The Imperative of a Talent Strategy

We all know the pain points when our talent practices aren’t working: difficulty filling positions, increased staff turnover and burnout, low staff morale, and overarching downgrading of talent over time as top performers seek employers who have their talent practices in order. And there is a plethora of research outlining the financial implications of these challenges. For example, the price of one employee leaving is estimated at 150% times that employee’s annual salary.

And the implications do not stop there. Who achieves an organization’s goals? People. Who implements an organization’s marketing strategy? People. Who raises money to support an organization’s programs and growth? People. So why wouldn’t everyone have same level of rigor around their talent strategy as they do around marketing and fundraising strategies? Especially when the success of achieving an organization’s mission is so obviously dependent on the people employed there.

Here are five steps your organization can take now to build a talent strategy that is aligned with organizational goals and priorities:

1.     Understand what your organization is trying to achieve. This means setting concrete and measurable organization wide goals that the talent strategy can be designed around to support. For example, if your organization is planning on launching a new service or program, the talent team will need to ensure they have talent pools at the ready to fill new openings.

2.     Assess your current bench. Do the people in your organization have the skills and experience required to achieve these goals? Or, are you venturing into a new area that requires bringing new expertise into the organization. Maybe your organization is growing in size and complexity requiring a more sophisticated management skill set. The talent team needs to be aware of these changes on the horizon in order to plan for professional development that will prepare staff for the future and to fill certain gaps with new talent.

3.     Survey your staff. It is critically important to understand staff engagement. Are people fired up and inspired to give it their all everyday or is a lack of engagement and enthusiasm getting in the way of your organization’s success.  

4.     Start leveraging data. Data driven decision-making is the anchor for any effective talent strategy. Without it, your organization will be shooting blind at an unknown target. For example, individual staff performance data should inform every single decision your organization makes about talent:  who gets promoted, where you invest professional development resources, how you embed strategic succession planning to prepare for future organizational evolution. Market data should inform how much individuals are compensated and how. Engagement data should inform priorities for improvement.

5.     Put it all together to inform your talent strategy. Once you know what your organization aspires to achieve, what skill gaps exist in your talent pool, how engaged your staff are, and have concrete data to refer to, your strategy will become clear. Top talent priorities and areas of urgency will rise to the surface.  Now, your job will be to translate these into concrete goals, initiatives, and actions that the organization can take to advance talent practices throughout.

Recruiting Lessons from the Mayweather vs. Pacquiao Fight

My colleagues and I regularly get called upon to help schools and education organizations find the best candidates to fill key positions in their organizations. We are skilled at combing our extensive nationwide networks and researching prospects in similar roles to identify top candidates. Still, hiring managers sometimes struggle to settle on a final candidate, wanting to hold out for the “unicorn” candidate.

Everybody loves a unicorn. Unicorns are those magical, mystical creatures that have all the most desirable characteristics and traits. The unfortunate truth, though, is that unicorns don’t actually exist. Which might be why some observers of the May 2nd boxing match between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao were disappointed.

Hype and anticipation accompanied the weeks and months leading up to the title match in Vegas. Fans and the media excitedly looked for this to be the biggest fight in recent memory, harkening back to the “glory days” of boxers like Ali, Frazier, Foreman, and Sugar Ray. Now that it’s over, fans are complaining that it was boring, lacked excitement, wasn’t worth the hype or the money Pay-Per-View viewers and attendees of the live event paid to see it. They’d hoped to see the kind of dramatic moments in boxing that die hard fans never forget, those magical, mystical moments that get replayed for generations to come.

What they got instead were two accomplished boxers who put in exceptional effort and followed the rules. Arguably, Mayweather was victorious because of his precision, consistency, and tenacity. Nothing about either boxer was spectacular, extraordinary, or exceptional, yet both have excelled in their field and won the adoration of legions of fans as a result of what Mayweather would call “hardwork and dedication”. It’s clear they’ve both been successful.

Aren’t these the qualities we all want in a good employee - someone who can be counted on to deliver consistent and dependable results? Is it actually necessary to hold out for someone with almost supernatural talents and abilities rather than hiring the person we can rely on to do their job well and follow the rules? In other words, what really is the allure of the unicorn candidate who seems to have so many strengths that failure seems impossible? We can all agree that our kids need great people leading their schools and the organizations that support them. Yet maybe it’s time for search teams and hiring managers to prioritize consistent, knowledgeable, and dependable talent over the hunt for the seemingly impossible-to-find unicorn candidates. After all, though some might think Floyd Mayweather’s technique lacks dynamism, it has led him to an almost flawless record and recognition as a stand out in his field. 

