The Definitive Guide to Attracting & Keeping Talent – Part I: Understanding the Dynamic

“Do you have any questions for us?”

You take another quick glance at the resume you’ve been holding lightly in your right hand before looking across the table. The young woman across from you meets your gaze directly, holding eye contact as a curious yet strong tone of voice meets your ears. Although the setting is that of an interview, you can’t help but feel as if you are talking to an equal.

“I do actually. You’ve explained that the work environment here is quite fast-paced and that I can expect to be juggling multiple priorities. Where do I turn when I am unsure of what task should be my primary focus?”

As you sit in a brief moment of silent contemplation, your mind is awash with the future. Mikayla is everything you have been looking for in a new director. Her resume is star-studded, she is clearly very intelligent, and you can tell from the short conversation you’ve just had that no other candidates are even worth pursuing.

You quickly respond with an answer, thank her for your time, and tell your HR department to wait a few days before moving her forward through the process. Two quick weeks later, she joins as director of operations… and six months after that, you get her two weeks’ notice. After you do the math on her hire, you’ve actually lost money on the experience, just like with every other person of her caliber you have interviewed.

Let’s just cut right to the chase. It SUCKS to go through interview after interview with people you feel can really move the needle for your organization, just to have them leave for a new opportunity before you’ve had the chance to recoup your investment. Experience this enough, and you can’t help but have your previous sense of excitement replaced with subtle anxiety and dread as you sign off on the next offer letter, knowing that the interview you just came out of might be too good to be true.

“The key to attracting and maintaining talent in your organization, therefore, comes down to being the best option for them on the job market.”
– Issac Hicks

But it doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, talented people want nothing more than job stability. They want to find a company in which they can thrive, plant their roots, and start making the serious, impactful moves they know they can make to bring real change to the organization, and reap the rewards of their efforts. They just also understand that they are in a buying position instead of a selling position when it comes to the job market, and they respond in kind. The key to attracting and maintaining talent in your organization, therefore, comes down to being the best option for them on the job market.

Luckily, being the best option on the market is not simply a matter of paying the highest salary for a given title. What it really comes down to is building the organizational hierarchy and leadership infrastructure that allows talented individuals to focus solely on producing high-value, needle-moving work.

In this 3-part series, we are going to dive deep and get real about what it actually takes to win the competition for highly effective people in the job market. Let’s get started.

A Hierarchy of Workers

A fundamental aspect of organizational hierarchies is that they primarily consist of three distinct classifications of worker. The type of worker that a given person represents is a side-effect of their disposition toward the company, their surrounding social environment, and even their deep-seated beliefs about the role of work in one’s life in general. As I cover these in great detail in the The Climb Series, I will touch only briefly on the construct here.

– Axes

o Informal Hierarchy: The balance of power that exists between members of an organization due to their consolidation of political influence. In laymen’s terms: how things actually work at the organization
o Appreciable Effort: The amount of value-producing work (work resulting in actual, undeniable organizational progress) that an individual is able to claim direct credit for.

– Classifications

o Climbers: Climbers represent the highest-value employees of the organization. They are characterized by a strong, conscientious drive for upward growth and a keen awareness of the underlying political climate of the organization. Climbers are adept at both performing work tasks to a high degree of effectiveness and positioning themselves such they are able to effectively capitalize on the recognition of those efforts. Climbers typically account for 10%-20% of the total working body of an organization. The talented individuals you desire to maintain in your organization all belong to this class.
o Unaware: The Unaware represent the vast majority of the organizational body. Typically, well-intentioned individuals, the Unaware are characterized by their strong adherence to the prescribed rules of the organization and unquestioning belief in the façade of the formal hierarchy. They are likely to become unwittingly involved in political constructs such as unofficial reporting structures and targeted outgrouping as an ineffective means to achieve their own career aspirations. They happily drink the “kool-aid”. The Unaware typically account for 60%-70% of the total working body of an organization.
o Standby: Standbys are jaded and/or disillusioned individuals who are typically putting in the bare minimum in order to retain their employment. They are normally quite open about their dissatisfaction with the organization (unless they used to be Climbers), testing the bounds of what they can get away with without being terminated, and sometimes purposefully creating situations that are actively detrimental to the organization. Standbys typically account for 10% – 20% of the total working body of an organization.

The different classifications of workers are a direct consequence of the Machiavellian framework that drives the standard progression of events in the typical, modern workplace. Organizations primarily consist of Climbers in their early days (hence the rise of Start-up Culture) and move into paradigms of increasing levels of Unaware and Standby members as the business matures and the formal hierarchal distance between the executives and the production level becomes larger.

