Talent Magnet Series: Attract! Hire! Retain! – People=Your Company

Your people are your company—you gotta find, develop, and keep talent. I am so excited to start this new series! We’ll talk about finding talent and improving your employees’ lives while enriching your company, and let’s start with the big picture.

Seven Big-Picture Ways to Think About Being an Employer

• Building an organization starts with hiring one person and then another and another. It’s about collecting people on your team. After that, the sky’s the limit.

• Be on the lookout for extraordinary folks. If you’re paying attention, you’re bound to meet them anywhere and everywhere. Practice the law of attraction— looking, looking, looking for people all the time. 

• Recognition and purposeful work are some of the company’s most powerful tools. People like to work for a purpose-driven organization that recognizes their contribution. Make judgments about their behavior, intelligence, and work effort. Evaluate work and give feedback. Correct some actions privately and praise other actions publicly.

• The pay and benefits are always secondary to the work environment and mission. It is just true; read the stats.

• People don’t quit their jobs; they quit their bosses. That’s not just the owner but everyone in leadership, so make sure your people are on the same page as you. I constantly pep-talk our team on the issue of friendly leadership.

• If you manage people, please read First Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman. Read it many times.

• Never stop recruiting, hiring, and training. Remind everybody that we need these three things to hit our goals. If you are trying to scale your company, you need a plan to address your employment needs. At Nolan Painting, we make money by deploying painters, carpenters, and apprentices to paint houses. The more field personnel deployed, the more money we make. We have a minimum Feet on the Street (FOS) number to hit to break even—this is the number we will need to hit our goals. When we have failed to achieve our annual goals, it is usually because of too few FOS and not the lack of customers.

We’ll keep these principles in mind as we launch into our Talent Magnet Series. Upcoming posts discuss hiring practices, workforce demographics, and realities. All along the way, we’ll be talking about how to make life great for your employees and your company—looking forward to it! 

See you next week—build muscle.