One size does not fit all: Conveying company culture through recruitment and retention strategies

A good workplace strategy is proactive and accounts for expected changes. With a very fluid labor market, listening to your employees diverse needs and staying on top of workplace trends and understanding how your company is perceived in the market place is crucial to recruitment and retention. Hear from the CEO of The Muse, Kathryn Minshew discuss the interplay between designing a recruitment process that accurately captures your companies culture to avoid shift shock and how to provide tailored benefits based on the key priorities of your workforce.

Transcription:

Kathryn Minshew (00:08):

Good morning. Good morning everyone. I am Kathryn Minshew and I am so excited to be here. I am I guess the second thing that you all are hearing after hopefully getting your coffee, getting a little run through the room next door. So I am I'm very excited to kick off this conference and talk through a couple of the key things that I'm seeing that I am deeply passionate about in the HR talent benefit recruitment and retention space and the title of my talk today. As you can see, one size no longer fits all, so I'll talk a little bit more about what that means. But first of all, I just want to reiterate what Stephanie said and thank everyone for taking this time out of their day, out of their lives during what has been an incredibly challenging period for the last couple of years, the last couple of months.

(00:55)

And I think it's been especially challenging, frankly, for people who work in this industry because not only are we expected to maintain great benefits programs, recruit and nurture and engage our best people, but we've also been asked to step up and become, in some cases spokespeople or advisors on how companies should respond to these major global events from a pandemic government unrest and other issues that employees are increasingly looking for businesses to respond to have opinions on. As Stephanie said, my name is Kathryn Minshew and I always just like to kick off with a very, very quick introduction to who am I, what is the kind of perspective that I bring, the base of work that I speak to. And as Stephanie said, over the last 10 years I have been living, breathing and working in the HR and talent industry. And very particularly I've been focused on building a business called The Muse, which exists because I became fascinated probably 15 years ago with this question of what does it mean to find the right fit job company and career?

(02:02)

How can an individual understand what matters most to them and then architect their professional path to meet as many of their unique and specific needs as possible? And what are the benefits for employers that understand this growing desire for more personalized career approach among the workforce? What are the benefits for companies that think about creating an environment that attracts, engages and retains the people that are looking for what they have to offer? Not some sort of generic one size fits all definition of a universal workforce. So over the last 10 years the muse has served actually over 75 million people annually the majority of them, Gen Z and millennial candidates, but really serving all ages. And we've worked with hundreds of companies, seen inside thousands of recruitment processes and called together a number of lessons and insights about what's changing, what are some of the trends that we might wanna be paying attention to, and ultimately what can we all do about it in our companies and in our day to days.

(03:03)

So first of all as I said, we are, I think living through this massive redefinition of what does it even mean to work in HR and talent? How we think about the function is changing, the expectations put on many of us in our jobs are changing. It feels sometimes to a lot of the people I talk to, literally everything about what it means to be good at HR and talent as both an individual, as a practitioner, and as a company is changing beneath our feet. And this is true when you look at the data at some of the big trends, I obviously don't have to tell anyone in this room about not only the great resignation and the massive shift in the balance for the balance of power between talent and employers, but also the fact that for much of the last six, seven months we've been living through the highest imbalance between job openings and job seekers that we have ever seen since the Bureau of Labor started recording these statistics.

(04:00)

That said, this is also in a time when employers are being asked to increasingly step up and adjust their offerings to compete for great people. It's not only anymore about compensation, but it's about what are the benefits packages that you offer? Do you have flexibility, hybrid or remote work, reduced work days? What are the paths for internal mobility? What is the process of someone not only joining, sorry, what is the process of someone not only joining your company but moving through various processes and kind of internal needs and situations? And on top of that, I think there's been a really interesting shift in what a lot of people are looking for from their jobs. So this chart on the bottom here, this is from Gartner this year, 2022, and they ask people how has the pandemic made you change your opinion on things like contributing to society, rethinking the place that work should have in your life, changing your expectations towards your employer, making you question the purpose of your day-to-day job?

(05:06)

And I think you can see that more and more people are saying, yes, the last two years have really made me rethink the role of work in my life. And in some ways I think that's not surprising, right? We're all very familiar with the common trope in media. You've probably seen it a hundred times in television movies where a main character has a near death experience, they survive a car crash, they wake up from a coma and all of a sudden they go, oh my gosh, I realize what's truly important and I need to go out and make changes in my life. That is to some extent what a lot of us have lived through over the past two years, especially the first couple of months of covid where there was a real sense that the world as we knew it might not exist in the same way any longer.

