Engaging Talent | Never Hire A 10/10 Candidate

Let us qualify this – don’t hire someone who ticks all 10 boxes that you need ticking. Unless you want to go way over budget, they probably don't exist anyway.

Hire someone that ticks 6 boxes brilliantly, 2 well and who leaves 2 boxes unticked.

When hiring and/or trying to retain talent think of your employee’s 3 year career roadmap not just the first 3 months’ probation period.

If someone comes into your business who is the perfect 'finished article' - ticking all 10 boxes - they’ll get bored and will quickly become a flight risk sooner rather than later: do the job, move on.

It’s arguably never been easier to move on too: bigger companies are paying more than ever for talent, flexible working has become the norm opening up companies in different parts of the world and exceptional talent with FMCG 'rigour' is increasingly popular with other industries inc. tech and retail.

If you can balance getting the most value out of the 6 things out of 10 that they do

exceptionally well with challenging individuals to grow and learn those other 2-3 new things, then they will thrive by evolving their career and skill-set.

You’ll be happy too.

Tangibly, the energy and happiness they get from that challenge will translate into them sticking around and giving you a good 3-4yr stint at least.

The challenge to an employer is how to add value to their career with mentoring, coaching, external learning etc to fill in the gaps in their understanding.

To that end, when hiring and/or trying to retain talent think of your employee’s 3 year career roadmap not just the first 3 months’ probation period.

To see how other clients of POET use this approach for successfully managing their talent, give us a call here, we’d love to help you out.

www.wearepoet.com