Get Ahead of the Game

If you're a talent professional in the education sector, things are likely a bit slower (read: more manageable) for you right now as all the people you hired for this school year settle into their new roles. Still, I always say that education talent recruitment is like working in retail - to be successful you always have to be at least a season ahead. So now with the season officially turned to fall, a good recruitment strategy for your next hiring season needs to start now. But where does one begin?

Evaluate the previous season
Most schools are data-driven environments these days, and the HR/talent team is no exception. Begin your talent strategy planning by looking at all the important data from the previous season. From where did most of your new hires come? Which events or marketing initiatives were most successful? How successful are your newest hires in their roles? What were the candidate pass-through rates for each phase of the selection process?

Begin with the end in mind
Particularly for anyone working in a growing charter school or network, you'll need to know what new positions are anticipated for the coming year. Is your organization adding a new grade? Are new positions being added as part of the transition to Common Core? Connect with whomever is charged with the academic program to find out what they have in mind. (But keep in mind that it could change!)

The talent shuffle
Take a current faculty and staff list and sit down with your school's leaders to determine who they anticipate will return to their same position next year. Is anyone being promoted to a new role? Who is considering a cross-country move, planning to be a stay-at-home mom, or planning for grad school? Use the fall season to start identifying these potential transitions to help you assess what openings you'll need to fill. You'll start to identify some definite openings and some possible ones.

Survey and Interview staff
Want to know what people like about working at your organization, what made them choose your school over another offer, or what candidates most liked and disliked about the selection process? Just ask your staff. This information will be invaluable in putting together a talent recruitment marketing plan, figuring out where to recruit, and tweaking your selection process. Don't forget to use the opportunity to ask them what educator rockstars they know who might be interested in future openings!

Review your selection process
When I was Chief Talent Officer at DC Prep, I called this "reflection and refinement" in honor of one of our organizational values. Ultimately, you want to be sure the steps you take to select staff in different roles are efficient while also being aligned with your values and expectations of staff. You can get even more bang for your buck if it is well aligned with your performance management system and observation/feedback cycle. Further, it is important to get clear about what you're looking for in staff before you start recruiting them to ensure both processes are aligned.

Review your marketing materials
Have you updated your website, social media sites, and print materials since the last hiring season? Make sure these properly reflect what's happening in your schools and promote your school in the best light. Think about how the sites reflect what you value most in staff. For instance, if you want data-driven and results-oriented staff, include student achievement data and examples of the kinds of results your teachers and leaders have garnered for students. As much as possible, try to show and not just tell the things that make your school great by including videos, pictures, and graphic representations.

Candidate cultivation
Plan ahead, get clear about your hiring needs, and make sure your materials are a good reflection of your organization, but don't wait another minute to cultivate prospective candidates already in your database. Remember that awesome candidate from last season who decided not to move at the last minute? Or that leader you didn't have the right role for last year but think you might next year? Send them an email or give them a call just to check in, include them on your organization's e-newsletter, or invite them to an event at your school. They'll love that you remember them and who knows how circumstances might change for you and them in the next cycle.

Our team just loves coaching and consulting with talent professionals to support these proactive components of talent strategy. Let us know how we can help you get ahead of the game. Talent strategy is all about planning and it takes the talent professionals at your school or organization to lead the way in securing the best talent pool. Don't delay!

Back to School

My sons are back in school after a busy summer.  Mornings at the house are finally quiet again and this got me thinking of all the projects related to this back-to-school season.  It is time to get ahead of the curve on the most important of those tasks. 

Similarly, this is also a good time of the year when many school-based organizations can start to plan out their hiring timelines and projections for the following school year. Teachers and school leaders may start thinking about next career steps as early as November or December and many school recruitment activities really start to pick up at the beginning of the new year. 

 The Fall is a perfect time for organizations to look at potential hiring sources such as:

·       Recruitment events at teacher colleges and/or Schools of Education

·       Networking opportunities in your community to establish new relationships and to build potential partnerships

·       Specific conferences that specialize in areas to fit your organization’s needs (i.e Charter School or technology based conferences)

·       Maintaining connections to key stakeholders and building a referral network.

One of the best resources for hiring key positions is to promote from within.  Does your organization have an emerging leadership program?  The Fall can be a great time to look at succession plans for key positions.  Who are some of the influential individuals in your school or organization and how can you empower them to take on more leadership responsibilities?    

This is a great time to look back at systems and processes to determine what worked well last year.  You can ask key questions such as:  

·       What events gave us a good yield of qualified candidates for our open positions and which did not?

