Finding & Retaining Talent
Finding good talent is hard; keeping good talent can be even harder. What should you look for in new team members, and how can you create a culture where high performing talent wants to stay? Traci and Rob answer these questions and discuss the concept of being talent producers versus talent consumers.
Transcript
Rob:
So I think back in time in Sparkbox, and I think back to 2010—and something significant happened that year. We had a good group of core people, there was about 12 of us. I have this belief that we had found the right people and that these are the people that we were going to grow around, build around, and this is the direction of our company that we were going to lean into and have our future with us.
Then something happened, the first person left and that was kind of a blow. Shortly thereafter, another person left. And then another person left after that. And over the course of three months, three of those—what I consider pretty core people and friends of mine—left the company. And I had to go through a lot of soul searching with that and figure out what that meant. Did we screw up? Did we make mistakes in such a way where they didn't want to be a part of what we were building or was it something else?
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Rob:
Hey Traci, how are you?
Traci:
I'm good. How are you doing?
Rob:
I'm good.
Traci:
I'm hanging on the edge of your story. Did you figure out what was going on? Or are you able to articulate it?
Rob:
I think so. I think that after a lot of soul searching and thinking about this, I've come to realize that there's seasons for things. And sometimes the people we start with are not going to be the people we finish with. And I think it's pretty true that when people join a company or a movement, they identify with what it is when they join, they are looking to be a part of something. And when people join a company in an early stage or any stage really, they identify with who you are in that moment. That's what they're attracted to. And as things change, which they inevitably will, especially if you add growth and figuring out how to do things, then those people will still identify with who you were, not who you are becoming. And they'll go look for that again. And I think that there are seasons for things and that's okay.
Traci:
Yeah, I think you're right. And I had the same exact experience when I was at HGTV. I mean, there was a small group of us that started. And the bigger we got, people would leave or be asked to leave. And you're right. It's because some people really love the startup phase of a company. Like they are just designed for it. They like when it's scrappy, they like when everybody knows their name, they like when they can have their hands on multiple things and have great influence.
And sometimes when you grow beyond that, one of two things happen, either the employee sort of feels like, “Eh, it's not as exciting as...I don't like this phase and I want to go find another startup,” or something. Or it's outgrown their skillset. So they have a skillset that's good for when things are smaller, projects are smaller, ideas are smaller, but when things get bigger and more massive, it doesn't fit them as well. And so, these phases of companies, how roles within companies evolve, they might have the same title, but they might look completely different when you're 20 years into running your company versus years one through five. And so yeah. Sometimes we see people move on, and sometimes we feel it's time that people need to move on.
Rob:
Yeah. I mean, I can think of a couple cases where we had someone on staff that didn't quite realize it was time for them to move on, and we had to have those tough conversations to help them realize it and figure out like what's best for the company, what's the best thing. And it doesn't invalidate what they did and how valuable they were. It's that the thing changed and the needs changed. And I think that's just a recognition of reality sometimes.
Traci:
I often say that what tends to happen in the business world is that people are very quick to hire. We feel the pressure when we have an open position and the workload is piling on our other employees. And so we feel like we have to fill that position as quickly as we possibly can, but then we're slow to fire. It's uncomfortable to fire. We're not quite sure we're doing the right thing, but there are unintended consequences to both of those sides of the coin.
When you're too quick to hire, sometimes you can have somebody that's not a good fit or that's not onboarded properly, or that doesn't really understand who you are as a company or what your culture is. And when you're slow to fire, especially your top performers can become very deflated and unhappy. So we do have to put more time and understanding and thought behind how we find talent, talented people that fit our company. And we also have to think about how are we going to retain those top performers and how are we going to get the people that maybe aren't fits to sort of move on or not fits in this next phase to kind of move on.
Rob:
Yeah. I think those are all hard lessons to learn. I think that, like my natural bend is I care a lot about the humans involved. I think that everyone is capable of growth and getting better and improving over time, but there has to be some limit to that and how much investment can be made and what can be done to help someone along that path. And those are really, really difficult conversations.
