5 Hiring Strategies To Attract Top Talent FASTER | Ep 243
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Have you ever hired somebody to make your life easier? And what happened is that your life did not get easier, but your work actually doubled. Back when I started my first company, my hiring strategy was, if you've got a pulse and you apply for the job, you're in. And at first it worked because we were a small business, but then things exploded. And what I realized is that the people that I had brought on that were underqualified were the reason I wasn't able to scale faster.

And so today what I wanna do is I wanna share with you what I learned the hard way, is how you can turn your business and even yourself into a magnet for top talent. And in case you don't know me, my name is Laila Hormozy. I am the CEO of acquisition.com. So if your business isn't great at attracting talent, there are five things that make up an employee value proposition that will answer the question, why should I work at your company? You can't just focus on what you want as a business owner. You have to focus on what they want

as a top performing employee. This is what I call a company talent match. To what degree an employee value proposition satisfies the external talent's desire and your internal needs. The first one is compensation. Okay, so most people think about compensation just like salary. There's actually a few things that make up compensation. There's annual salary, there's a promotion cycle, there's raise cycles, there's pay.

Equity, there's pay transparency. All these things go into compensation. It's not just the number that they get paid on an annual basis. Compensation is the foundation of the talent strategy because often this is the thing that's going to get somebody to even click on the job requisite that you've posted. If you want to get the best

director of marketing in the world, and you post the job at $70,000 a year. Do you think the best marketer in the world is going to click on that? No, they're going to be turned off by the job posting before they even click. And so that's why I start with compensation because without anchoring at the right compensation, that's the reason why people don't even read further on your job requisite. Great talent knows their value. If your compensation doesn't reflect

that, they won't even show up at the table. And what most companies get wrong is they think that paying well is the full story, but it's not. Compensation is more than just how much you pay somebody on an annual basis. If you tell someone that you're going to pay them a lot of money on an annual basis, but they have no room to move up, they have no room to grow, they have no idea what their bonus or on-target earnings are, then that means if they work harder, if they work faster, if they do more for the company, they still can't get paid more. It's about how much they can earn over time and what the opportunity for growth looks

like. Think about it like the first impression. Okay. It's going to tell people how much you value their time, their energy, their skills in the marketplace. And so if you're trying to hire the best, your offer has to match their expectations. So I'll give you an example of this. When I am recruiting for my executive leadership team, the way that I have their compensation set up is that the base salary is quite small compared to what their on target earnings are. So if somebody comes into my company, I'm going to bring them in. Let's say I'm bringing a CTO.

I'm going to bring them in. Maybe the base that I'm paying that person is $450,000. But their bonus that they can earn is essentially in line with how much the company grows and how much the company profits. And so that person, for example, if we hit our projections as a company and they hit their goals as a person, they could earn more than triple, quadruple, or even quintuple their salary. For a top level executive, their bonus is not going to be capped.

it's gonna be congruent with the growth of the company and with how much they're able to grow their department. For a leader in that position, you might have something set up like a profit share pool where they get 1% of that profit share pool, or they could get 1% of year over year revenue growth. Those are both pretty common. Well, that means that that 1% isn't capped.

it's just in line with how much the company grows. And so it's really incentivizing to somebody in a high level position because they don't want a capped earning potential. They wanna know that the more that the company earns, the more that they can earn. And so that's why for me, the higher up in the company somebody is, the more I'm going to trade

base salary with performance salary because somebody in a higher level position has more influence over the growth of the company, therefore they should be compensated with that growth. Another example of how you wanna align yourself with the top talent, you need to have clarity around how do they get promoted,

And how do they get a raise? Which means, okay, if you hit these five boxes, you qualify for a promotion. If you hit these five boxes, you qualify for a raise. I personally think that if you want to get the best talent, you shouldn't make it based on tenure. You shouldn't make it based on arbitrary boxes. You should make it based on objective measures of how much that person can get done. We promote because of performance.

