Attract The Best
We have all heard about “personal branding” and how to make yourself have incredible value in the eyes of those offering employment. But the other side of the coin is that companies are vying for a limited resource called Human Capital. This in effect means that your company better be on the “best place to work top ten list” so that those talented humans out there go out of their way to be in the queue for meaningful employment at your offices.
It is extremely painful to attract the wrong people to your organisation and even worse, to let them in! Firstly they won’t fit and will cause internal strife for all and sundry and secondly, it will cost you further to get rid of them.
There is a big difference in what you sell and market to the world of consumers and what actually happens in your work place, and often a job candidate can become very confused in this process.
A prospective employee should not choose to work at your organisation because you sell great baked beans or have funky adverts running on the television. They should be attracted by your culture and your reputation. These are created by yourself and transmitted into the market by suppliers, current and past employees.
Thus, if your brand is not seen as a positive attractor, your recruiting efforts will be both challenging and very costly, and the best talent will search for companies with better reputations, because they can.
It’s not necessarily about facts but more so about perception. A good example is the perception of Google being a sexy, fast paced, entrepreneurial environment where you work exclusively with A-players and get to change the way people access information around the world. We’ve seen the intern movie and we are led to believe this is what you get when you arrive.
If you get a job at your “Google” and the workplace is as expected i.e. the brand delivered on their brand promise , it’s happy days for all.
Beyond Teambuilding pride ourselves in creating events, activities and challenges that push any team past mediocrity, allowing them to express themselves in a way that unleashes a team synergy that is often lying dormant. Our teambuilding is done in two definitive ways; formal and informal. Both have merit and are used to create the specific objectives of your particular team’s needs.
Regardless of whether you can afford the best, if you want to attract the best then you may find this helpful:
1. Match the external brand with your internal brand. If there is a disconnect between your external image and your internal reality, it will cost you dearly in losing good people. Potential employees and “newbies” are smart enough to see through the glitz and glamour of commercials and marketing campaigns if they are not mirrored internally. The real future challenge will be to ensure your internal brand and the external brand are integrated and speak to each other.
2. The internal brand must be developed. A huge part of developing an sustainable organisation is to create a corporate culture whereby, values practiced, work ethics and corporate behaviour are all real and actually practised by all, especially management. This is one of the primary responsibilities of the leadership within organisations today, not the numbers, not the short term deliverables, but the long term sustainability of the organisation’s attractiveness.
3. Understand Millennials. Those attracted to your business are hopefully smart, can be empowered, and can be of all ages and diversities. This creates a new challenge for management. Where the management is Generation X or even Baby Boomers, they will find it somewhat “interesting” when young and demanding millennials come knocking on the door. There is not enough ink or paper to write the book on successfully managing millennials, but I suggest you go get one, or await my next blog.
The challenge of attracting the right talent is “Game on”, just getting a podium place won’t be good enough if your competitor’s attract the Gold.
John Ingram
Director of Training at the HiSide Group
When we remember that people were shot so we could have the 8-hour day; if we acknowledge that homes with families in them were burned to the ground so we could have Saturday as part of the weekend; when we recall 8-year old victims of industrial accidents who marched in the streets protesting working conditions and child labour only to be beaten down by the police and company thugs, we understand that our current situation cannot be taken for granted – people fought for the rights and dignities we enjoy today, and there is still a lot more to fight for. The sacrifices of so many people cannot be forgotten, or we will end up fighting for those same gains all over again. This is why we celebrate May Day.