Attracting, Retaining, and Turning Loose Top Talent.

High Tech Talent Solutions
By Dr. Jerry Willbur

Now that we are entering the new age of high tech, high productivity, high expectation competition for customers we are still faced with an age-old problem. How do we attract, retain, and turn loose for performance self-motivated people, i.e., the top talent available? With the specialized training called for in high tech businesses, the individual performer becomes not only more productive, but is also a very expensive investment you have made in your organization. We now know from recent studies by Cap Gemini Ernst Young (CGEY) and Watson Wyatt Worldwide among many others that getting the right people and then keeping them committed to stay and engaged in making the organization successful has an enormous payoff. Replacing an employee at the minimum costs 1.5 times a year’s pay at the entry levels and much more at middle levels and above. Also companies with highly committed and engaged employees (according to Watson Wyatt Worldwide and also studies reported by Frederick Reichheld of Harvard in his two “Loyalty Effect” books) tend to post sharply higher shareholder returns. To summarize Reichheld’s research, loyal employees create loyal customers that create loyal shareholders!

Richard Ogilvy of advertising fame is credited with a great visual to dramatically summarize the effect of good and bad recruiting of talent. He provided each of his leadership team members with a Russian nesting doll. These are the dolls that as you open them up successively reveal a smaller doll inside until you have a very small doll in the end. Then he is reputed to have said to his team that if each person on the team hired people smaller than they were and this was duplicated they would soon be a company of midgets. However, if each one recruited a person slightly bigger than they were they would soon be a company of giants! It was up to them!

Another visual concerning talent came to me as I thought of my work in a masters program in blind and deaf rehabilitation. One of our learning experiences was to work with seeing-eye dogs. The key question was what type of characteristic we thought was essential to the effective seeing-eye dog. The class suggested intelligence, courage, patience and many other admirable traits. But none of these were the essential ingredient. It ends up the essential characteristic is empathy. This was described as the ability to lead people taller than you are, putting yourself in their position and helping to lead them through obstacles.

So it is with extraordinary organizations. They know how to select people bigger than they are and then have the empathy to lead them to even higher achievements.

But while we will spend months deliberating which computer system to purchase, or even what office space to rent, we often take only a minimal amount of time, or delegate the task to someone else, when we acquire a new employee to join our team. The correct selection of talent is a difficult task, and can seem like a mystery to most practical minded people. But would you invest in a new car and not really look at the engine or other features or consider the maintenance costs? These are people who you will probably spend more time with than you do your family, people who will contribute to how successful you and your organization will be. Extraordinary organizations know that attracting, retaining, and turning loose top talent to perform can distinguish them from their competitors, provide positive economic benefits, and is a competitive advantage not easily duplicated. In short, it is the key to sustainable competitive success. Two of Stanford Business Schools leading management gurus, Jeffrey Pfeffer in “Competitive Advantage Through People” and Jim Collins in “Good to Great” both studied separately the most consistently successful firms over the last 20 years. They both found that these high performing great companies were often in very mundane, highly competitive industries. They also both independently found the effective organizations shared the same core key competency. Their secret alchemy, the ability to seemingly turn lead into gold, to sustain their competitive advantage over twenty years, to grow rapidly in a declining or stagnant market, was their ability to attract, retain, and then turn loose top talent to perform.

To paraphrase the great management guru Peter Drucker: “The greatest leadership ability is the ability to see ability in others and very few organizations are very good at it.”

Fortunately there are some new strategies, and some that could even be called high tech talent strategies that are available to help us make better decisions in this critical area that Drucker also says is one of the last reliable sources of competitive advantage.

Before you launch into a high tech talent solution there are a few low-tech basics you should take care of which will provide a good foundation for the high tech tools. You should have a very clear-cut job description, listing the most critical performance areas for the position. You should also determine what eligibility issues, i.e. education, experience, certifications, etc. the abilities if you will, that are necessary for the position. While these form the basic requirements or even barriers to entry, they have very little impact in the eventual success of the individual. Then comes the most difficult and vital part of the process. You should determine the ‘suitability’ factors you want in a team member who you will probably be spending more time with than your own family members. These suitability factors have to do with attitude and attributes. For example, if you have a fast moving, digitally oriented, and customer centered organization, you better be looking for people who are up-tempo, continuous learners who like computers and are oriented towards interacting with people. This is what is called building a talent template or a performance portrait of the ideal candidate. What makes the eligible person actually suitable for the work we have for them to do?

By now it should be evident that extraordinary organizations want to attract top or ‘tall’ talent, the people that stand out in the field. According to the book “Topgrading” by Dr. Bradford Smart, they want to attract ‘A’ players. An ‘A’ player is one who qualifies among the top 10 percent of those available for the position. You won’t have a chance of attracting these people unless you have carefully defined your employment criteria, including both eligibility and suitability factors. You must also develop a talent template that details the desired attributes. For example, for a lot of our high tech, fast growth clients that need excellent customer interaction we have recommended a blend of some of the following “suitability” traits, including:

• Extroversion: Warm and friendly, likes to meet and interact with people.


