5 Tools for Attracting and Retaining Top Talent

0:29Hi, I'm Michael Hyatt. people often focus on one or the other of these. They don't think about how they go together. And I think battle number one is get the right people in the door. And battle number two is create an environment that they wanna stay in. And so I think that's really what we're gonna be talking about today is how do you find and attract the right people? And then how do you make them wanna stay? How do you become the kind of organization that nobody ever wants to leave on the backside of that hire, both of which are critically important and have never been more challenging than they are in this market right now.

1:12Well, I think it's easy for business owners and leaders to think this is mostly about compensation. You know, in other words, if we want to attract great talent, we got to be willing to pay for it. We got to step up to the plate. We got to pay above market if we're going to get the right people. The problem with that is if you do that, yes, you might attract the right people, or you might attract some people, but you may not retain them because there are some things that are more fundamental, some things that are more essential than compensation. And I would start with having a purpose that people can align with.

1:43You know, especially for younger generations, you know, it's really important that they can buy into your mission. I think this is so critical. And it's one of the things that small businesses in particular often discount. And yet, this is one of the greatest differentiators and competitive advantages that you have as a small business is that you can have a mission that people are attracted to that they feel like gives them meaning and purpose. And one of the things we know on this side of COVID and really part of what's happening with the Great Resignation is that people are evaluating how their professional choices align with their values at a different level than they ever have before.

2:25And so what they want is they want to have congruity between their personal values as well as their desire for meaning and contribution with their place of employment. And so if you can be explicit about what your purpose is in the world, what your mission is, what your values are, what even your vision for the future is, then you're going to have the opportunity to attract some of those people who might be otherwise swayed simply by compensation. They're going to be swayed by something that's deeper that you have to offer in your smaller organization. And the reason that's important is because if the primary tool that you're using to attract people to your company is money, they're going to be people that are easily recruited to a better paying position.

3:13You're not going to be able to retain those people. That's why it's got to be deeper than just the compensation. But to give you an idea of what a mission might sound like, because I know there are probably a lot of you that are listening to this that have heard a lot of talk about a mission statement and creating that. And is it just a general sense or does it need to be specific or whatever. I'll tell you, this is something we have on our careers page, something that's on our website in a number of places, because we do want to attract people that are like-minded, people that share the same purpose in the world.

3:41But here's what we say in terms of our mission. We say, we are a performance coaching company. We help high-achieving leaders and their teams get the vision, alignment, and execution they need to drive extraordinary results without compromising their most important values. Now, not everybody's going to salute that. That's not going to resonate with everybody. And that's okay because we want it to act like a filter. If somebody looks at that and goes, meh, fine, you're not somebody we want to recruit. But if that's something that you read or hear and go, yeah, that really sounds interesting. That sounds like something I could get behind.

4:15Those are the people that you're trying to attract. So what I would say in terms of acquiring or finding the right people, put your mission front and center. Megan, do you want to say a word about core values? Because I think those are important as well. Yeah, absolutely. You know, again, people want to know if their personal values are going to be congruent with the values of the organization that they're working for, they're considering going to work for. There's very little tolerance for there being incongruity between these two things anymore, especially as people are becoming more sophisticated in understanding how organizations work.

4:52There's cynicism around organizations who maybe have a set of values that they don't live by. So people are really looking for an organization that has a clear set of values and that walks its talk. You know, whatever you say is how you behave, people want to know, do you really behave in that way? And so we have eight core values. They're posted on the wall in our office. We give awards for those every year in our annual team meeting, and we call them out as people are acting in alignment with them throughout the year. And it really matters to our team. You know, we're really screening for these on the front end in our hiring process because we want to know, are people going to be naturally aligned with our values?

5:32You know, that's not something, for example, unyielding integrity is one of our core values. If that's not something that resonates with someone, if they're kind of willing to do whatever it takes to succeed or succeed at all costs and at the expense of others or at the expense of their values, you know, they're not going to do well in our organization. We want to weed those people out on the front end. So I think this is a really important part of, you know, those that kind of core ideology of your organization. This is why we teach this, by the way, to our coaching clients and our business accelerator coaching program.

6:03We teach how to write your mission for your company. How do you develop a set of core values? How do you develop a vision for the future? We want you to have these components in your business, not only because they act as really a compass or a rudder for the future, but also because they help you attract the right talent and then build and maintain a culture that keeps the right people in your organization for the long haul. It's so critical and very few places teach you how to do this. So we've really prioritized this in our coaching program for that reason. Okay, so that's basically the first tool in attracting and retaining top talent.

