Why should anyone come and work for your company?

Paul Goring wrote an article this week about attracting, engaging and keeping talent for Discuss HR blog.

I’m not sure Paul is saying anything particularly new or going beyond common sense… but that’s not the point.  The point is that, even in these straitened times, talented people have choices – and make them – about who to work with.  In my experience as an assessor, organisations never (and I mean never) complain of having too many talented people for the roles they have available.  If you want to continue to attract talented people for jobs at every level of the organisation, you need to pay attention to the promises you make and to how you deliver on your promises when you hire people.

And there’s another point.  The way you treat people when you do hire them… well, it tends to seep out to the customer and become part of the customer experience.  In my local branch of Timpson – I’m sure I’ve written about this before – I’ve had staff go into unsolicited raptures about how the company works and how much they enjoy working there.  No surprise, then, that Timpson has a whole section on its website about awards it has won, including the Tomorrow’s People Annual Award Of Achievement, Employer Of The Year 2012 award.

Of course, there’s more to it than that.  I have been gifted so many free lattes by staff at Pret a Manger over the years that I know there must be a policy lurking somewhere.  (After all, if it were just a spontaneous act of kindness by one human being to another – a human response, for example, to the one customer who smiled today – why haven’t I also been gifted the occasional book of stamps in the Post Office, or even… well… mortgage by my bank?)

I don’t need to spell out the impact of having unhappy, demotivated staff on the customer experience (though it may be worth saying that unhappy staff can lose confidence and they don’t always leave… so don’t count on losing them.  Equally, it may be worth saying that even when they do, they may well continue to talk about their poor experience of working for your company a long way down the road).

Of course, this Friday snippet would not be complete without highlighting the impact of your organisation’s leadership on engaging staff and reminding you of Daniel Goleman’s article Leadership That Gets Results, which is readily downloadable.  In it Goleman, outlines in brief the findings of research about the links between different leadership styles, employee engagement and organisational results.  If you’re serious about developing a brand as an employer that you can be really proud of and which attracts the kind of staff you really want to hire, you need to get serious about recruiting and selecting the right people to leadership posts and about how you education, train, manage and… mmm… lead them when they’re in post.

Please let me know how you get on.