Quick tips to help talent leaders prepare for next year
Jim Conti is the Talent Advisor and a Partner at Hyde Park Venture Partners and has been with the firm since 2021. In this role, Jim provides strategic talent support and consulting to the firm and portfolio companies.
This fall, I hosted a three-part webinar series to help early-stage execs, HR managers, and talent leaders make their 2022 talent plans. With the series, I hoped to give startups an overview of the steps they need to take in order to be ready for next year. We began with a webinar around setting organizational goals and mapping out the team you need to meet them, then dove into recruitment strategies in the second webinar, and wrapped up with a session around prioritizing retention. You can watch the webinars here.
You probably need to hire earlier than you think
If you have an organizational goal that needs to be completed by the end of next year, that doesn’t mean you can wait until Q4 to start the hiring process for the role that will own that goal. You need to keep in mind each piece of the process necessary to bring that role onto your team.
In the first webinar, I walked through the example below to explain this. Say you need one sales rep to reach 100% of their quota for H2, 2022. That means they need to be a fully effective sales rep by July 1, 2022 (the beginning of H2). To be fully effective, they need three months to ramp up, which means they need to start their role by April 1, 2022. To have someone start by April 1, you should start recruiting for that role at least 60 days out — February 1, 2022.
Prepare for attrition
Attrition is something that employers should always consider, but with the current talent market it’s more important than ever to plan for it. Employees are antsy to make moves, they are thinking about their work and personal life differently, and overall, they are re-evaluating their goals. Before this year, I’d say to assume 15-18% staff turnover. Now, I’m advising companies to prepare for 20- 25%.
With this in mind, there are a few key ways that you can prepare:
Spend time documenting processes. That way, when an employee leaves, they don’t take all their knowledge with them. This will also make onboarding new employees smoother.
If possible, overhire. I know this is a hard ask of an early-stage startup, so I want to emphasize if possible. That said, if you know you need five sales reps to meet your revenue targets, then hire six so you can still meet your goal if one leaves or doesn’t work out.
Don’t let fear of attrition prevent you from expecting high performance. Not seeing low performance addressed often leads to high performers leaving.
Be proactive with your current team. Prioritize engaging them and creating a positive company culture, not just hiring new employees.
Recruiting a diverse team requires real partnership
I love that most employers are thinking more proactively about diversity in their organization. However, a lot of people approach it with the mindset that there is a quick action they can take to check off this box, whether it’s getting on a certain type of job board or paying a fee to be a ‘partner’ of an organization but not really engaging.
If you really want to prioritize diversity in your recruiting process, you need to become an active partner with different organizations and build trust within those communities. For example, at one of my previous companies we became a partner with Women in Product (WIP). We gave our employees professional development funds to attend WIP conferences and hosted events with WIP members in our office. Because of our relationship with them, their members both knew about us and saw us as an employer they could trust. Eventually, we hired a product manager who was a part of WIP and had met us from one of our joint events.
There are many organizations like WIP with whom your startup can develop a true partnership. These organizations focus on a variety of identities, functions, and intersectionalities. Chicago:Blend is a great place to start and they have a list of resources and organizations to work with if you’re prioritizing DEI in your recruiting efforts.
Retention is not about perks — it’s about listening to feedback and taking action
In the final webinar of the Talent Planning series, we focused on retention and engaging your team. That webinar had one overarching thesis that dictated the content: retention is not about perks — it’s about listening to your employees and taking action based on their feedback. If you don’t know where to start when it comes to employee engagement and creating a good culture, ask your employees. It can be through 1:1’s, an annual survey (which I highly recommend), weekly pulse questions, etc. However, a key here is that you share the results of these conversations and create an action plan around them (and then execute on that action plan).
Your team engagement plans should be as important as your revenue goals — and your employees should see that
I both began and ended the webinar series with this point. When you’re thinking about your organizational goals, you need to include the employee experience in them. A goal around your team and their experience should be just as important as a goal around revenue. Employees are more likely to stay and be engaged if they can see that you care about them. Even if you do care about the experience of your team and want to make it a good one, if you don't have goals around it elevated to the same level as the rest of your organizational goals, then you’re less likely to find time in the year to actually do anything about it.
Interested in hearing more talent tips? Find more on the Hyde Park Venture Partners blog.