I’ve spent a great deal of effort in the past few months to help people understand the value of finding talented rock stars for their businesses. Again, we don’t recruit, we build the process with our clients for them to identify talent, interview, and hire talent. What has been interesting is the story of one of our early clients in this process.
I was working with a friend of mine who leads a sales team for a large company on the east coast. He is a rock star himself and his team loves him. He called me with an issue. He had lost several of his first line managers in the past several months, through no fault of his own. He had hired talented individuals, but the funnel for promotion narrowed quickly. The talent that left could not see a future for growth.
When you have worked hard to find talent, it is a shame, and a great expense to your company, to see them leave. The challenge my friend’s company had was not only finding talent but developing talent. Top performers don’t just leave the company for more money, they leave because they don’t see the challenge. That is what they are looking for.
We sat with the stakeholders and talked through how they were developing their managers. We brainstormed different ways they could give them opportunities to grow. We defined success at twelve months and worked our way backward in three month increments to determine what would set up the next three months to meet the expectations for success at the one-year mark. I spoke to my friend again at the one-year mark from his last four hires. He had implemented the plans we built, and they measured their impact. Not one of his first line managers had left the company in over a year.
Several companies feel hiring stars will allow them to get them into the company and let them find their way on their own. It’s a painful mistake to make. Don’t spend the effort to hire a great fit and then lose them because you don’t invest in their development.
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