And so personally, what I've seen is that the best performers want your pay transparency, they want your raise cycles, and they want your promotion cycles all to reflect that which is under their control. So here's what I want you to ask yourself. Are you getting what you pay for? As I've talked through these things,

Are there gaps in your compensation package that you're providing to people? The reality is, is that the more you wanna attract top performers, you have to configure your pay for top performers. Because guess what? Low performers aren't gonna like performance pay.

They're going to run the other way and they're going to go to some job that's going to pay them if they've been there three years, they get paid more money. Compensation in general does not just exist to attract the right people, but also to repel the wrong ones. The second piece of an employee value proposition is benefits. Employees don't just shop for jobs, they shop for a job that reflects the lifestyle they want.

And so your benefits package actually tells them what your values are as a company and what kind of lifestyle you're trying to support. Think about it like this. If you claim to be a wellness or a health company, but then you provide like the lowest PTO possible and literally no wellness benefits, then that's going to seem misaligned with your values. And it's going to

cause a pause in the people looking at your company because they're going to think to themselves, they say that they support wellness, but they have no wellness programs. They don't pay for time off. They have really short maternity and paternity leaves. Like this doesn't make much sense to me. And so that's why benefits are important because they really support the values that you claim to have as a company. Now, benefits can be broken down into a few categories. I want to talk about the most common ones. The most common benefit is paid time off.

Top performers want to know that they have autonomy. Okay, and so if you want a high performing team, you need to give them the freedom to reset. I think a lot of people misunderstand this. They think that giving a high amount or unlimited or flexible paid time off means that you're gonna get all these lazy people.

Here's the thing, you will either get really lazy people or you're gonna get really high performing people because high performing people wanna know that they don't have a ton of rules that they have to abide by. They wanna know they have a lot of freedom. Same with really lazy people. And so that's why this is a piece of the package, not all of it.

But I will say this, if you have really terrible PTO policies, then people are thinking, gosh, do you not trust me to regulate myself? Do you not trust me to know when I should or shouldn't take time off? If you want to attract top talent, they're going to want to have a lot more freedom than what low tier talent looks like. And so employees who feel like they're being punished for taking time off are either going to leave, they're never going to join, or they're going to burn out. The second piece in terms of benefits is flexibility.

And so this is also important because top talent wants to work somewhere that focuses on values rather than rules. They have options, they have choices because again, the higher performer, the more autonomy they crave, which comes with flexibility. And so what that looks like is do you have strict rules about working in person versus working remote? Do you have a strict schedule they have to be on like no matter what from nine to five?

Or do you give the person flexibility to work within a certain amount of constraints? So if I have somebody who is a leader of a customer service department, and I know that we have to respond to our customers between 9 to 5 p.m., then I'm going to trust that if I hire that leader, that they're at least going to be available between 9 to 5 to support their team. But I'm not going to tell them you need to be at the

office sitting at your desk in front of a computer, I'm going to say, listen, I trust you. If you need to go do something else, if you're going to take a lunch, if you're going to cut out early one day, I trust that you're gonna have your phone on you and a way for your team to reach you if there's an emergency. The second example of this is when it comes to in-person work. So I personally have a hybrid company. I have some people who are completely remote. I also have some people who are completely in person. And I love following this methodology, which is I don't have a minimum number of days for someone to be in the office. In fact,

I don't tell anybody how often they have to be in the office. I have things that if they want to do their work, they must be in the office. If they are going to film with me on Friday, then they have to come into the office to do that. If they're going to participate in one of our workshops, then they have to be in the office to do that. If they're going to be in our group all hands meeting that's in person, then they have to be in the office to do that.

But when they're working on projects alone, when they're trying to get shit done, am I gonna tell them they need to come to the office two days that week just because I need to fill the seats? No, I think that that burns people out. The methodology I like to follow around flexibility when it comes to in-person versus remote work is if it makes their job easier to work at the office, they should work at the office. If it makes their job harder to work at the office, then work at home.

