The Profile (Special Edition): 5 Lessons from World-Class Leaders on Finding & Developing Talent
How do you find great talent, and better yet, how do you retain it?
Good morning, friends!
This is a special edition of The Profile presented by career-matching platform Tal&Dev. It’s a round-up of lessons from a number of Profile Dossiers. I hope you enjoy.
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How do you find great talent, and better yet, how do you retain it?
When I talk to entrepreneurs and CEOs, they emphasize that building the right team is critical at every stage in the company’s lifecycle.
Every leader has a different idea of what it means to surround themselves with the most talented people. I often think of Tyler Perry’s tree metaphor.
Perry, the billionaire actor-director-writer-producer, says he hires people by putting them in "the category of a tree."
There are people who are like leaves, he says — they're there for a season. "As soon as the wind blows too hard, they leave," he says.
Then, there are people who are strong and somewhat reliable like a branch. "You can give them more of your life, but if you walk out too far, they'll break and leave you high and dry," he says.
And then there are the roots, whose only job is to hold you up and ensure you succeed. "I'm never mad at a leaf or branch employee, but I just need to make sure the roots are there," he says.
Below are five other practical tips from the world’s most successful leaders on how to find, develop, and retain talent.
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1. Develop a clear vision about every role at the company
Tope Awotona has built Calendly company into a $3-billion software behemoth. Hiring great people, he says, requires the entrepreneur to have a clear vision about what business success looks like.
Awotona says that before you hire a single person, you need to ask yourself: "What does success look like objectively? What do I want out of this role? How will I measure this person's performance in 90 days? What are the goals that we need to hit as a team in the next 9 to 12 months?" When he looks back on the poor hires he's made over the years, Awotona says it always starts with a mutual misalignment in the beginning of the journey.
2. Hire people who will raise the average
Jim Koch, the co-founder of the Boston Beer Company (which produced Samuel Adams beer), has a simple rule of hiring: "Never hire someone unless they will raise the average for that position.”
In other words, you want to find an employee who's significantly better than the average person doing that job. Otherwise, you run the risk of ending up with all average people, and "average sucks." He adds, "Don’t hire until employees will pay for themselves, either in more sales or cost savings on day one.”
3. Use interviews as a way to learn how people reason
Serial entrepreneur Marc Lore says the key to hiring great people is to understand how they think, and you can't do that with cliché interview questions like, "What is your greatest strength/weakness?"
When interviewing potential candidates for a role, Lore asks questions that he knows the person couldn't have possibly prepared for.
Here are some examples of things he's asked in the past: "What's the minimum amount of money you would take to walk backward for an entire week?" and "Would you rather be known to be very nice but not very smart or very smart and not very nice?" He says, "It's about seeing how people problem-solve and how they approach situations."
4. Aim to be memorable
While no one was looking, Melanie Perkins built Canva, an online graphic design business valued at $40 billion. Canva's latest funding round made it one of the world's most valuable private software companies, and the most valuable female-founded and female-led company.
When you search the words "bizarre pitch deck," Perkins's Canva recruitment pitch deck appears as the first result.
Here's why: As founder Melanie Perkins was building up Canva's technical team, she wanted to recruit Dave Hearnden, a senior engineer at Google. He was having second thoughts, so Perkins hatched a plan to convince him to take a chance on Canva.
She sent him a 16-slide pitch deck, which details the story of a man named Dave, who longed for adventure but was torn by his loyalty for Google. In the pitch deck, as in real life, Dave eventually joined Canva.
Sometimes, the bold, memorable moves prove to be fruitful — especially when courting top-notch talent. (Check out the pitch deck here.)
5. Enable the creators within the organization
As the CEO of LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy), Bernard Arnault has built the world’s largest and most successful purveyor of luxury goods. As a result, many people see him as a great financier, operator, and strategic businessman, but few understand that his most important role is to be a creativity enabler.
Throughout his career, Arnault says, he has always trusted the creatives at each fashion house. "If you think and act like a typical manager around creative people—with rules, policies, data on customer preferences, and so forth—you will quickly kill their talent," he says. "When a creative team believes in a product, you have to trust the team’s gut instinct."
You can have the best CEO, great marketing, and a brilliant business strategy, but without a driving creative force, you have nothing. When you're in the business of innovation and originality, Arnault says your first and foremost priority should always be the quality of the product. Know when to step aside and trust your team.