·       What key positions do you expect to open up in the next 9-12 months?  

·       What will be our recruiting and hiring budget for the coming year?

·       Have we prepared financial reserves for positions that need to be filled unexpectedly throughout the year? 

Putting together a recruitment project timeline and listing a calendar of events will help hiring managers to get a bird’s eye view of the upcoming recruitment season, alleviating any last minute scrambling to fill those critical positions.  So, why not get a jump start on the planning process this year?  You will be better prepared to fill those critical positions and before you know it, summer break will be upon us again! 

Conversion – More Than a Religious Experience

If you are like most people, when you see the word “conversion” you think of the process someone goes through when they are shifting money around among their retirement accounts or the experience of changing identity from one set of religious practices to another.  [Spoiler alert: Neither of these are the uses of the word “conversion” that I will be talking about today.]

For recruiters, though, conversion is about that very important – and often neglected – step between the “recruitment” phase of getting a candidate interested in a job and the “selection” phase, where we are assessing their interest, fit, and skills related to the position in question.  In this context, conversion means the work we do to “convert” someone from an interested lead to a real, live, active applicant for the given role.  And in my experience, this is where many of us fall down on the job, losing high-quality people in the process.  It is crucial to have a systematic, persistent recruitment operation, cultivating potential leads and getting them excited about our organization.  But we need to follow that up with encouragement to complete the application process so we have a chance to review their credentials and consider hiring them for our positions. 

As someone who has focused much of my career as a recruiter on finding quality leaders for under-resourced public schools and the organizations that support them, I may put a little more stock that most in the need to work closely with quality candidates to ensure they complete and press “send” on their formal application paperwork.  If I do, however, I come by it honestly.  My clients do not have a wealth of exceptional candidates beating down their doors to take over these highly rewarding but very challenging roles. And I have seen far too often that if we do not continually court and reach out to those who are in demand throughout the recruitment process, someone else will.  When we create cumbersome and opaque application systems, fail to follow up regularly with people to ensure they don’t have any lingering questions, or take for granted that candidates will understand our value proposition without really explaining it to them, high quality leads may decide in the end not to apply at all and try their luck with one of our competitors instead.

So as we start wrapping up our recruitment operations for this year’s education hiring season, don’t forget to evaluate your application systems to make sure that every step you include is vital to collecting the information you need to make great decisions – and not too arduous for candidates to complete.  Take the time to look back over your leads and see if any of those folks you were excited about when you did your initial recruiting calls failed to actually apply to the role(s).  If so, pop them an email or give them a quick call today and see if you can convert them from a lead to an applicant by giving a little more encouragement along the way.

The Tao of Networking

I've been thinking about the right title for this blog about networking.  I didn't want to use the words art or science because those are terms I've seen overused about networking.  I wanted to find a term that described networking as a philosophy, a way of being.  Then I thought about a posthumous collections of Bruce Lee's martial arts philosophy, the Tao of Jeet Kune Do. That was it - TAO!  The Tao of Networking is more of a principle, a path.    

My own Tao of Networking over the last 10 years (many of which have been spent on LinkedIn) are an accumulation of values and lessons learned from school leadership recruitment, making connections amongst my own networks, and meeting lots of people from all walks of life.

#1:  Networking is giving.  I read an Adam Grant article recently about this.  Yes when we reach out to people, there's something we usually want in return (advice, connections, a job!).  But I've learned to always offer what can I give in return.  I end every networking conversation by asking if there's anything I can do for the person.  I usually have something in mind based on the conversation, like making a connection for them, sharing a resource, or sharing a status update for the person's work.    

#2: Networking is learning.  I've had hundreds of networking conversations over the past two years.  I usually write a series of questions I ask each person, based on what it is I want to learn.  I've found that starting with a learning orientation, which makes me actively listen and more curious about the person, leads to new lessons!  For example, I had a great conversation with a trusted mentor.  Not only did she refer a number of great books on coaching, but gave me two easy pieces of advice as I coach clients:  Listen more and empower them to create their own path (and not YOUR path!).

#3: Networking is consistency.  It's all about the follow-up.  If you say you'll do something for someone, do it.  I take my networking notes and create a calendar appointment to follow up on an item.  Additionally, I'll email out any next steps from a conversation to hold myself accountable.  Most importantly, I reach out to three people every week to just say hi and ask what I can do for that person.  

There are plenty of great articles about the process for networking, from a good email ask to how to frame a successful networking conversation.  HOWEVER, without these values, networking then just become another item on our to-do list.  Why not network because it aligns with who we are!

