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Ryan Healy is a recent college graduate. He is a founder of 
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New here? Employee Evolution is a blog written by Ryan Healy. Ryan is a Co-Founder of Brazen Careerist, the webs #1 social network for young professionals. Ryan speaks with organizations on best practices for recruiting and retaining Generation Y and how to effectively use social media to reach your target market. To contact Ryan, please visit our contact page.
I recently revisited Jim Collins’ “Good to Great.” I first read the book back in college when I was obsessed with the thought of being my own boss and never answering to anyone. It was a good read, but for where I was then, it seemed a little too corporate. But now that I’ve been running a business for more than a year, I can apply the analysis directly to my current situation.
My favorite point is about the importance of hiring GREAT people if you want to build a great company. Collins claims that people are not the most important asset. GREAT people are. He goes so far as to say that “good to great” companies first worried about getting the right people in the door and the wrong people out, and then worried about setting the right vision or plan for the company. Some companies lost millions of dollars a day while they waited around to find the right people.
They lost millions because it’s not easy to find GREAT people to work for you. Most great people have great jobs and make great money. They’re not hanging around Monster.com waiting for someone to read their resume. The truth is, it costs a company a ton of time and money to find great people. And most companies would rather settle for good or even average people. Unfortunately, that’s not good enough.
Seth Godin reaffirmed Collins point in his post the other day, when he wrote
“If your organization can thrive with ordinary folks, then the marketing you’re doing right now to fill the ranks might even be overkill. You’ve got plenty of resumes. No need to pretend you’re doing anything much more than bottom fishing, though. That plaque for employee of the month? You can sell it on eBay.
On the other hand, organizations that work best with extraordinary talent are almost certainly not investing enough in finding and developing it. If marketing works so well that you spend a fortune on it, why aren’t you marketing your jobs? If talent is so important that you are betting the company on it, why aren’t you actually investing in finding and retaining that talent?”
Godin’s absolutely right. To be a truly successful business, you can’t just market your products. You have to constantly market your jobs.
The top companies already get it. There’s a reason that the big four - Deloitte, Accenture, Ernst & Young and KPMG appear at the top of the list year after year for best places to work. They spend money, time and energy marketing their jobs by branding themselves as employers of choice. It’s not like they have earth-shattering positions available. They’re mostly accountants, auditors and consultants. But they take their hiring seriously. And that’s why they’re great companies.
So yes, finding great people is expensive and time consuming. But hiring the wrong people is even more expensive and more time consuming. If your company is trying to figure out where to cut costs right now, make sure you consider the advice from Jim Collins, Seth Godin and The Big 4 before you decide to cut those recruiting and marketing budgets.
Ryan - great article!
At one of my former companies, we actually struggled with this. The best employees want to work for great companies - not mediocre ones. Do you have any insight into how you can not just recruit but actually retain great employees?
I’ve seen at least one organization become a revolving door for the best talent because they became frustrated within a year of joining.
- Chris
Thanks for the insights, Ryan. Coming from the other direction, I think it’s important for job seekers to understand that in order to get hired in the current economic climate, they *must* be great people, not adequate or ordinary.
We just put up a post discussing Ryan’s article over at The Recruiter: therecruiter.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/11/be-great-not-ordinary-grab-employers-attention.html
Let’s not forget that it doesn’t end with hiring. It’s about hiring AND retaining the great people.
Great point, Rachel. And part of employee retention is not becoming too enamored and obsessed with “the new guys” that you forget the rest of the workforce. As for new hires, companies (and job seekers) would do well to focus on niche job boards with a more specialized audience, instead of appealing to the masses with general job boards.
Interesting. If you take the typical bell curve and call that the pool of applicants, you don’t want to recruit the right tail, they’ll likely leave within months. The people on the left tail aren’t qualified. The mean is just average. What you want to recruit is the section just above the mean. They’re intelligent and qualified enough that they’ll produce good results, but they’re not so good that they’ll go start their own company or leave for another firm.
I can’t recall the name of the test, but there’s one that’s done by some of the staffing agencies. They’ll rank the applicant based on their aptitude to stay and work based on the type of job.
Excellent post!
So many companies will hire mediocre individuals because they don’t cost as much or because they’re less likely to shake things up. However what they fail to realize is that during a bad economy it is these great people that will come up with new ways to generate business, put in the extra time on projects, and help their company move the sales needle.
I can attest to the difficulty of finding great people. As an online resume writer, I have done my best to build a reputation for excellent work and heightened customer service. It has served me well for 13 years. But what I notice is that when I hire contract writers, the attention to detail is never the same. Also, if I let them work with the clients directly, they don’t provide the same attention and customer service as I do. I guess no treats your customers the way that you do.
I am working on a training program at this time that should help me in communicating to my writers exactly what I expect from them in terms of writing style/quality and customer service. But the biggest value of this will be that I can eliminate dead weight and have a training program that will get new writers up to speed very quickly.
But you can be sure that no one leaves us unhappy … I personally see to that!