6:41is to make sure that your core ideology, your mission, your core values, even your vision, which we're not going to talk about today, but it's another important component of core ideology. But this is a major tool in recruiting the right people.

6:57The second tool, I think, Megan, is culture. Having a world-class, healthy, enjoyable culture. You know, people, a place where people look forward to going to work, where people are not dreading it, but they actually enjoy the people they work with and they feel like the culture somehow brings out the best in them, that we're better together than we are individually. Now, if you've ever been in a toxic culture, there's no repellent like a toxic culture. I think this is one of the primary reasons people leave companies is because the culture becomes so abhorrent. The problem is that for most business leaders, culture is invisible, right?

7:35It's just kind of the water that fish are swimming in. They're unaware that there even is a culture, but there is a culture. There's a way your organization makes decisions. There are certain things that your organization values. There are certain things that your organization punishes, other things that are rewarded. All of that together makes up your culture. And for somebody coming in from the outside, that's kind of a palatable thing. They notice, but they quickly become acclimated to it and it either repels them or attracts them. So we've got to get this right. Do you have any thoughts on how to get the culture right, Megan?

8:08Well, I think like a lot of things that we've been talking about lately on Lead to Win, this comes back to the idea of the full focus system, vision, alignment, and execution. You know, if you're going to have a great culture, which is kind of the execution part, if it's going to, if your company's going to be a great place to work, you have to have a vision for what that culture is before you can align your team around it. And then, you know, that just becomes the water you're swimming in on the execution side. So I think that really starts with having a mission to align around. It starts with your core values because that becomes the standard of behavior.

8:44It really comes down to the behavior that you hold your, the standard you hold yourself to in terms of your behavior. Because if you're leader, whatever you do becomes the de facto standard for behavior in your organization. And being really clear on just what you want and what you're going to reward, like you said, for example, in our company, it matters to us that we assume positive intent. This is something, a concept that we got from a book called The Loyalist Team, where, you know, rather than kind of sabotaging each other by assuming negative motives or other things like that. We really want to be intentional about assuming positive intent because what we know is that so much of high performance is driven by trust.

9:30And trust means that people have to feel safe. And if they feel like people are assuming positive intent, then they feel safer. They feel more likely to take risks. They feel more likely to do their best and bring new ideas forward and things like that. So those are just some of the things that we have done to develop a great culture. But I think the values piece is critical for defining your vision for what your culture is going to become. You know, you get this right when people are engaged. Yeah. I mean, that's sort of in a technical sense, because a lot of people measure corporate productivity in terms of engagement.

10:04You know, are people actually engaged in the work at hand and bringing it to their work, their best self, their whole heart, their best skills, all the rest. And that's actually something you can measure. And in fact, we've had the privilege the last couple of years of winning the Inc. Best Places to Work Award. And one of the things that they measure is engagement. How much time do your teammates spend, say, scrolling through Facebook or shopping online versus actually doing the work that you're paying them to do? So the latter is engagement. And that's the thing that you're after. Most companies have very low engagement numbers.

10:41I'm talking like in the 30s. Our engagement numbers are in the 90s. That's not us measuring them. That's Inc. measuring it when they do the award process. They survey all of our employees. They come back with an engagement score. And we've always been in the mid-90s, which is huge. But that's a result of culture. And culture is the unseen force that drives operating results. That's one of the things that we teach, one of the things that we believe. And one of the things that we believe attracts top talent and retains it. Well, I also think in a world that is kind of remaking itself on the backside of COVID, we have to be intentional as we're thinking about culture with coming up again for ways for people to connect.

11:22You know, I think two years ago or even a year ago, we were all just kind of riding the coattails of the relational equity that we had built before COVID happened. Right. And then if we were remote for a long period of time with mostly the same team, that was OK. because we had all this equity to draw upon. And then, you know, fast forward, now here we are two years later, we have to reinvest. It's sort of like we've taken a lot of withdrawals on that equity and we need to reinvest culturally. We need to do things again, best case scenario, in person to nurture the relationships that people have with their coworkers, with their supervisors, with their teams, with just kind of the mission and the lifeblood of the company because that drives engagement too.

12:07And I think this is one of those things because it's kind of a little amorphous that it's easy to discount, but it's so critically important. People need to be together and they need to have meaningful relationships with each other because in many cases, the most meaningful relationships people have in their lives are with their coworkers. That's who they spend most of their time with. So it's not something to dismiss as you're thinking about how to retain talent. If people are connected to the people they work with, they're going to be more likely to stay.