• Integrity: Trustworthy, conscientious, and honest.


• Customer-service oriented: Helpful, nurturing, and willing to serve.


• Technology-oriented: Sees technology as a helpful tool that frees them to spend more time effectively working with customers!


• Continuous learners: Flexible, highly inquisitive and adaptable, open to new experiences.

Once you have determined your own list of suitability traits, we strongly suggest you develop a series of behavioral based questions that make candidates explain how they exhibit them. A great exercise is to get your whole team involved in determining suitability traits. Then get their help in designing the behavioral based questions. For example, teams of employees have helped us develop the following questions. For continuous learning we ask potential team members to share one new thing they have learned in the last month. For customer service orientation, we ask them to give an actual example of when they had provided good service to a customer. Later on we ask them to give an example of how they handled a difficult customer.

We suggest you ask everyone interviewing for the same position the same questions in a standardized format, following a strict pattern throughout the process. Just like one bad apple can spoil a bushel one bad hire can spoil a team, so we also suggest that structured team interviews be used wherever possible. This structured team interview using behavioral based questions really helps to avoid the error of hiring the ‘interview’ not the interviewee. What do we mean? We all have experienced many interviews and basically know how to answer the ‘right’ way. We also wouldn’t be interviewing for the fun of it but because we need a job! Such behavioral based questioning in a structured team interview format really helps you cut through the smoke to the real kindling! What really makes this person glow and go? By using the structured team interview approach using behavioral based questions developed by the team, everyone has a say and a stake in seeing the new team member come on board and succeed!

This construction of job description, talent template, and behavioral based questions should really give you a clear idea of what type of person you are looking for. They are also important components of the selection process because you should never depend on any instrument alone, no matter how good it may be, to make your final decision. Also the better instruments will ask you to design profiles of traits you want in a good candidate, and the job description and talent template will greatly assist you in that task.

So now that you have these low technology basics covered, what should you look for in a good high tech talent tool? It should be 1) user friendly and 2) measure things that really matter. We could discuss a wide array of instruments but for the sake of brevity I will instead feature only two that while they are distinctly different in approach have a high technology flavor to them and meet the two simple criteria above. One easy to use and inexpensive tool is the StrengthsFinder Profile by Selection Research Institute, a division of the highly respected Gallup Organization. A great description of the tool can be found in the book, “Now Discover Your Strengths” by .Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifden, published in 2002. For the price of the book you can actually take the StrengthsFinder Profile and find out what your major themes or strengths are. What do they mean by themes? According to Gallup themes are areas of talent where you have the greatest potential for finding your strengths. They list 34 major themes and after you take the survey they will print out on-line for you your top five ‘signature themes’ that act as a filter on your world and consistently influence your actions. Obviously, for the price of the book for each employee you can get a good reading for what type of strength profile each person has.

Why is this important? According to an extensive Gallup poll cited in the book, only 20% of employees working in the organizations they surveyed felt their strengths were in play every day. In other words, 80% felt underutilized. This is because most organizations are operated based on two flawed assumptions. The first is that every person can learn to be competent in anything if they try hard enough. The second is that each person’s greatest potential for development is in his or her areas of greatest weakness. The researcher’s state instead you must discover and build on a person’s unique set of strengths to get them in the right position and get maximum performance.

I have found this tool to be simple to use, quick, relatively inexpensive and conducive to in-depth discussions about what the best themes or strengths should be for each position in the organization. According to the authors: “The StrengthsFinder Profile was designed to help you sharpen your perception. It presents you with pairs of statements, captures your choices, sorts them, and reflects back your most dominant patterns of behavior, thereby highlighting where you have the greatest potential for real strength.” (p. 76) You can find a lot of useful information on the web site, and I am sure the Gallup people would be willing to let you invest in a more in-depth analysis if you so choose! At the Leadership Mentoring Institute we use the StrengthFinder tool as a good entry level discussion starter for building balanced teams and building on strengths. But then we believe such an important decision as who joins the team and builds success in the organization demands a more in depth investigative tool.

Simple, quick, and easy are good guidelines but what about if we really take to heart the idea that adding a staff member to your team is like bringing someone into the family? The disruption to team unity, customer service, and even competitive advantage caused by a bad selection is horrendous. Add to this lost training time and reduced productivity while the new replacement person is brought up to speed, and you have sunk a lot of money into the situation. To put an exact price tag on it is difficult, but as I stated earlier many experts say that for even the most basic position the real price of a bad hiring decision is at least equal to 1.5 times a years pay. The cost of a bad decision in choosing a top executive is easily multiple times this. Dr. Bradford Smart in “Top Grading: How leading companies win by hiring, coaching and keeping the best people” says that for average companies the cost of bad hires are 25-40 times base compensation for executive positions (p.51). How do you avoid such a traumatic loss of time and treasure?