The most important thing to understand about this construct is that Climbers that are offered an opportunity with a company will quickly and quietly revert to Standby individuals who perform the bare motivated minimum (that is, the minimum required to appear as a motivated individual) if they have been bait and switched. They do this in order to maintain their political capital as they look for opportunities outside of the organization.

If the opportunity that was presented to them during the recruitment process is not congruent with the actual role they play within the organization once they have been hired, they will grow to distrust that the organization will actually fulfill on any promises made to them into the future.

Ex-Climber Standby individuals are amongst the most dangerous employees to exist within an organization as their keen political acumen can be used to disempower other Climbers and convert them to Standbys, beginning a catastrophically destructive cultural disempowerment complex. This is especially dangerous when it occurs at higher levels of career altitude. Therefore, if there is one key takeaway from this section, it’s this:

You cannot embellish or omit the negative aspects of a position during recruitment if you expect to staff a talented individual to it.

They will join your company, expectations will not be met, they will become disillusioned, and they will move on to whatever opportunity they feel is more worthwhile. Highly Talented individuals have an abundance of options when it comes to the job market, and they interpret incongruence between the presented role expectations and on-the-job reality as an irreparable offense.

Furthermore, talented individuals interpret the recruitment process is indicative of the organization as a whole. Perceived misdirection at the point of interview will appear to them to imply systemic communication issues throughout the organization, which further prompts them to leave.

Let’s make this more practical. Many organizations fight tooth and nail to ensure they get a “Great Place to Work” award and use this as a draw to attract talented individuals. While this may work to get more interviews with them, if there is a notable difference between the way the opportunity is presented and how it is in reality, it only creates a larger churn rate as more high-qualified individuals join and consequently leave the organization after a short period of time.

The Mindset of a High-Value Individual

The very first thing you must understand about high talent individuals is that their entire frame of mind works very differently than that of your standard hire.

In the same way that you as an executive are able to see things in a 360 point of view, intuit significant amounts of information from seemingly innocuous events, and cast coherent narratives about future strategy into the future, so too can talented individuals. The largest difference between a high-value employee and an executive is time. Talented people are talented because they have prioritized pursuit of efficient growth, a trait that spills into many other aspects of their lives. In the same way you seek to grow and expand your market dominance, they seek to grow and expand their personal power.

As a consequence, those who bring significant talent to the table tend to be social outliers in comparison to their peers. This means is that although they are usually quite skilled conversationally and can easily blend into your established corporate culture, chances are that they do not actually relate well to the majority of their coworkers. While being involved in cliques and superficial relationships at work are seen as a standard (even enjoyable!) part of the game by most employees, Climbers tend to see these constructs as necessary evils through which they must work to demonstrate personal power and form strategic alliances in pursuit of their greater aspirations.

I’ve always found when it comes to topics like this, it’s easiest to provide a direct narrative so that you can “hear the voice” of the talent pool you are looking to capture.

I recall in my own experience as a business transformation consultant working for a major consulting firm, this was certainly the case. I could put on the act and chit-chat with my coworkers, get them to laugh, and have a “good time” at company-sponsored events, but it was “work” to me as much as the actual job was. To me, the vast majority of conversations seemed to revolve around nothing. They revolved around nothing because they were designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

Social events hosted by the company were not mandatory, but they were obligatory, and there were significant political repercussions for not showing face at these events. At these events, small groups would form around people who represented some form of political power, whether that be their position in the corporate hierarchy, their influence on the narrative (i.e.: whoever can fake it “the best”), or their self-proclaimed importance. They usually displayed said importance in a tongue-in-cheek, humble-brag style manner that nobody is actually a fan of but is compelled to respond to given the “inclusive” nature of the corporate façade.

In order to make the moves I needed to make, I formed strong one-on-one relationships with peers and superiors in the corporate hierarchy that were primarily based around the honest and transparent communication that most forward-facing individuals engage in. This allowed me to “get away with” (I hate to even use such patronizing language.) things that are normally frowned upon in the standard corporate hierarchy, such as openly and firmly calling out my supervisor when he made poor decisions or put me or my team members in disadvantageous positions.

I quickly came to understand that rules are only as strong as your relationship with their enforcer is weak and that the appearance that everything is going to plan is far more important to the actual state of affairs at any period of time.

To be blunt: Talented people know that it is all fake. They understand the game.

And they don’t want to play it. They don’t want to suck up to executives with ego problems. They don’t want to “bide their time” for several years while they watch people much less talented than themselves take the “fast track” because they schmoozed their way into someone’s inner circle by pontificating about sports teams. They don’t want to be slowed down by outdated bureaucratic processes whose primary purpose appears to be making the person in charge of them feel important. And they don’t want to have to worry about maneuvering themselves into “high-visibility” positions as a prerequisite to getting rewarded for their efforts.

