How to Attract & Keep Talented People

Picture this...

I woke up to more negative google reviews, absolutely crushing us on service. 

 I held my breath a little, half-reading the words because they were pretty familiar. 

I thought, if only I could get my A team on every day we’d turn the customer experience around and attract more talent to join us. 

It was early 2014 at a place called A. Baker. I’d just lost another key member of my team. The remaining ones were spread thin across the 7-day roster. Never getting the chance to work alongside the other greats to build momentum. Instead, they were stuck supervising too many people who I shouldn’t have hired.

It was a tough gig.

The good ones just seemed to pass each other at the door and I could never manage to get them working together long enough to build momentum and create a brilliant culture. 

I didn’t know it at the time but I was learning (the hard way) many of the greatest recruiting lessons of my career.

After half a decade of reflection and gaining perspective, I've been applying what I've learned to Three Mills since to test my theories.

Today, I want to share what I've learned about holding onto great people (and having everyone on the A-Team).

 Let’s dive in.

The first thing I wished I understood earlier was:

The recruitment process starts long before you recruit anyone. 

It’s about becoming the type of company that excellent people want to work for. 

I started asking myself:

• Do I have the leadership ability to help talented people do their best work?
• Do we have a senior leadership team that brilliant people would want to work under?
• Does our company have a variety of options for those people to build meaningful career pathways?

I then listed all of the things people would get out of working for us (other than a low salary in a small-biz).

I researched what attracted people to work for the biggest companies in the world and why some left.

I noticed the common themes. People joined because of opportunity, impact, values, missions, lofty goals, and the ability of the senior leadership team. Some quit because they couldn't affect change quickly enough, were bogged down in policy and procedures and felt undervalued.

There's too much to unpack in this area for a short email but the key message is:

Without becoming the type of company people want to work for, it’s impossible to attract or retain top people.

Here are 5 things I started doing at Three Mills that helped me build to 135 people in 5 years. 

1. Hire For Attitude.

I had heard it a million times. Hire for attitude and train the skillset. For some reason, I kept defaulting to looking for people with hospitality experience. I wanted the silver bullet instead of implementing a training program that built sustained performance.

When I started Three Mills I stopped looking for people with the perfect skills and started hiring for attitudes.

Fast forward to today and it's one of the most difficult recruiting markets we've seen. If you were going to start recruiting for attitude from similar industries, now is the time. Combine it with an in-house training program and you'll be unstoppable.

When we started this combo we found people who really want employment with us and are grateful for the opportunity to learn. 

I should have started doing these years earlier. 
 

2. Build In-house Training and Career Pathways

Simple, structured, on-the-job training that builds a culture of learning and sets people up for success in future jobs is crucial.

Yet, back in 2014 I never did it. I just looked for people who I thought didn't need training and hoped they would fix my problems.  

If you combine that lack of structure with the reality that lots of people think they have nothing to learn from hospitality (or any small biz) and you have a real cultural battle on your hands.

Here's how I started to turn that around:

I showed new hires the enormous value of working in small organisations. Places where you’re hands-on with every part of the process. I demonstrated how they can apply everything they were about to learn to their future jobs beyond Three Mills. The result was, people started staying longer and were more productive. 

And without much effort, momentum started to build and we could leverage those experienced people to build out our simple training programs.

3. Create Brilliant Onboarding

Again, I never even thought about this back in 2014. But at Three Mills I started doing it on a basic level and have been improving it year after year. Onboarding is something I'd love to write about again in 2 years because I suspect what we're doing today will pay back 10X.

In a later newsletter, I’m going to break down my process for onboarding people so they stay for years.

But the general backbone of it is you must make new hires feel special and part of the team early on. 

Set automated reminders or email sequences to automatically drip send them all of the necessary information they need to succeed in your business over the first 3 months.

This can be photos, infographics, supplier profiles, staff profiles, products, scavenger hunts challenges, videos, books, activities and social events, etc.

Remember, people like to learn in tiny snippets so break your entire company document down instead of bombarding them on day one.

4. Get Your Managers on Board

This was a massive one I overlooked and was happy I learned from someone (brilliant) inside our organisation. 

Don’t assume your management team are on board with training new hires. 

The typical small business approach is to “throw them in the deep end”.

Your job as a leader is to sell your Managers on the idea of helping to train new hires.

So reframe their role not as a Manager, but as a mentor or coach so they see the value in recruiting for attitude, and then training the skills. 

5. Business Is a Long Game.

This last point is the most powerful of all.

Anyone who applies for a job is clearly a fan, future customer or future employee. 

This database is another opportunity to build your network by giving them a great experience during the recruitment process and keeping them in your pipeline for later. 

Every person you don’t hire goes on to mature, learn and develop new skills. 

They also have discussions with their friendship network who is acutely aware of their friend’s strengths and weaknesses. These more talented friends will value the strict recruiting process and potentially apply in the future. 

Reaching out to those who missed out systematically once or twice a year to check in and follow their progress will massively decrease your recruiting costs and lead to the healthiest pipeline of potential talent for the future. 

It changed the game for us.

TL:DR

1. Start becoming the type of business talented people want to work for.

As a leader, become excellent at connecting big goals with tiny daily habits of your team
 

2. Build in simple practical training.

Even if people are only there for a short time
 

3. Create brilliant onboarding procedures .

Assure people know that they’ve made the right choice when they join you and they’re likely to stay

4. Get your managers on board with hiring for attitude and training the skills. Reframe their role as a coach or mentor

5. Play the long game - Every person you don’t hire is a huge opportunity for the future. Stay in touch as they develop.

That's it for today.

I hope this helps.