Insights

During the tight labour market from 2020 through 2022, several questions repeatedly came up from our clients:

• How can we find & attract top talent in a tight labour market?

• How can we compete for top talent, if we’re not a market leader or don’t want to overspend?

• How can we retain top talent, with more prominent companies circling?

 

Great questions. My answer applies to hiring with the various constraints that all companies face; hiring in a tight labour market, hiring in smaller cities or shallow labour pools, hiring for niche roles, minority hiring for diversity, and so on.

 

The first thing I would do is step off the beaten track. Hiring managers & recruiters often reflexively target ubiquitous companies or the top competitors in their field. There are several problems with doing that:

 

• It puts you in the mainstream vying for the same prospective candidates as everybody else. Those candidates receive a disproportionate amount of recruiter attention, which can inflate their true worth.

• For individuals in a great company that are performing well, their success might be due to the slipstream created by the company’s reputation, incumbency, investment, resources and so forth; advantages they might not get in your company.

• The best performers tend to be well looked after and more embedded / harder to dislodge.

• If they’re in a great company and not performing well, you risk (over)paying for another company’s problem. This is a real gotcha because hiring managers tend to be less diligent when screening candidates from marquee companies…they mistakenly assume that those firms don’t have average or poor performers, and of course they do.

 

Stepping off the beaten track puts greater onus on the recruiter & hiring manager to think deeply about what’s important, what’s nice to have, and what gaps can be offset or bridged over time. A situation that we see a lot is companies over-indexing on role-specific experience and under-indexing on the core attributes that lead to greater impact (and cultural accretion). That thinking forces you along the beaten track.

 

Developing a search strategy that also considers sources of emerging, unheralded or lateral talent takes you off the beaten track, deepening the pool in areas where great talent exists with less conventional competition.

 

• What I mean by emerging talent is individuals with less role-specific experience, but high potential; a magical balance of strong core attributes with evidence of driving results on a smaller scale.

• Unheralded talent might be a person that works in a lesser-known competitor, or has topped out in their role & company, or is overlooked or boxed in by their leadership for the wrong reasons.

• Lateral talent might involve moving an industry domain expert to a senior role in consulting. Or shifting a solution architect to a business development role. Or moving a general manager with strength in a particular offering to an adjacent or different one.

Hiring from these sources requires more effort from the recruiter & hiring manager (to envision and test a candidate in a different context) and the candidate (to weigh an unexpected or left-field career opportunity), but the pay-off can be significant.

 

The second thing I would do is ensure that the reasons that a candidate wants to accept a particular role are sound. Essentially, you’re testing the veracity of why a candidate is open to moving, and why a prospective role & company jibes with their aspirations. Failing to fully understand the ‘why’ often leads to false negatives (losing a great candidate) and false positives (appointing the wrong candidate).

 

We are especially interested in the migratory patterns of top talent; why they leave a particular post and where they’re going. For example, in 2022 we observed that top performers in three market leading technology corporations mostly moved to scale-up companies, whereas their average performer counterparts tended to move to established competitors.

 

A word of caution. There are pyrrhic victories in hiring that are worth avoiding. Here are two biggies:

 

• Embellishing, or omitting downside aspects of a role or organisation to sell a candidate. We tackle this by asking our clients to ‘stress-test’ a candidate by discussing the least appealing aspects of their role and organisation.

• Accepting a new employee whose main reason for joining is money or status. Not a good foundation. We want to be convinced that a candidate is attracted by the opportunity to grow and make an impact in an aligned environment.

 

In summary:

• The best hiring decisions arise from making the best compromises.

• Hiring manager and candidate alignment on the ‘why’ leads to impactful & durable appointments.

• You don’t have to be the market leader or highest payer to access the best talent.