By Frank Mulligan ñ Accetis International, Talent Software & Recruit China
We have all heard it before. Talent attracts talent.
Ok, so thatís great if you are hiring for the Boston Redsocks or the Dalian Shida Football Club. Or maybe if you are building a research team that will change the internet as we know it. Or even building a complete research centre in China. What, you might ask, has this got to do with just hiring a bunch of sales guys for an industrial product in China!?.
Everything, if you want it to.
What this phrase above should really say is:
Any kind of recognizable talent will have the effect of attracting other talent.
Note that this does not mean closing and bringing onboard, but just attracting. Itís not a yes/no, on/off kind of relationship, more of a stochastic process.
Often the attraction will not be strong enough to bring someone on board but, for sure, having good talent in your team will make it more likely that you will be able to close new people. Statistically you win, just not necessarily for every job.
But in order to achieve this virtuous cycle you have to have the talent to begin with. How were Google, who successfully hired Kai Lee-Fu from Microsoft the year before last, able to build their talent base?. I cannot speak for Google but here are a few suggestions.
- Align your hiring process with the experience that candidates will have on the job. Tell your story in detail but donít leave out the hard parts. You might be surprised. The ëStarí candidate may well jump at the chance to turn your situation around. He may think to himself that nobody has ever told him the truth like this before so there must be something good here!.
If you tell the candidate that everything is fine before he joins you then all you are doing is ensuring that you will have to look for someone else after a month or two. Even if he can handle the challenge he will feel betrayed, and will not be prepared to take it on.
- Expand the role you are offering. This is an excellent way of bringing on board strong people. If your current role is not attractive the good people will not even look at it twice. Expand it or combine it with another role and you may get their attention.
- Pay for the right people. Yes, I know, itís easier said than done. We all have budgets, and limits, and current staff, and so on. We canít just offer someone a salary that is outside the range for the other staff in the plant. Actually you can if you redefine the role, and at the end of the day you have to pay market price, whatever market you are in.
- Hire an HR Manager or Director with an organizational development or coaching background. Someone who will spend the time to understand the needs of your team and build an infrastructure and process to give them what they need. They are rare in China but they do exist, and at the least they will help you to stop doing the wrong thing. A recent graduate with a psychology degree would also be a good start for a small to mid-sized company.
- Systematize and professionalize your processes so that your staff do not have to spend time on bureaucratic time wasting. This is one of the most commonly cited complaints of staff all over the world. A lot of it seems to have to do with the idea of not having to do work that has already been done. Repetitive form filling is the surest way to kill the motivation in your HR team.
The good news is that the kind of people that you need to build an excellent team, one that attracts other good people, are to be found in China. They are in short supply so the only question is how committed you are to finding them.
Email frank.mulligan@recruit-china.com
Frank Mulliganís blog - english.talent-software.com