If the blunt nature of the narrative described here offends you… good! Because this is the actual inner monologue that high-value contributors have when they approach a career opportunity.

• They aren’t going to play the game of appealing to the lowest common denominator because they see it as an unnecessary aspect of an antiquated social system that is based on upholding façades. Furthermore, they interpret façades to be another barrier to communication that inhibits both company growth and their own growth.
• They have a very low tolerance for constructs that are primarily designed around ego satisfaction, political maneuvering, or other means that are not directly related to the forward progression of the company.
• They aren’t going to accept micromanagement, overly oppressive bureaucracy, or any other constructs that create a situation in which someone who doesn’t understand what they are doing, is standing in the way of what they are doing.
• They aren’t going to accept “because I said so” style responses to inquiries about inefficient processes or nonsensical activities that do not drive business value.

In short, high-value contributors expect to be treated as autonomous, functional adults that are capable of producing work that shows bona fide value addition to the company. If you are not able to provide that to them, they will leave as soon as they realize their plight to unencumber themselves is a pointless endeavor at your company.

The Covert Social Revolution that Nobody is Talking About

True to the nature of what we do here at Autonomi, I’m going to go ahead and draw attention to key differentiating factor between organizations that are able to keep and attract talent, and those who cannot:

Organizations that respect talented individuals, get to attract and keep talented individuals.

Ok, what does that mean?

Well, the “no questions asked” hierarchal models of the past simply aren’t going to work as we move into the next stage of corporate development. With the rise of automated processes and transition to work that focuses on technology as the new paradigm of leverage, those who have learned how to quickly excel in the fields that they have entered are no longer willing to accept the strict “rank and file” culture that outdated Machiavellian corporate models expect them to prescribe to.

Developers that can design AI systems so advanced they can pass Turing tests aren’t going to sit idly by while superiors who have little understanding of their work hold them back by asking amateurish questions or rejecting work because they are not familiar with the tech stack it’s built in.

Consultants who understand that organizational problems at their client are caused by one executive’s direct sabotage of another’s work aren’t going to quietly fall into a staff augmentation project they know is destined to fail since it doesn’t address the core issue.

The demonstration of applicable knowledge in the job market has become more important than cookie-cutter metrics such as “years of experience”. Those organizations that learn to see value in individuals who operate outside of the standard corporate chain are those who get to take advantage of advancements and progressions outside the standard corporate narrative.

The people who are truly talented want to move fast. If they can’t move fast with you, they will move fast with someone else. Because the thing is, high-value contributors don’t need to spend years being “groomed” for the next level of career progression. Chances are they can already handle it, right here right now. They understand that growth takes time, but they aren’t going to wait for a superior who knows less about the game than them to try to graft their inadequate knowledge onto them. THAT is what they see as a waste of their time.

This is why you see companies like Tesla do open hires on “anybody who is familiar with AI” and become Goliaths of their industry, whereas other organizations tell applicants they need to have 5 years of experience to make below the average entry-level salary in their field and wonder why they struggle to meet their 7% YoY growth targets.

The individual with four years of experience who is completely up to date on the latest advancements in your field and has led two organization-wide changes is far more valuable than the individual with ten years of experience who’s never done anything to move the needle.

The people who truly believe in your organizations mission are going to drive it forward with both feet on the gas, but that’s if and ONLY if you allow them the autonomy to do so, and reward their efforts as they do. The rise of the entrepreneurial movement in recent times is less about the “instant gratification” trope popular in mainstream circles and more about the fact that high-performing individuals know that they can perform more impactful work if they just cut the corporate cords and do it themselves.

Every high performer has a story that they tell behind closed doors about how they provided extensive value for an organization and it went unnoticed, prompting them to leave.

The law of reciprocity is a fundamental aspect of the human condition, and it holds in the corporate world just as much as it holds anywhere else.

When it comes to talented individuals who will really move the needle for your company, you must make sure that they receive in direct proportion to what they are providing.

Or they will go to someone else who makes sure they do. Simple as that.

See, the hard truth that many maturing organizations don’t want to face is that the companies at the top right now act more as cooperatives than they do as armies. There is a pool of work, everybody contributes to said pool, the process is formalized to ensure compliance is maintained, and the ship continues on its way. The rise of Agile Methodology, Kanban, Six-Sigma and other fast-paced institutional production paradigms are all based on tenets of impediment removal. Thus, we arrive at the core message of this article:

To adequately attract and maintain talent in the current market environment, you need leadership infrastructure that more about Growth and less about Control.

So how do you realistically go about doing that? That’s what Part II is all about.