The deceptively simple answer is you should analyze the position carefully, as we have already described, screen out as many applicants as possible through the use of structured team interviews using behavioral based questions, and then look for an instrument with high validity and reliability to help confirm your hiring decision. Since this is not a treatise on testing, I will give you some quick and easy definitions of validity and reliability. Validity says that the instrument measures what it says it measures. Reliability, often described as test-retest reliability, basically measures whether the test will measure whatever it measures with a high level of consistency. These two factors are legally important in case you ever get challenged on a hiring decision, even though every available instrument says you should never use it to make hiring or firing decisions, only as part of the input you use in making decisions.

In studying various instruments I have not found another one with the high validity and reliability of the Harrison Innerview (HI). It has over 85% test-retest reliability, and close to 90% validity based on several studies. You can check the HI out at the general web site or if you want our independent perspective check out www.leadershipmentoring.com. The HI measures over 80 different ‘suitability’ factors relating to four general areas including personality traits, task references, interests, and work environment preferences. According to their web site and training manual “A person who is suitable for a position tends to enjoy the different tasks that are required; is very interested in the work areas; has a high tolerance for the type of work environment; has the proper attitudes and motivations to perform competently; enjoys the type of interpersonal interactions and decision-making required for the position; and does not possess negative traits that could hinder his/her productivity.”

The instrument generally takes 25-35 minutes to take on-line, although there is no time limit. It is comprised of a series of rankings of activities exploring a person’s work preferences. What do they prefer doing most, what do they prefer doing least? It is a deceptively simple process that really provides an in-depth look at the preferences and strengths of the person. What you get is a very detailed report on close to a hundred basic traits, task preferences, interests, work environmental preferences, behavioral competencies, and generic position ratings. More specifically, you will get a reading on how good a communicator the person is, how optimistic and outgoing they are, how self-motivated, persistent, flexible and helpful they are, and how oriented they are to computers and self-improvement among many other insights. The HI also provides a built-in truth detector so you can see just how consistently the person answered the questionnaire.

The only drawback to this more in-depth approach is the cost. Because it is a licensed on-line tool, and because of its underlying complexity and the sheer amount of information available, when you use the HI you also need to have it interpreted by a certified Harrison Innerview consultant such as our team at the Leadership Mentoring Institute. Since these are professionals, and to prepare the debrief takes a couple of hours, you are usually looking at approximately $500 a person.

Is it worth it? The next time you make a people decision remember in some ways you are betting the business, or at least 1.5 to 40 times the salary of the position you are hiring for! Why not use the high tech talent tools to minimize your risk and maximize your return? Even if you choose to discount the costs of a poor hire it doesn’t take much for a tool like the Harrison to pay for itself as much of the effectiveness of any hire hinges on personality factors.

Once you have used behavioral based questions and the structured team interview to determine if the candidate meets the eligibility and suitability requirements, and then used either one or both of the high tech talent tools we have described, there still remains one last critical element. The fact is when it comes to hiring superstars, the ‘A’ talent, remember that they are interviewing you as much as you are interviewing them. We think the critical element here is to develop what we call a Talent Value Proposition (TVP). This is a brief, articulate one-page document about why someone without a doubt should want to work for your organization! Do you some ‘A’ players already on your team? Ask each person, why do you love it here working with our team and this organization? Use their input to develop this concise one-page document about why people are passionately engaged in what you do!

A key part of your Talent Value Proposition (TVP) should be your organizational vision and values statements. The vision is quite simply a clear, one sentence statement of what you want your organization to look like in three years. The values statement should be a list of no more than three to five brief sentences stating your bone deep, enduring beliefs about people, customers, and your organization. (See “Built to Last” by Collins and Porras for a host of great vision and values statements from outstanding companies). For the Leadership Mentoring Institute we live the following five core values:

• Do all things with integrity and trust.


• Make excellence a habit.


• Treat all people with dignity and respect.


• Help people be successful.


• Be committed to continuous learning and innovative adaptation.

This value statement is so critical for an organization because it should help you screen in and out potential candidates or even current team members who do not want to grow with you. It should be posted in open view and everyone should be able to realistically say how the vision and values impact the way they work together, treat customers, and make decisions. As one old friend said to me: “Don’t preach it perform it. If you don’t live it, you don’t believe it.” The vision and values should act like one of those “invisible fences” people sell for pets. You wander astray and it should give you a jolt! If someone calls you a hypocrite, you should not be offended but instead motivated to explain what you are doing or apologize for what you have done! This is the foundation for trust that so energizes extraordinary organizations and effectively engages their talent. The bottom line is this: Unless you and your team are rock solid sure yourselves about what a great place you have to work you won’t be successful in attracting, retaining and turning loose for performance very many top talent people!

While the use of such unique strategies and high tech talent tools we have described can’t solve all of your problems they can certainly equip you with talent to handle the challenges! Are you building a team of giants or slowly shrinking to midgets? Are you attracting and retaining ‘seeing eye’ dogs that can lead bigger people than they are? Are you attracting, retaining, and turning loose to perform top talent? Are your people enthusiastically engaged in making you an extraordinary organization? Your future depends on it. In business you are the hunter or the hunted, the predator or the prey. Extraordinary organizations choose to be the hunters, and they are hunting the top talent right now.