Why Search Consultants Make Business Sense

The Challenge

If people make an organization, why is recruitment often a second tier priority for most organizations?

Most HR leaders including myself will say, “no, no, no – our people are our greatest asset and hiring the best talent is one of the most important priorities in our organization.”

Very often in today’s world of efficiency and productivity, the strategic initiatives that are so important to our organizations are under-resourced while we battle the business priorities of the day. We can easily close out a 10-hour day of managing the tactical priorities that are most pressing “right now”, and fail to dedicate the time and planning required for a successful talent acquisition effort.

As an HR leader I have spent many an evening and weekend screening applications and talking with candidates. These working hours were not ideal for me, the candidates, or my organization; this was simply the only time I could allocate to recruitment and talent acquisition.

Relegating search activities to a lower priority often leads to a less rigorous effort, which in turn can lead to a poor hiring decision. And, if you have been in the business long enough, you understand how costly a poor hiring decision can be to your organization and to you.

Another interesting dynamic we deal with today is what to do with the unqualified candidates who apply to an ad or our website(s). An organization’s brand is increasingly valuable in today’s social media world.

• Do you respond to all applicants?
• Do you personally contact interviewed candidates to respectfully inform them that they didn’t make the cut?

A Solution

Do you have several open positions or just one really tough position to fill?  Don’t know where to start recruiting because it seems like such a daunting task?  There are so many advantages to hiring a search consultant; these individuals make a profession out of hiring the right person for the job.

Here are a few benefits that come along with hiring a third party recruiter:

•    A structured approach
•    Existing & relevant professional networks
•    Access to candidates
•    Objective outsider's perspective
•    Protection from alienating great candidates lacking the experience you seek  
•    Protection from politically sensitive relationships that may be bruised from the  search & selection process
•    The resources to respectfully manage all applicants

Want to learn more?  Feel free to reach out to us at http://www.redwoodcircle.org/contact/ or leave a comment on this page.  Thanks for reading!

- Viviana Pyle, Senior Consultant

She’s Just Not That Into You

Why Hiring and Dating Are More Similar Than You May Think

First of all, in the interest of full disclosure I should say that it is possible some might not think me qualified to write a blog piece that talks about the world of dating.  I met my husband more than 15 years ago and have not dated anyone since, which means my last dating experiences came not only before the days of social media, “meet-ups,” and online dating services, they were also before regular people had cell phones.  If we wanted to meet up with one another, we left messages on each other’s home machines, called the other person during our work day and tried to talk quietly so our co-workers in the next cubicle wouldn’t snicker too much, or (shocking, I know!) made firm plans a day or more in advance.  I doubt many 20-somethings today would even recognize the dating rituals in which we participated. 

So why, you may ask (given my substantial disclaimer upfront) would I presume to speak about how dating and hiring are more similar than one might think?  It is because, although it’s been a while since I have been out on the market for both things, I remember clearly the feelings and thoughts I experienced when I was – and they are almost identical.  “Does he like me?” “Did I make a good impression?”  “I wonder if they will call me this week?”  “How long should I wait before I call them?” “Am I really that interested?  How will I know?”  One of the most important – and most difficult – characteristics of success in either scenario is a clear understanding of your own needs and value proposition and how they match up with the qualities and interests of the other party.

As hiring managers (or in my case, search consultants), it is easy to become seduced by someone’s credentials and qualifications – their Ivy League degrees, deep and relevant experiences, referrals and high recommendations from trusted sources – and forget that the candidate selection process should be a give and take on both sides.  We need to make sure they are passionate about and committed to us as much if not more than we are passionate about and committed to them.  Otherwise, we are like the guy in the movie chasing the ideal catch and losing sight of the really great girl next door who loves us for who we are.  If a potential hire is haggling aggressively about money, taking forever to respond about an offer, or easily swayed to consider another opportunity, it’s probably a good sign that he or she is just not that into you and your time will be better spent finding someone passionate about your mission and committed to working with you for the long term.

Similarly, it is important for organizations to not only put their best foot forward, confident in the value they are offering to employees, but also to be realistic and honest about the challenges new hires will face when and if they come on board.  Deception during the courting phase doesn’t do anyone any favors and can lead both parties down a path of regret, frustration, or hurt.  If a lasting match is to be made, it will be because both sides have been open and honest about their strengths and weaknesses and have decided together that they can work through their differences and form a strong, enduring partnership.  Regardless of how people find one another, it is these kinds of relationships that lead to great things in terms of high levels of loyalty and job satisfaction and – most importantly – long-lasting sector impact.