Companies hire you for your story!
You have to have a story. And part of that is the strategy of controlling the conversation but, ultimately, it’s about building a connection right away.
We talk to Tim Sackett, author of the best-selling book, The Talent Fix: A Leader’s Guide to Recruiting Great Talent, with over 20 years of combined executive HR and talent acquisition experience working for Fortune 500 companies and the president of HRU Technical Resources leading IT and Engineering Staffing Firm.
Tim was kind enough to join me in a conversation where we unveil how organizations and hybrid creatives can make future work. Jump into that to learn how the future of work is changing and how you may have to change along with it.
Part 1
What is the impact of design on the future of work?
T.S. — I’m fascinated by the design aspect of HR and work in future of work. Not just for work spaces. But from the marketing aspect of how you’re presenting yourself to employees or potential employees.
I can take two companies that are exactly the same, right? Let’s say it’s two manufacturing companies making nuts and bolts — it doesn’t even matter what they’re making — and I can make one, from a design standpoint, look great, have great marketing and they will always get more applicants and better quality applicants than a company that’s just the traditional and like “hey, we make nuts and bolts, come work for us”, right?
How do you define talent?
T.S. — I think it’s people that meet the skills needed to do the job and the culture of where they are going to go to work. I think there’s a combination of that.
T.S. — Here’s why I say that. It’s because I’ve hired people who were great at what they were doing, right? They were at company A, they were amazing, they were the number one employee production-wise and then we hired him into a company I was working into and they were either average or they were bad.
And you’re like “Wait a minute, they were amazing over there. So why were they not amazing for us?”.
And I think there’s this combination of talent, leadership, development and also the culture. And you might have somebody who is just not a fit for your culture and they will fail or they will struggle to succeed.
So I think there’s this combination of skills and culture fit that brings out the best talent in everybody.
Is there a gap between hybrid creatives and companies?
T.S. — I think there is a gap, because as HR people, as talent acquisition leaders, you know these hybrid creatives don’t necessarily fit in the box to what we have, right? We have all these positions and we have all these job descriptions and then we go “Wait a minute. Where do they fit?”.
I’ve been in companies where the leader, the CEO or COO, has taken a flier on somebody. They just go “Oh, gosh that person is amazing. I don’t know where they fit. We are just going to hire them. We’ll have them create their own position.”
And even then it’s a struggle because everyone’s trying to figure out, they want to have this person fit in the structure, right? And if they don’t have this structure — the vast majority of workers, I think, actually like the structure.
T.S. — I think the hybrid creative then becomes one of these individuals that say “Hey, here’s what we can do and here’s how we can do it.” But you have to have a leadership team that really goes “hey, let’s let them just go. Let them figure out the future, or figure out how we can do better at whatever that might be.”
A lot of companies just don’t have, I think, the profit or margin to have that flexibility and that freedom to do some of that.
What are the challenges in talent acquisition in 2021?
T.S. — I think there’s a two-fold problem: one of the challenges is obviously just attraction right now. That’s the biggest question I get from organizations, just “how do we attract more people to us?”
And there’s multi-pronged, there’s so many factors that play into that. I think once you have them then it’s like “Well how do we keep our best talent?”
I think from a talent standpoint it’s “Well, how are you developing me? Are you making me more valuable as a person and in my career?”.
T.S. — And then there is not a clear path. There are multiple paths where I potentially can go.
We have this whole concept of internal mobility. If we hire great people, shouldn’t we allow them to move around in the organization and try different things and increase their skill sets?
T.S. — And yet in organizations we struggle with this. If I’m a leader and I hire Dalia to come work for me for a position, there’s a part of me that wants to keep you right there. You just do great work for me right here in this position, but you as an individual go “No, no, no, I want to grow. I want to expand that. I don’t want to just be working for you.”
But if we hire great people, shouldn’t we allow them to move around and try things? Because ultimately what’s going to happen is they’re probably going to find stuff that they’re not good at. They’re going to find stuff they’re great at, but all the time we’re keeping that talent, right? We’re keeping them internal with us.
Organizations really struggle with that. They go “No, we hired you for a position A. We need you to do position A. I can’t have you worried about position D, and F, and G.
How do you design a job?
T.S. — I think job designs are ever evolving, right? Because you might have one job design and you think “oh, this is the job and this is what you have to do to be great”. And then, all of a sudden, you have somebody come in that totally takes it to a different level. And you go “Wait a minute. Wow, we didn’t have it perfect, we didn’t have it right”.
So it’s almost like a living and breathing kind of thing. I think you start with “here’s a baseline design that we think this job is”, but we have to be open for it to evolve and change over time.
*Thank you, @TimSackett! It has been a privilege to chat with you and to learn from your knowledge and experience.
*This article has been edited and divided in two parts for clarity and space reasons. Part two will be posted soon after.
*This interview was video recorded.
