Can you afford to put up with mediocre employees?
Humetrics president, Mel Kleiman, posed this
question in a recent TLNT.com post.
Despite the obvious answer, Kleiman notes that employers and managers
frequently keep mediocre workers around rather than replace them with top
talent (whom he refers to as “A players”). He even offers 10 reasons they do
so, including:
- They’re focused on low turnover rather than on retaining the right people.
- They don’t really know what constitutes an A player.
- They use a screening process designed to screen people out rather then let the right people in.
Recruiting top talent isn’t easy by any stretch. But it’s
worthwhile because, as Kleiman points out, “hundreds of research studies have
quantified the difference between having an ‘A’ player versus a ‘C’ player in a
job … (and) every one of them concludes the difference in productivity and the
impact on the bottom line is anywhere from 20 percent to over 1,000 percent
greater return when you compare the best, most productive employees to those
who are average.”
Of course, to effectively recruit top talent, you need to
know who your current A players are and precisely what sets them apart. Once
you do, you’ll know which skills, behaviors and attributes to seek out as you
recruit new talent and as you craft your employee learning and development programs. (You can read more on this
topic in a previous post, “Do
You Know Who Your ‘Top Guns’ Are?”)
If you’re interested in raising the bar on your recruitment
of top talent, you might consider a recommendation from Jonah Berger, marketing professor at
University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School: “Stop selling, start
storytelling.”
Rather than trying to sell A players on a specific job,
Berger encourages employers to snag top talent through word of mouth from their
own employees and storytelling related to their actual work experiences. In a recent
article on Inc.com, “Howto Use Viral Marketing to Recruit Top-Notch Talent,” Berger notes that
there’s an entire psychology behind the power of social sharing and word of
mouth—and this same power should be applied to attracting new talent.
A players, top guns, high-performance workers—however you
refer to them, one thing is certain: the best way to attract more of them consistently is to use this three-step
process:
Step 1. Identify your current top performers and what makes them
special.
Step 2. Use your findings as a
“template” for recruiting and hiring new talent.
Step 3. Leverage your current top
performers to tell your brand’s “story” in their own real and meaningful terms.
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