I think that in a lot of cases in these types of service businesses, the wrong hires are some of those expensive mistakes that we can make. We get stuck in this idea of sunk costs, like, “Well, I've already made the wrong hire. I've already invested them in a team. Maybe even they're a good culture fit, but they don't have the right skillset or even worse in a lot of cases is they have the right skillset, but they're not a good culture fit.” I think that's the most damaging people that can be on our teams that actually become accidental leaders because they're super skilled at their craft, but don't buy in and are part of the culture. And don't want to be part of that. That's actually somebody to really watch out for.
I know for us, we've implemented a couple of things to help with that is a 90 and 180 day check-in where we're intentionally stopping and asking on both sides, is the company getting what they expected out of this hire and also individual, are you getting what you expected out of the company. So that it goes both ways, like it's got to be a mutually edifying partnership for the season they work with us.
And that gets into this whole bigger idea I think about seasons and how everybody who chooses to work with, and at Sparkbox for a while, like it's a season and it's not my first job. And it's probably not a lot of our people's last job. They're going to move on at some point. And that's just part of the life cycle. And I think we talk about that a lot is that you're starting here and our goal is to help you achieve your goals in your career and where you want to be. And eventually you might...We talk about becoming alumni, graduate, and move on from Sparkbox if you at some point our goals don't align anymore. And that's okay. That's a natural part of growing.
Traci:
I think that's a great mentality to have, because sometimes I feel like leaders can take people leaving the company really personally. They'll feel like the employee is not really leaving the company, they're leaving them. And in some cases that actually might be true, but in a lot of cases, it's exactly what you're talking about. They've moved on. They want to try something different. They need to grow their skillset in a different area. There's multiple reasons why people leave companies.
And so when we hold our employees with an open hand, then I think that's a great way and a great position to take. So we don't feel like it's a horrible, awful thing when somebody leaves our company to go somewhere else. And we're also realizing that people might just be there for seasons and might outgrow our company, or we might outgrow them. And it's all okay. It's like the cycle of life. And sometimes people, the role becomes like an ill-fitting coat. And you can tell you're feeling uncomfortable, they're feeling uncomfortable, nobody's talking about it.
That's why I love that concept of you talking about these check-ins, where you're saying, “How are you doing? How are we doing? Is this a fit? Is it working? What's working, what's not working?” And also, you sounds like you have a very growth and development mentality. So as soon as an employee enters the door, you're thinking about what their trajectory is, what they're learning, how they're growing. And I think that's a great mentality to have too, when it comes to retaining talent, because most of the time and surveys say this over and over again, that employees will leave companies because they don't feel engaged. They don't feel valued. They don't feel like they're growing and developing, especially this generation. They don't have a clarity in the role.
I think when we know that to be true, then we can craft our company to be this place where you can grow, where you're valued, where we care about your engagement. We want you to understand the vision and participate in that. And we want there to be great clarity in your role. You know what's expected of you, you know how to exceed those expectations and you know what growth looks like and means, what your potential is within our company. And if companies do that well, they find that they're retaining their employees for much longer, which is very cost efficient. As you mentioned before, it costs money to go out and find talent, keep talent, have to let talent go for them to move on. So retention is, we want to retain our key star players as long as we possibly can.
Rob:
Yeah. As long as it's reasonable. And I think it's as long as reasonable and as long as it still meets their goals. And I think that’s the hard part here is, I've said this to I think everybody who has ever worked for us is, I care enough about you as a human where I can't just care about what happens when it benefits me while you work here. If I'm invested in you as the person, I want to see you be successful and achieve your career goals, even if that's not here anymore. But while you're here and while our goals align, let's kick as much butt as we possibly can towards our projects and the goals of this company. And when they stop being aligned, we're good. Go move on. We'll celebrate the time we were together. You were part of our story. We're part of your story. You cannot undo all of the good things that have happened. We'll celebrate you on the way out.
Traci:
What are the key things you're looking for when you're hiring somebody? Because it sounds like once you get them in the door, you're so invested in them. Like I think that talk that you're giving to them once you...That is brilliant. I think it really is. Like what's the step before that? Like how do you know you're bringing the right person in to be part of your team?
Rob:
Yeah. And I think it's the whole idea. Like when I think about companies, I think there's two different kinds of companies. There's talent consumers, and talent producers. There is this idea that you're hiring people who can already do the job at a really, really high level. And that you're bringing in outside talent that somebody else grew. Then there's this whole idea of talent producers, which means that you're investing in people the entire way. And that allows you to hire more junior people because you have systems in place to turn those more junior members who don't quite have the experience or the exact skillset and invest in them longer term to bring them up.