12:48Okay, so we talked about core ideology being the first tool. We talked about a healthy culture being the second tool. I would propose that the third tool is job clarity. You know, people need to know what winning looks like. And that starts, and this sounds really elementary, but a lot of people don't do this. and that is it starts with a position or a job description. What is it that you're hiring to? What's expected of that position? How have we defined what winning looks like? And when you know that, you can play your best game. If you don't know what winning looks like, then you kind of, you know, flay around trying to figure it out on your own.

13:25Sometimes you hit it, sometimes you don't. But that leads to a lot of frustration, a lot of misunderstanding, a lot of misalignment, and a lack of execution. Absolutely. Well, you know, a job description is also critically important when you're trying to attract the right talent because you're really trying to discern if you're the applicant, is this job a fit for my interests, for my skills, for my experience? And if you're maybe in a smaller business context and that's not something that you've done or it's kind of sloppy and not that precise, you're going to have a hard time finding the right person.

13:58And maybe you even get a lot of applicants, but their skills and experience are not the right match for what you're looking for, for the work that actually needs to be done. And so this is a critical piece to, again, go back to the vision, articulate the vision. And then as those applicants are coming in, you can align them or not to the job description that you had, which ultimately enables there to be great execution when and if you bring them on board. So this is an important step and something we talk a lot about with our coaching clients because it's a step that gets skipped or not done well.

14:33And then the downstream effects tend to be negative. Well, it seems so bureaucratic, you know, position description. Do we really have to go through that? You know, I know a lot of people roll their eyes when they hear about it, but that's really where it starts. And again, we want to begin with the end in mind. But it's not just that. It's also having clarity around goals. It's having clarity around, you know, what performance looks like when it's successful. So the more that you as a leader can do to define the win in advance, again, don't try to dictate the details, but define the win, what winning looks like, the easier it's going to be to recruit people and especially to retain people.

15:09People want to play with the winning team. They want to know they're succeeding. If you're in a job where you feel like you're never quite measuring up or you don't even know where the end zone is, you know, and there's no score being kept, then that's the kind of thing that leads to people leaving for another opportunity. Yeah. Well, if you're thinking about doing this on the front end of hiring, there's a few components to a good job description that we generally incorporate into one. The first is just a company overview. You know, if someone's reading this and let's say they're sending it to a friend, you know, hey, I think you might be a great fit for this copywriter position.

15:43You know, they may not have the context of your company. So including just a paragraph or so about your company as an overview would be really helpful. Then you want to have a positional overview. So let's talk about what is this position? Who does it report to? What is kind of the mission, to your point, Dad, of this position? How do they know if they're being successful? Kind of what's the overview of what the job itself is, what the benefits are, that kind of stuff. Then what are the responsibilities? And when I write a job description or when one of some of our team writes a job description, I like to think of these in buckets.

16:18You know, for example, for my chief of staff, Erin Perry, and this now being a post-hire format. But originally, before I found her, here were the buckets of her job description. Communication, project management, strategic planning, internal meeting and event planning, and administration. So those were the areas. And then under each one, there are three or four bullets that detail the specific responsibilities so that it's clear that, you know, these are going to resonate with the kind of person that I wanted. In fact, when she read this, she was like, oh, my gosh, that sounds like me. And that's exactly what you want.

16:53And then lastly, what are the proficiencies in terms of skill sets? So again, for chief of staff, these are things like relationship management, influential leadership and decision making, planning and logistics, event planning. You know, these are all the proficiencies that she needed to have. And then what are the requirements in terms of education, you know, physical capability, if that's relevant to the job, those kinds of things. So this is what you want. So again, you have a company overview. You have a position overview. You have the responsibilities that are detailed. And I like to bucket those under kind of the main headings with bullets underneath with the details.

17:31What are the proficiencies that are needed? And then what are the requirements in terms of education, experience, or physical capabilities? And if you really get all of those things at a job description, you're going to have a pretty professional, complete description of what the role is that you're looking to fill. And by the way, if you want to see a living example of what this looks like, you can go to fullfocus.co slash careers. We have some positions open and you could scroll down and look at those for examples.

18:05so again the tools we're talking about to recruiting and retaining top talent core ideology healthy culture job clarity and the fourth one i'd like to propose megan compelling benefits this is where you have an opportunity to not just kind of do what everybody else does but to exercise a little creativity and say what would be an amazing package that would attract the best talent and keep them. Something that they probably couldn't get elsewhere. So we've got a little bit of creativity. And Megan, I can remember very well when you and I sat in a hotel room in Chicago and kind of reinvented this for our company, we said, okay, if we're going to get the very best talent and we really had this conviction that our company was going to rise or fall based on our ability to recruit top talent.