And I think that that fluctuates between the type of work somebody is doing. You burn out and deter people who are top performers from joining your company when they feel like you have these arbitrary rules that actually make working harder. So when the company or the manager put so much rigidity in place that it makes people's jobs harder, that's when you see the top talent doesn't want to join your company. The second piece of this is that if you're not a giant corporation, giant corporations, their way of getting top talent is they just throw money at people.

They have a sick salary package. They've got a sick on-target earnings package and they have sick stock plans. They do have a really incentivizing compensation plan. That's why they call it the golden handcuffs. Now, if you're a smaller company, that's why I think it's so important to lean in on the other benefits that you have because maybe you can't pay top dollar. The next benefit is going to look like ongoing education, which means offering education and training benefits to the people that work at your company.

This shows people that you're invested in their growth. And this is especially important for top performers because here's the thing, they don't just want a job. They don't just wanna make money. They want a career path and they want growth to more. And this matters because it's not just a benefit,

of bringing the person in, it's also a retention strategy. So if you offer, for example, in-house certification programs, if you offer budgets for ongoing learning, if you offer sending people offsite to do trainings, that's when these can help employees see their long-term future with your company.

Because they think, I actually grow more by staying at this company than I would if I left this company. And that's really why this benefit is so important, especially if you're not one of those giant corporations that can pay a million dollars a year. It's like, well, what can you do? You can provide more growth, provide more opportunity so that they learn more at your company than if they went anywhere else. So for example, at acquisition.com, what I tell people when they apply to work for us is I say, listen, we pay well.

But that's not why I want people working here. I actually believe that our number one value proposition is growth. The amount of growth that people have personally and professionally within our company is absolutely our competitive advantage. And so when I'm hiring people, I explain to them, how do we create an organization to facilitate that growth?

And what that looks like for me is that they're in a essentially shared service organization that then is going to get deployed into any one of those divisions at some point in time. So people in my organization have experience working on portfolio companies. They have experience helping with $100 million book

launch. They have experience putting together a workshop. They have experience consulting with businesses. They have experience sometimes being on camera and making content. And so they get to go around and have all these different opportunities and challenges to help build different things in different divisions. Now, that is a hard thing to do as a company. It's much easier to just put people in a box and never touch it. But I know that our number one value proposition is growth. And so that is how I support it. So what I want you to ask yourself, aside from a paycheck, what do you have to offer?

Is it time off? Is it flexibility? Is it ongoing education? These three things, if you signal them to the marketplace, they signal that you trust people, that you want people who are autonomous, and that you want people who want to learn. You want to build your benefits in a way that speaks to the people you want and repels the people you don't want.

The third piece of an employee value proposition is career development. So career development is the ongoing process of managing your professional growth and progress over the course of your career. Okay, so this is going to involve identifying the employee's career goals, providing them with the skills or education, and then putting them in opportunity where they can flex those skills. And this is important because high performers, they want to evolve, they want to grow, they want to learn, they want to be challenged, they don't want to be stagnant.

In fact, they want learning and growth more than they want money. And so if your company doesn't provide that, they're going to go find one that does. So if you're not aligning your infrastructure to meet the demands of that top talent, they either disengage or they leave. And so just like there's product market fit, there's also career talent fit that you have to nail. The best employees, they're not going to stick around if they can't see a path forward.

In fact, I'm always constantly checking myself with the people who report to me and thinking to myself, are they clear on where they're going? Are they clear on where they need to improve to get there? And do they have support and feedback along the way? And if somebody has those three things, the likelihood that they remain engaged is almost irrefutable. Think about it just like yourself. Like you want progress. And when you're feeling like you're making a lot of

progress, you don't want to go start over somewhere else because you're like, I see the path to get there. Maybe I'm not there right now and today, but I'm making progress to get there. And so I know it's inevitable. What I've learned over my decade doing this is that if you don't create a vision for your company big enough that people can fit their vision inside of it, they will simply go somewhere that can't. I can give you an example, which is in my last company, I had about four people who I would consider were superstars in that company.

