Spoke with ERE’s Thursday Keynote Speaker, Dr. Tim Butler of Harvard after his morning talk. Maslow lives!
“The Art of Retaining Your Best People” revolved around identifying an organization’s most valued employee(s) and understanding the elements of their most imbedded motivations to be committed to an organization. In a nutshell, recruiters are just at the tip of the career development iceberg in most organizations.
One interesting claim by
Butler is that in companies who do “get it”, the leaders recognize that people who leave are often those whom the company may do business with in the future. As a result, it is vitally important to have maintained a strong nexus between the employee and their career development goals. Not brain surgery but consider how many companies “write off” someone who leaves without realizing that the exiting employee may experience substantial personal and professional growth – and come back to haunt everyone who spoke negatively of them.
Consider the plight of employees today… They’re asking themselves: Who really cares for me? How many times have I sat with someone and had a talk about me? How does a recruiter propose to sell an organization to a candidate only for the candidate to discover that the reality of engagement is at most a once a year performance review – probably a bad one – with their manager.
I asked Tim what questions would he have enjoyed asking the audience.
- Where do you see yourself in 3-4 years and is your company going to help you get there?
- Does your company have a fully developed career development program for most employees with fully engaged managers?
- Do you talk about career development in your company to people you recruit?
Finally, what did Tim hope recruiters would take away with them?
- For one, there’s a substantial personal element for each recruiter – after all, they are involved in the equation of career development of all hires.
- Two, that recruiters should be actively connected with the career development and be part of the discussions.
- Three, that recruiters are the sales reps behind the organization’s human capital improvement initiatives.
The Recruiting Inferno 