going to break down the exact strategies that I learned the hard way how to attract and retain talent over the years in a competitive market.

2:06live video software, online course software. I got your back. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Today's lesson is going to be helpful regardless if you're in a competitive market or not, but especially if you're in a competitive market. I've been in competitive markets for over two decades and I've seen pretty much everything that you could see when it comes to recruitment. I've seen people leaving after a couple of days. I've seen people sign employment agreements and they're about to start and they get a better offer somewhere else or an offer they want to take and I lose them. I've had people that just never did a great job and just disappeared, ghosted us.

2:41I've had people get poached. And I'm talking about people I know personally would poach people on our team. But I've also experienced team members stay for a long time, six, seven, eight years on our team. I've attracted some amazing talent that have been incredible and added so much value, not only to our company and our business and our customers' experiences and lives, but to my own life. I've learned so much from them. So how do we do more of that and less of the negative stuff that I mentioned? Well, let me show you what has worked for me and what can work for you, especially if you're in a competitive market.

3:15And it really boils down to three big things. Number one, don't be mistaken. You are in a competition, okay? It's a competitive market because it's a competition. You have to be a better company. You have to be a better place to work. Great talent has a lot of options. They can work anywhere. Why you? You got to get real with the situation. Now, you might be thinking, I'm a small business. I can't afford big salaries and free lunches and water slides running down the lobby of my business. No, you don't need to do all that. Most talented people actually don't care about all that stuff. It's very low on the priority list.

3:54So the first thing you need to focus on so you can have a better chance of attracting entertaining talent is making a better offer. Just like you're selling something in your business. What's a better offer that you can provide to new people and to your current employees? And the three things you can offer that has nothing to do with salary or even time off or the office are the things that actually matter the most. The first thing is what they actually do every day. If you provide somebody with a great work experience, meaning they work on things that are fun and exciting and they have autonomy and they're excited to go to work every day.

4:32We've all had that experience, hopefully. Then you are providing something they can't find easily. Now, you might be saying, well, how do I attract people if they don't know what that experience is like? Well, grab some testimonials, some video testimonials even from your current team members. I'm sure they'd be more than happy to share that and create a montage of what it's like to work for your company. So first thing is, in character number one, you know, improving what you're offering, is what they actually work on every day. Number two, growth. Personal, professional growth. When we are growing, when we are challenged, when we feel like we're getting better every day, we are content.

5:12We are happy. That's a job people love. Think back at your favorite jobs when you were growing up. Think back of the favorite things you worked on in your business or in your career. Your best experiences are the ones when you felt like you're growing, where you were way better than you were last year. And growth can also mean moving up in position and responsibilities and management. People love to grow. People love to learn. They love to look up to their mentors and the people that are working with them. And if you're a small company, this is a huge plus because they're going to learn straight from the founder, which is an opportunity they're not going to get in a big company.

5:45And the third ingredient that you can offer that is going to be compelling to them is culture. Just a great place to work. It doesn't matter if it's remote or you're in person in an office. Do people feel respected? Do people feel like it's fun, like their ideas are accepted, that they can voice their ideas? Do they work with interesting people, different types of people? Is it culture supportive? Does it allow them to have some good work-life balance? For example, at Webinar Ranger, we established a rule that said no pushing to production on Friday. Pushing to production means pushing the code to the live environment to our customers on Fridays.

6:21We don't push on Friday. We push every other day of the week. Why? Because sometimes in the off chance that something happens and something needs to be fixed, it's urgent because it's live. And we don't want people working late on Friday. So to make sure that doesn't happen and respect the time of our team members, we have a rule. No pushing on Friday. No deploying code on Friday, the last day of the work week. So the first thing is you can cultivate a great offer with those three things. What they actually do, growth and culture. Okay. Next, the first month of their employment is a really important.

7:01You want to make sure that they have a great experience, that they have a well-organized onboarding. We take onboarding very seriously. We have a whole game plan for every new employee, depending on what position they're in. And they have a step-by-step training program where they know exactly what they have to do every single day for the first two weeks. Beyond the first two weeks, they are then mentored by a buddy or somebody in their department that can show them the ropes and get their feet wet. Why is this so important? Because people like direction when they're unfamiliar place. And if they feel comforted, they feel like they have direction, they automatically get the impression this company is organized.

7:37This company thought of me and is organized enough to come up with a plan and not just throw me to the wolves, right? Or down the deep end. So the first month of hiring somebody is super important. So make sure you have a very good training system for them set up and you help them ramp up so that they can become proficient at the job they were hired to do. Make it a point to give them shout outs. We do an all hands, which is basically a meeting for all the people in the company. once a month. If there's any new hires, announce in your all hands, hey, we got some new hires. This is so-and-so. This is why we loved them and we hired them.