Like didn't necessarily mean they were at executive level, but they were superstars in their own. And for three of those four people, I had a very clear career paths as to where they could go and what they could do to reach the goals they had for themselves. And because of that, they stuck around for a very long time.

I ended up selling that company, but they even stuck around after the sale. I had one person in that company who their aspirations were aspirations that I simply didn't have a big enough vision to fit theirs inside of it. I just didn't have anywhere to move them to. And so because of that, I lost that person.

And it's something to this day that I wrestle with because it was such a loss for the company. It was a loss for me personally because I felt like I had failed as a leader of the company. And so what I've realized is that the first job of the CEO or the founder is to paint the vision of the company. The second job of the CEO or founder is to paint the vision for all of those leaders within the company as to how they fit within that greater vision.

And that is actually one that you have to pay a lot more attention to a lot more frequently because the vision for the company doesn't often change on a quarterly basis. But aligning your top talent with that vision, you're constantly reorienting based on the marketplace, based on the team, based on the strategy, based on execution, based on things you're doing right now. And so you have to constantly make sure that everyone beneath you has clarity as to how to get there.

Top talent wants growth. And so the question is, do you make growing easier or harder? Some companies, because they're inundated with rules and arbitrary constraints, they make it harder for people to grow. Whereas a lot of companies, I don't think what they realize is that you can actually make it easier to grow if you provide clarity and you provide resources as well as not too much rigidity.

The fourth piece to this is work environment. Work environment is referring to like the physical, the social, and the cultural conditions in which an employee performs their job. So it's going to encompass all the factors that influence how somebody performs, how they interact with other people on the team, how they interact with the tasks that they have to do, and just

how they feel in the workplace. You could call it the vibe. If somebody walks into the acquisition.com building, like what's the vibe? Top talent thrives in an environment where they have the freedom to make their own decisions and own their outcomes.

Micromanagement literally suffocates creativity. Autonomy empowers employees to do their best at work. If you have, for example, a chaotic work environment that has unclear roles, shifting priorities, lack of communication, that can drain even the best employees because they don't know what they're working towards. And high performers excel when they know exactly what success looks like and how what they do on a day-to-day basis contributes to that bigger success.

Clarity provides focus and focuses what drives results. Now, some people ask, what if our company is completely remote? How does this apply? Well, the company that I ran for seven years prior to the one that I have now was actually fully remote. And I can tell you that the vibe of the workplace was completely different. Now, this goes down to what kind of language do you use? Do they use emojis? Do they not use emojis? Do we do calls or do we do meetings? Are we using a project management tool or are we not? So let me give you an example of understanding how this affects the vibe.

Right. OK, so think about like a traditional software company, probably not a lot of meetings, probably not a ton of emojis, probably a ton of developers that don't want to go back and forth too much, a lot less activity in the communication channels. And when there is activity, it's only on very big, important things. So what that means is you're going to want people who don't need too much social interaction, like keeping to themselves.

and the vibe is like a little bit intense. Whereas on the other side, say you have a D2C business where you have custom makeup products that you send to customers. Like it's much more marketing centric. You want more collaboration. You've got more back and forth in channels. You have more meetings to do brainstorming. If you step into that environment, the vibe is much more light. It's a little lighthearted. It's fun. It's

playful. And so I think a lot of it too that has to do with shaping that work environment is what is the product that you deliver? What's the service that you have? Those things also contribute to shaping that work environment. That's why if you walk into a hospital, the ER is probably not the funnest, lighthearted work environment because you're saving lives all day. Whereas if you walk into a chocolate shop, probably the more lighthearted, probably more fun, probably more creative. And so the same goes for remote. It's just a matter of the way that you're seeing the communication is showing up on a screen rather than in front of your eyes.

Here's the thing. I don't think that there's a benefit to having a more intense vibe versus a more lighthearted vibe. I think that you need to know what kind of vibe your workplace is and then understand what kind of people that's going to attract. So for me, I always think of acquisition.com as like we are business professionals demonstrating excellence. I want people who are competitively great. I want people who are a little bit intense and I want people who take their work seriously but can have fun while they're doing it.