There's a lot of companies that haven't invested in that production and that ability to grow people well. We're talking about like studios and service shops, I don't think that most of us can afford to just be a consumer, we have to invest in that growing people phase of it.
So what I look for is somebody who has got the work ethic and a really high ceiling. I want to see that high ceiling. I'm looking for a high EQ, a people person that understands that the people are important and that's what makes software projects successful in my opinion, is people, is knowing people and be able to work with people, high collaboration skills.
And we also spend a lot of time looking for people with diverse perspectives. We're trying to grow a diverse team. We want to have people from many different backgrounds, from underrepresented groups, on our team because we fundamentally believe that those will make our projects better.
So we're looking for all of that shapes how we go and look for that talent and how we try to attract it, be through at job postings, with partnerships, with organizations from diverse backgrounds and underrepresented groups from investing and letting the people who are doing the work in those communities help and be involved with them and let their voices be heard and being allies to them is some of the ways that we're looking for that talent.
Traci:
Yeah. And I think that it's great that you can list off that criteria. One of the things that's really interesting to me when I'm talking to some of my clients about hiring and about going through that process of…We run assessments or helping the interview process, is how often I find that people haven't actually sat down and listed out their criteria. They usually put too many eggs in the skillset basket and maybe not in the culture basket or too many in the culture basket and not enough in the skillset.
So it's interesting that I think it's such an important process to sit down and say, "Okay, what talent level do we need? What's the skillset here? What's the intellect level we're looking for? Are they teachable? The growth potential." Like you're talking about that ceiling, their emotional intelligence level, their personality, where do they fall on the DiSC? Does that fit on this team? Do they fit our core values? Like here are five core values, how do we think they measure up against each one? Let's ask them how they feel about each one in the interview process.
If we're looking for somebody who's a cultural fit and can also do the job description, we need to make sure that we really understand what that is. And so then we can say, man, this person really feels right. They meet this entire list and we know what we're measuring up against. Sometimes when we don't do that, we're like, "Oh, he seems like a great guy. He's been a developer for five years. This should be great." And we just hire them. It's that, again, quick to fire on the surface seems, and we don't have that criteria listed and we end up making a quick hire and not really going deep.
We need to go deep, take a breath, take the time to really understand, do they have this growth potential? Do they fit the culture? And then we can start diving in on the retention of them once we bring them in the door.
Rob:
Yeah. And I think that a trick that we used when we were much smaller is when I was out at events and when I was meeting people, Ben and I had a shared spreadsheet of people that we had met through our time of speaking or attending events or participating with people and saying like, "Oh, these could be potential hires down the road. We're not ready to grow this way yet, but these are potential people that were interested in and that we would stay in touch with and continue to make sure they knew what was going on in our business." And when we're ready, we could reach back out and say like, "Hey, we've known each other for a while. We have this particular job open. And I think you would be a good fit." Like there is a whole recruitment phase that you can go through now.
Personal experience says that gets much harder with scale. Like we still meet people and do all that, but we've grown enough over the last couple of years that we don't meet enough people to meet up with our hiring demands. So that's become a different problem, when we were small, that was a great way to continue to network. And there's some risk associated with that because people tend to network with people who look like them and come from similar backgrounds. So that's definitely a risk there, but we've been trying to be really intentional about getting into groups and attending events where there is a diverse population that we can then get to know and build those networks in those communities.
Traci:
Yeah. Which I think is key too, because you guys have like an internship program as well, which I would imagine would be a really great place to bring in diversity.
Maybe in our last few minutes talk about like, has that been a success for you guys as far as people that end up staying and being full time employees for a long period of time?
Rob:
Yes. So we've run an apprenticeship program, and I think that distinction is important, but that's okay. When I think interns, I think, "Hey, go get my coffee or make a couple of copies for me." So I think apprenticeship is a little bit more on the job training and intentional investing in people, not just giving them a line on their resume.
So yes, we've been doing it for 10 years now where we bring in between two and four people every year in January. And we pay them to hang out with us for six months, and we have a curriculum that we put them through that we actually, our goal is to turn them from wherever they start into really, really, really well qualified beginners at the end.
