How to Attract and Hire Excellent Employees - No Matter the Position
“Ask employees why’d you join, why’d you stay, and why’d you leave and make sure your programs fit their feedback.”
- Amanda Gordon, VP People at Rewind
In the sixth episode of our podcast, Unicorn Leaders, our guest, Amanda Gordon, explains how companies and managers can attract, hire and retain amazing employees. She also tells us the importance of figuring out what brings an employee to your company, what makes them stay and what makes them leave.
The people on our team are key to any business’s success. The composition of a team concerns the skills and attitudes of each member. You want to try and get the right people on the team to achieve the desired high-performance level you’re aiming for.
What matters most on a team is the interactions between people rather than the necessary talent on the team. Over and over again, research supports this. Still, when we raise the bar and two sets of teams work effectively together, team composition becomes important in solving complex problems and innovating when building your startup and developing leadership.
To effectively manage team composition, you need to have to answer a few questions:
- What individual team members have the necessary technical skills?
- Do you have the right soft skills, the interpersonal skills?
- Communication skills?
- Are the individual team members committed?
- Is there alignment in their values, intrinsic values?
- Is the team the right size to complete the right tasks?
Teams with members who lack alignment in their motivation and engagement, aren't able to accomplish tasks and lack the skills to achieve their team’s goals.
Imagine a documentary about your team and what it's accomplishing six months from now. What specific results do you see? How was your day different from what the team is doing today?
Think about the skills needed to make that vision a reality six months from now. Once you've envisioned the ideal outcome of how your team works and feels, the skill that's necessary to achieve it, it becomes clear as you analyze whether those skill sets match the existing team members that you have and what the gap is.
You need to have honest conversations about letting some team members find a new place where their talent is a better fit. You'll also need to recruit the right people and skills because once you have a high-performing team, once you're moving towards that ideal vision six months from now of what your team will look like, you'll start to see the gaps in people.
In startups, we often talk about our customer journey and when trying to make the product market fit and understand exactly how our product has to be positioned in the market. We get good at customer insight. Why can't we do the same thing for employees?
We've got to create a talent market fit within our organizations. What is our employee experience? What are the challenges, and how are we positioning ourselves in the market to attract the most phenomenal team players to create a high-performing team?
Table of Contents:
Now that you have mastered how to manage conflict - what is your plan of action for making an impact with your team?
Now that you have mastered how to create an environment of empowerment via the 3-P's - what is your plan of action for making an impact with your team?
Developing Your Communication, Empathy and Emotional Intelligence skills is start. What is your plan of action for implementing your learnings within your your team?
Now that you understand the differences in these titles - what is your plan of action for what you learned?
Assessing your team's behaviors is a start - but do you have a plan of action for the results?
Now that you have mastered the art of decision making - what is your plan of action for making an impact with your team?
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A DISC Behavior Assessment is the best way to understand your team's personalities.
Each DISC Assessment includes a Self Assessment and DISC Style evaluation worksheet