8:16Sing their praise a little bit. People like hearing their name, hearing good things, and then ask them to introduce themselves to the crowd and share something about themselves, maybe a fun fact. Give them a warm welcome to the family. Everybody loves gifts, okay? Everybody loves gifts. So give somebody a gift when they join your team. It could be something very simple like some swag, like a t-shirt, a sweatshirt, a mug, or all three. Send it over to them so they can feel welcome and part of the team. It's going to cost you very little for something that's going to make a big impact. One of the things I've seen done in many companies is they send their new hire and their spouse on a date night.

8:52They get them a gift voucher or some sort of gift card where they can have a dinner and a movie at their local area, their local town to celebrate their new job. Now, this is two things, put a smile on their face. It marks the occasion. It makes it really more memorable that they started a new job at this company. And it gets the other half, the better half, right? The spouse on your side. Hey, you better do good work. These people are awesome. They're taking us out to dinner. It's such a small little thing that makes such a big impact. And the gifts don't have to stop there. Somebody has a baby, somebody gets married, something happens, special occasion in their life, send them some flowers, send them a gift, send them a get well soon care package if they fall ill or have to go to hospital or something like that.

9:36Again, this is not going to cost much, but it's going to make a huge difference because most companies don't do the small stuff. All right, so we talked about the three things to create a great offer for your new hires. Number two, your first month is very important orientation, setting the expectation presentations praising prizes all that stuff what's the third thing you could do to attract and retain great talent this one's very simple but it's not easy okay and that is make an effort to build a relationship with each person in your company and make an effort to allow other people in your business the other team members to have relationships with each other and people call this culture i don't call it culture i call it relationship building because you have to really make an effort.

10:24This means a lot of FaceTime. This means productive, laser-focused meetings, but also a chance for you to praise everybody, to recognize people. This is off-sites, like retreats, maybe a big team retreat at a nice hotel once a year. I know companies that do it twice a year. This could be just an off-site for the afternoon. I know companies that just take their team out once a quarter to some evening on a Friday night. Let's go get some pizza and a movie. Socializing with your team allows them to get to know each other, know you, and feel committed, feel a part of something. Listen, we're social creatures.

11:03Even if you're an introverted person, we are social creatures. We are hardwired DNA'd into being with each other. And the more we do that, the more we create opportunities for us to get to know each other, for your team members, to spend time with each other, spend time with you and other people, the more they're invested, the more they feel like they're part of something and it's harder to leave. Why? Because they're thinking, oh man, I've built so many great relationships and memories and great times with these people. I'm going to have to do that all over again to get to the same level of trust and comfortability if I leave and go to another company.

11:43That sunk cost feeling, it exists for relationships too. So very simply, think about how can you have fun activities, fun events? This is much easier when you have a team in person in an office because you can literally just have pizza delivered to your office once a week or something or have a breakfast on a Monday together or whatever it might be. But if you are running a remote team, not as easy, but you could still do it. We've done it before where we send snacks and care packages and fun baskets to the team members and we enjoyed it together virtually. We come together for team retreats at a location, like I mentioned, where we spend a few days together and it's a lot of fun.

12:23We have a blast. We go snorkeling. We do karaoke. We go banana boating. It's just a blast to have fun with your colleagues because you spend so much time with the people you work with. It's nice to build some nice, fun, positive memories with them. So there you have it. Three ways for you to attract and retain top talent. One, work on the offer. Work on what you're actually giving people and attracting people with. Two, make sure they're onboarding their first month and beyond is rock solid and fun. And three, build in a chance for them to build a relationship with each other. Pop in some dates in the calendar, organize it.

13:01You'll be surprised how inexpensive some of these things are. But you You know what's really expensive? Turnover, right? Having to recruit new people. We went on a recruiting sprint just about four or five months ago. It's costly putting up job ads, recruitment companies, a lot of time spent interviewing and going through CVs and evaluating people. No one wants to do this. This is so much work and it's so costly. You might as well work hard on keeping the people you love on your team. Thanks so much for listening to The$100 Ambition. Thank you, Lloyd, for that amazing question. on today's Q &A Wednesday.

13:37If you've got a question you want to ask, go ahead and email me at omar at 100mba.net and I can answer your question right here on Q &A Wednesday. If you love the show, if you found today's episode valuable, helpful, hit subscribe, hit follow on your favorite podcast app, whether it's Spotify or Apple Podcasts or Overcast or whatever you're using to list a podcast, by hitting follow, you do some amazing magic for us. You tell the algorithm this is a great show, but also you get access to over 2 ,400 episodes in our back catalog. You get our next episodes automatically and it's all free. So go ahead and hit follow right now.

14:12Before I go, I want to leave you with this. If you want to build something great, something amazing, something bigger than yourself, you're going to need to build a great team. You're only as good as your team and really that's how you compete in the marketplace. You just have a better team. And by the way, you can have a better smaller team, meaning a team that's really good and talented and motivated and really works well together. They could be five, six, seven players and they out-compete a team of 20 or 30 or 40 people. So if you want to compete with your competition, you do it with your team.

14:45Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in Friday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

15:02Thank you.