(05:50)

And so all of a sudden you have a population that is looking for more that is asking bigger questions and that is expecting employers to respond. And then on top of that, you have the rise of two generations, millennial and Gen Z, which make up an increasingly larger percentage of the workforce and which are thinking about the way that they live their values in a very differentiated way. Now this trend, by the way, is not limited to specific age groups, but we are seeing it more prevalent among some of the younger generations. And you see these statistics like 83% of Gen Z and millennial want brands to align with them on values. 60% would leave a job over a clash of values, and 85% believe businesses should take action on specific social issues, which again puts increasing pressures on employers, on HR to think about in what ways do we want to respond and engage and how do we balance the need to serve a really diverse set of employees and set of customers with the fact many of our people do expect us to take stands to offer benefits that align with the values that they hold or that we profess.

(07:02)

And this is obviously putting a tremendous amount of pressure on the function. And then finally, I think that it's also really interesting to note that particularly in hiring but also in a lot of other areas of HR and talent, the way we measure success and the way that we measure, for example, a recruitment process is changing as well. When I got into this industry in 2011, we were just seeing the end of the pay per posting model, $200 30 days, you get what you get. That was supplanted by cost per click, which was then supplanted by cost per applicant, which was then supplanted by cost per hire, all of which I think are really good things because a lot of clicks doesn't necessarily matter if you don't get great applicants and a lot of great applicants or applicants in general shouldn't necessarily matter if you're not making great hires.

(07:50)

But just as the industry has evolved over the last several years, we're also seeing now a lot of people wake up and say, well, what's the point of making the cheapest fastest hire if we don't have the right person who's successful in our organization, who stays, who's retained? And while there's still a lot of debate about what is that next metric, how do we measure the success of a talent function of a talent acquisition and hiring function going forward? I think it's very clear that the industry is going to keep evolving. And not only that, but candidates are demanding it. We recently did a survey on the muse and found among many interesting statistics, this fascinating one, which was that 80% of Gen Z and millennial respondents said it was perfectly acceptable to leave a new job in under six months if it didn't meet expectations.

(08:36)

Now this is very, very different. When I started work almost 15 years ago, we were told kind of scared within an inch of our life that if you quit this job in under two years, it will be a black mark on your resume that you will be lucky to ever recover from. That was the old paradigm that was an environment in which a lot of us operated in. But that paradigm is no longer. And in some ways I think it's a good thing because it means that it is forcing employers to be more direct and more transparent upfront around what is it truly mean to work here? What is it like to work here? What do we offer and what sort of people are going to be happy and successful and what sort of people perhaps are not going to be the right fit for our organizations?

(09:21)

So what do we need to understand about some of these changes that are drastically kind of affecting the way that talent engages with our businesses, the way we as HR leaders and individuals and managers want to engage with our people? I think there are three key things to understand and then we'll talk a little bit about what are we actually going to do about it. So I'm going to talk more about each of these three, but just to lay them out quickly, the first is that reputation is co-created. It is not defined, it is not fully controllable, although you can participate in it. There's also unfortunately no longer such a thing as what everyone wants. One size fits all workplace. And then finally, I'm seeing that successful companies are practicing what I call the art of alignment. And I'll talk a little bit about what that is.

(10:09)

So first, reputation is co-created. Think many of the people in this room have probably been thinking about this for several years, but I do always like to start here because I still speak to businesses and employer branding leaders and talent individuals who think that they can control their brand, that they can define their employer brand, they can put something up on a wall, they can write something on an online profile of their career site and that's how they'll be perceived. But really your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room. And your employer brand is really the sum total of your employee's experiences. It's affected by your customer's experiences by the way that people in your organization might make comments to friends or post something on social media. The more you understand that you can participate in your brand, you can try and guide your brand, you can be part of the bigger conversation around your employer brand and your company reputation.

(11:04)

The more successful you can be at engaging. But understanding that it is not something anymore that companies can control. There's too much information, too many conversations and too much frankly, interest from the outside in what your people have to say, not necessarily what your team is trying to communicate. Secondly sometimes people ask, what do I mean by the end of the one size fits all workplace? And what I mean is that as someone who runs a major career site where a lot of Gen Z and millennial candidates are looking for jobs, everybody wants to know what's the one thing that if I do this thing or I offer this benefit or I solve this problem, all the best talent will want to come work for me. And the fact is, there are key themes that every business needs to focus on flexibility, like diversity, equity, and inclusion.

(11:53)

But there's no one answer in the data that every candidate wants because part of what we're seeing is the personalization of the workplace is the fact that if you think about the perhaps Netflix queue that you get if you go home or back to your hotel room tonight and open up Netflix or the recommendations you might get in your favorite app, those are personalized to you to what you have indicated and interest in to who you are, to what you like to consume, to how you're navigating the world. And employees who have that experience in so many different areas of their life are starting to take some of those same themes into the workplace and say, I don't necessarily want the exact same thing as everyone else. I want to tell you as my employer what I care about, what I want and I want to work at a place that's somewhat responsive.

