Looking for Good People

Like most LinkedIn users, I periodically get a wave of overtures from recruiters when firms are seeking to fill position with experienced candidates – it’s validating and gives me a sense that I’m in a growing profession – but this recent round I have become sensitized to the words “looking for.”   It’s a fairly standard and entirely sensible in a recruitment letter to say a firm is “looking for” experienced candidates, “looking for” certain skills, “looking for” those who are capable of accomplishing specific things.   But for whatever reason, those two words are beginning to get under my skin.

A company looks outside its own operations to obtain from the outside world the things it is unable to do for itself, or is unable to do as effectively as other firms – services that must be outsourced or contracted because the company does not have the core competence to do these things for itself.  A firm must look for a vendor to provide payroll accounting or social marketing because it simply isn’t any good at those tasks, and hasn’t the first idea how to develop that capacity internally.

Considered in that light, a firm that is “looking for” good people is implicitly admitting that it doesn’t know how to make its own – and must lure away workers who were trained in other companies, those who presumably have the competence to not merely hire and use talent, but to grow talent internally.  In a broad sense, it’s the tragedy of the commons – with every firm assuming that other companies are able to train and develop talent so that they can hire it away.

So the question arises: what firms are capable of making good people to fill the need of other firms that do not?  A partial answer might come from my recent experience in rebuilding a department after all their experienced employees departed within a period of months.  This firm is the hands-down leader in customer experience, with customer satisfaction ratings that left the second-place firms far behind – but when it sought to grow the discipline within the organization, it filled all the top slots with outsiders (people from firms who were second- or third-rate) and the experienced people, feeling unrecognized and unrewarded, sought positions in other departments or outside the firm.   This company grew good people, but failed to retain them.

And thus begins the downward spiral: a company does not invest in developing talent because it also does not invest in retaining talent.   Such a firm can only lose its best people, into whose professional development it has invested a considerable amount of time and money.  It then comes to the conclusion that it is not worthwhile to develop talent because some other firm will simply hire its good people away (which is a kind of psychological denial of its own inability to retain them).  And so it stops developing good people and starts to hire them from outside.   (But in this case, if you are the leader in a given field, the personnel of other companies are not as good as the ones you have, and have lost.)

And in the same situation, I was faced with a significant problem: if experienced people had left, then experienced people had to be hired to replace them.   There wasn’t time to hire a flock of recent graduates and bring them up in the profession – or at least, that was the response I got when I made that suggestion.  It was the same response I had received when I made the same observation years before: that there weren’t many greenhorns in the ranks to replace the old salts when they matriculated or left their positions.  So the net result is that the senior staff was all hired from firms that were not as good, and these second-rate individuals would be the new leadership to train the junior staff.   The prognosis in such a situation is not good.

I expect this situation is far from unique: a firm seeks to develop talent internally, then fails to reward and retain the talent they have developed, and their most talented individuals are lured away by other companies who lack the ability to develop their own talent, who are “looking for” and willing to adequately compensate people who developed skills at other companies that fail to retain them.  The folly of this is clear, but folly is perennial.

And so, I despair there is not a firm who sustainably grows and retains its talent – that through a brief period of crisis or a sustained degradation of culture, even a firm that has the capability to make good people out of raw recruits will cease to do so, and join the many who are “looking for” talent that it cannot (or will not) produce internally.   It’s perhaps a healthy thing that the giants of industry should crumble and make way for the next generation, perpetuating the cycle of life and death in the corporate jungle.