So does that mean that people who like the lighthearted, fun, super creative bubbly vibes are going to want to work at my company? I don't think so, actually. I think I'm going to get a little bit more intense. Now, they're not going to be developers working in a corner because my team likes to work with each other. However, it's going to be somewhere in the middle. I'm going to understand that either one of those are probably not going to work on my company. Now, there's nothing wrong with that.

as long as I understand how that feeds into the greater package that I'm presenting to the marketplace with my employee value proposition. So ask yourself this question, what is the vibe of your company? Is it one that is built on autonomy and recognition? Is it built on intensity or lightheartedness? Is it clear or is it chaotic? These are the things you have to ask yourself to understand, am I attracting the right people based on the work environment that we have?

Now the last piece is culture. Culture is really just the beliefs, the values, and the behaviors of the organization. Just like customers research a brand before they buy it, top talent is going to do their homework on your culture before they join a company. So they're going to look at your Glassdoor reviews. They're going to look at employee testimonials. They're going to look at the LinkedIn profiles of you and all your employees and your Instagrams, your Facebooks, and anything else they can find.

And so if your culture is unclear or it is subpar, that's going to hurt you in how you can recruit top talent. Because here's the thing, just like when you see an ad online for a product, you go Google it. The same thing happens with your company.

Ain't nobody going to a job interview without having Googled your fucking company. And so they show up having done their research. And the top performers, they want to join a company that has a clear mission, they've got clear values, and they have good internal reputation. Does that mean that they have nothing bad said about them online? No, I will tell you this. For example, if somebody leaves acquisition.com and they were not the right fit for our company, you're going to see that people are going to say like, wow, these people are intense. Maybe they work too hard. Those things that somebody considers a negative, a top performer is going to see those and think those are a positive.

And so understand that it's not just about trying to attract the right people. It's also understanding that the reviews that people leave should also repel the wrong people. And so your culture is what defines if this is a good or a bad thing. There's different types of cultures for different types of people. And there can be top talent in a really playful, lighthearted culture. And there can be top talent in a really intense culture

serious working culture. Red flags that show up for any kind of company. I would say there's general red flags that would be red flag for anybody. And then there's red flags that show up based on they're just a mismatch. Mismatched red flags are when you say you're one thing, but your reviews online show that you're another.

You say you're all about competitive greatness, intense working, et cetera. People are leaving reviews saying like they're not what they say they are. Everyone here is lazy. They hire really low performing people. They don't pay well. Generic red flags are when people talk about things in reviews like this company fires people without notice. This company treats people poorly and isn't ethical.

Anything like that, that's going to pretty much scare away anybody from any type of company. It's not just going to be your employee reviews, but people are also probably going to look at your customer reviews. If you're selling enterprise level support and you're selling very expensive packages to businesses, and then you're looking at reviews online and saying, I don't get answers. People aren't supporting me. This is a scam. This is that. And it's tons of those reviews. That's

that's probably something to be up in arms about. In general, people are going to look at red flags when it comes to working there and then also red flags when it comes to the product that you sell. So ask yourself this question, does your internal brand reflected externally to the talent marketplace? And so is it so clear who you are on the inside that it shows up externally when somebody is applying to work

for you. So after that breaking point in 2019, I got really serious about understanding talent strategy. I stopped hiring people out of desperation. I stopped hiring people out of panic. I stopped all that bullshit. And I started thinking about who I really wanted on my team. And I considered those five things in every search I put out into the marketplace.

And so through doing that and focusing on those five things, I essentially built my employee value proposition so that I could answer the question, why should somebody work here and not somewhere else? Because at the end of the day, above all else, that is the question that we were answering with this. And so here's the truth. Attracting top talent is not about being the biggest or even the most profitable company.

It's about understanding what the talent that you want, wants, and then delivering on that better than anybody else.