It's a lot of fun. Like we are able to give people an opportunity to get into the industry that may have not otherwise had an opportunity. We've had people make career changes. We've had people straight out of high school. We've had people with two-year degrees, four-year degrees, art degrees, bootcamps, you name it, have come through that program.
I think every year we've hired at least one person from that program. I think it's right at about 25% of our company—maybe a little bit lower than that right now—has been a past apprentice. It's become a huge part of who we are.
And one of the coolest things in my opinion about it is, because we do it for the first six months of a year and we actually run two apprentices now, one full stack web dev and one design, one over the summer. They hang out with for six months, which we pay, which equalizes the playing field, everybody makes a living wage while they learn. And then the next year we see the apprentices from the previous years investing in the new apprentices, they are able to mentor them and help them along on their journey. I'm a such a big believer that teaching and mentoring and being a mentee even, is such a huge part of our learning experience in that having somebody who's brand new that even our more junior members of our team can invest in and help along their journey helps them get better.
And it really helps put education in the middle of our culture and our teaching and investing in people and makes that cog turn. It's been everything for us than finding and being able to produce our own talent and always having a pretty predictable schedule when we'll have people to hire.
I think it's just one more kind of thought on that. If you want to talk about apprenticeships, reach out. I love talking about this topic. If you're out there thinking apprenticeships, I never thought about that. How do you make that work? I have tons of ideas, but the coolest part to me is we've figured out a way to make it cost neutral, is we do pay those people to hang out with us for six months living wage. But as long as we hire, about half the class, then those people that we start on projects, we can start using them on projects and they start working on client things during the second half of the year. That pretty much makes that whole program cost neutral when you think about the hiring process and the recruiting process, and that's pretty stinking cool in my opinion, something that's able to sustain itself and produce talent for companies that I think sometimes have a hard time figuring out how junior members can fit in.
Traci:
Yeah. I mean, that is literally one of the best ideas I have heard for finding and retaining talented people, is your apprenticeship program. I think it's brilliant, and it hits all the buttons. And I think the whole way of looking at it as cost neutral is key. And man, being able to see them in action within your culture on top of it all is such a wonderful window into will they fit in? Is this somebody we really want to hang on to? What's their mentality? Do they get it? Do they want it? Do they have the capacity to do this job and be part of the Sparkbox team for a long period of time? I think it's a great idea.
Rob:
Yeah. I mean, it's been pretty cool. Like we have one of our former apprentices is now a technical director in our company. Pretty cool. Another kind of cool stat is I think we've had about 35 apprentices over the years and every single one of them that has wanted a job, has been able to leave with one when they've left, either with us or had an offer somewhere else. The one exception is an apprentice several years ago who decided that tech was not for them and they did not want to be part of the industry anymore. That was the end of their experience was, “Okay, I need to be done with this. This was fun.” And part of that, we help them learn how to write resumes and go do interviews and help write letters of recommendation and find jobs.
But I think you said something real important there is from an interviewing perspective—which we'll have to do a whole episode on interviewing at some point—is you can't fake your way through six months. We know who you are, what you believe, how you fit, at the end of that apprenticeship, there is zero chance that we don't know where you fit.
Traci:
Right. Well, that's just awesome. That's great.
Rob:
We'll have to do another episode, maybe focus in a little bit more on finding talent and then another one on retaining talent. But then this was a good one.
Traci:
It's such an important topic. So yeah, we could go deeper. We might have to think about that.
But I think in closing when it comes to finding talent, take your time, know what you're looking for, get that criteria down. And with retaining, man, you've got to provide people with an engaged purpose filled, clear role and expectation, and also just a lot of growth and development opportunity if you want to keep them. And then be okay when it's time for people to move on and know that it's the cycle of life and business. People are going to come and go. And it's the perspective that we have that is going to help us through that whole process.
Rob:
Yep. A lot of people say, all good things must come to an end, but I firmly believe that all things come to an end.
Traci:
This is true.
Rob:
Good, bad, or indifferent. I completely agree. Like I think that investing and growing your talent will help your retention and your recruiting. People will see it and notice it and it'll look different than what they see out there.
Traci:
Absolutely. All right. Well until next time.
Rob:
Until next time, Traci. Thanks.
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