18:51And boy, is that proven to be the case. But we said, we've got to have a talent package. What would attract people so that they looked at our company and said, how do I get into this company? So just a couple of them that we have today, and I'm looking again at fullfocus.co slash careers, but we have, for example, five weeks of paid time off. We have a company one week summer vacation where the entire company closes down for a week. So nobody has to feel guilty about not doing any work. You don't risk getting messages from your coworkers or your supervisor because there ain't nobody working during that week.

19:23We have something, we have a six-hour workday. We have a culture that's mostly remote or it's a hybrid, you know, where you get a little bit of the best of both worlds. You can work remotely. You don't have to have that commute. You can get a lot done, be productive, and also be flexible with your family. But at the same time, you can come in and work at the office when the need is there. We also have Flex Wednesdays, which is one of my favorite benefits. This is new this year and our team is loving it, which is the freedom to choose when you wanna start and end work on Wednesdays. So for example, we have generally a six-hour workday.

20:00If you wanna start early in the morning and be done by late morning so that you can go do some other things in your personal life, that's great. Or if you wanna take the morning for personal things and you wanna work late in the afternoon or even in the evening, if that fits better for you, then that's great too. So our team is loving that. That's a no meeting day for us. So synchronous work is not required. And, you know, people love autonomy. I think one of the principles that you'll see in our list is that there's a lot of autonomy there. And that's one of the things that people are looking for, especially right now, especially after having worked remotely in many cases.

20:33So if there are ways that in your benefits you can incorporate autonomy in a way that works well for your context, that's always a win. Plus, of course, we have great regular benefits like fantastic health insurance and things like that. Yeah. And one of the things that we have that I love and our employees love is a tiered bonus plan. You know, a lot of times I hear leaders complain, they say, well, you know, if I could just get my team to think like owners, well, if you want them to think like an owner, you got to treat them like an owner. And one of the things that owners do is they share in the profits.

21:06So to have some kind of bonus pool where everybody has a vested interest based on the performance of the company, but if they have a vested interest in the company performing well, then they're fully engaged, right? Because they've got an upside to their job.

21:24Okay. So tool number four, compelling benefits, tool number five, and there's a reason we're putting this last, but it's competitive compensation. I think a lot of people too often put this first. I've looked at a lot of HR studies in terms of why people stay, why people leave, what attracts people. Compensation's definitely one of those, but it's not usually the top one. And I'm putting it last because that's the one that usually gets most of our attention, but you really need to think through the other four tools first, but then get down to competitive compensation. Obviously in this market, that's so competitive, you're not going to be able to lowball people.

22:01You're going to have to be competitive, which means you got to do some research. You've got to know what the position is. You got to be a little bit careful here because sometimes people will use the same title to describe vastly different jobs. You know, somebody who's a director of marketing at Procter & Gamble is probably different than a director of marketing for, you know, a small business in your local community. So you've got to look at the job content. You've got to look at the scope of responsibility. The geographical location matters. Geographical location, all that stuff matters. And one of the things that we do just to make sure that we can say this with confidence when we make a job offer or when we're telling our people that they're being, you know, compensated in a competitive way.

22:43We do a compensation study every couple of years. We employ some outside consultants to do that. They look at industry specifics. They look at our regional specifics. They look at the job content and the job description. The size of our company. They factor all that. I'm sorry? The size of our company. Yeah. Size of the company is really important, like the Procter & Gamble example I gave. So all this needs to be factored in there. But I like to be able to look prospective employees or our existing employees in the eye and with confidence say, I know for a fact that what you're being paid is competitive.

23:16And frankly, our standard is we want to be above market, you know, not vastly above market. That wouldn't be good for us or good for the longevity of the company. But we want to be paying better than just, you know, average or fair. We want to dial it up a notch from there. Yeah. And this also helps you when people come to you who are on your team and they say, well, I think I'm being underpaid because, you know, I saw on Glassdoor that, you know, a marketing director makes whatever, whatever. And what you can say is, well, actually, we've had this third party analyze our compensation. And based on all the factors, dad, that you just mentioned, you're in the whatever percentile, you know, and it's really helpful to do that because the problem on sites like Glassdoor and others is they don't factor all the variables that don't make visible, all the variables that drive compensation.

24:08And like you said, titles are not apples to apples in most cases. I mean, there's no like title police that says that, you know, a marketing director here must be the same as a marketing director over here. It's obviously totally discretionary. And I think sometimes employees or prospective employees don't know that. And so they have expectations that are not aligned with real market data. And that's where having a third party is really helpful because it might be difficult for them to trust you as the business owner just saying that, you know, based on whatever your anecdotal research would be.