(12:45)

Now, some of that is individual employers being responsive to the needs of their employees, and some of that is what I actually, I prefer the term the great reshuffle to the great resignation because most of the people who were resigning weren't just throwing up their hands and throwing a party and saying, I quit. I leave the workforce forever. If that was you, like congratulations. But most of us are still working, we are still employed. We are just for people who left or resigned, they're employed somewhere else. And in many cases what they were aiming to do with that shift, whether or not it was kind of successfully achieved, what they were aiming to do was leave an environment that wasn't meeting a need in some way and move to an environment that was meeting a need or that was more aligned with what they were looking for.

(13:27)

These here are a list of some of the filters that users on the muse used to search for jobs. They might say, I wanna look for sales positions with fertility benefits, or I'd like to see a front end engineering role with maternity leave at a veteran founded and led company. The types of things that people are looking for are varied, but the fact that not everyone is looking for the same thing is assured. Now, for some people, by the way, this is a very overwhelming message. It would be much more comforting if I just said, offer these three things, check this box, and you know, won't have to worry about this again. But I think for others, there's an element of freedom in this because what this end of the one size fits all workplace means is that companies have a variety of different ways to compete and to attract great people.

(14:15)

And it's not necessarily about being everything to everyone, but about really identifying who is your ideal employee target market, who should you be attracting and do they know that and can you bring them in? And I love dating as an analogy. If anyone thinks of another one, let me know. But I've been leaning into dating for years and I actually think it works really well because we love to see these media what do you call it? Sort of media stories on the 50 best places to work in Austin. I think that that is as ridiculous as a media article that says these are the 50 best people to marry in Austin. What does that even mean? The best place to work is, in my opinion, not some sort of arbitrary rankable criteria, but it's really like what is the best place to work for you?

(15:04)

And in dating, you can't be everything to everyone. You have to understand who you are, who you're not. You need to put your real self out there because otherwise you have a lot of very disappointing first dates. And I think it's important and people start to realize that if you overpromise and underdeliver actually wasting everybody's time, I think that if companies thought about recruiting their people through a similar lens and also managing their existing employee bases through a similar lens of more transparency, more authenticity and more awareness, that for most of us, it's not whether a workplace is a five star or a one star. It's whether it meets the core needs that we have and it aligns with the way that we want work to get done. And again, just like there are so many different people and most people have a match, I'm a believer that there are actually a lot of different types of ways to be a great company and what works for one company and one set of employees may not work for another.

(16:01)

And you really get in trouble when people don't recognize that or join expecting something that's very, very different than what they found. We call this phenomenon shift shock. 72% of people have started a new job and then realized with surprise or regret that it's not as all as they expected. And it tends to lead to lower engagement, higher quit rate, and a fast array of other problems that can be avoided. We find when you're a bit more transparent and straightforward up front at its core, all of these different elements can coalesce into what I call the art of alignment. Essentially the ability or the process of uncovering who are we as an organization, who am I as a leader, as a manager, as an employer, and then how can I communicate that authentically so people that want what I'm offering can opt in and people that are not interested can go find a better match somewhere else.

(16:55)

So how do you actually do that? There are four important strategies or steps of the process that I typically recommend people take if they're looking to approach engaging with their current and prospective employees in a much more aligned, authentic way. Those are listening, planning, communicating, and then iterating. So very quickly as we get to the close of the speech one listening, I actually think that this is by far the most important part because unless you are in a very, very small team where you intimately know all of your coworkers and their experiences, it can be very hard to understand what your organization is like for people in different parts. Do you know what it's like to be an accountant on your team, a salesperson, a data scientist a compliance officer? Do you understand the differences in work experience company culture, how your kind of corporate day-to-day shows up for people in a wide variety of teams and the bigger the company, the harder it is to do this well?

(17:57)

So I always love to suggest that when you can start from a place of asking questions I think the best information on your employee's experience is uncovered through a variety of in-person and anonymous forms. Sometimes people will say something in a survey that they won't say directly, but there's also a lot of new nuance and context in small focus groups of employees that you can uncover and explore that are hard to do in some sort of large platform. But I think it's also important as you're going on perhaps a listening tour to understand the employee experience and really to get a more granular sense of where you are today so you can start to both communicate that externally but also chart the course to how you want to be as an employer, as a company, I think it's important to make sure that it is comfortable and safe for people to tell you some of the harder things than just the praise.

(18:52)

By the way, just because someone doesn't tell you that something's tough doesn't mean they don't experience it as tough. Doesn't mean they don't talk to their colleagues about it being tough. So the only thing you typically gain from creating an environment where people are afraid to tell you some of the challenges of working at your company is your own blissful ignorance. It doesn't tend to solve any other problems. So the more that you can really communicate an openness to the tough feedback as well as the positive feedback, the more likely you are to start from a base of accurate information. And I think it's very important as well to pay attention to the extent that you can to the differing experiences of various demographics, populations, et cetera. You may have a workplace that is great for people who are single, but very challenging for people who are parents or pick any one of a number of other criteria.

(19:40)

So the more that you can understand and really plan for capturing a diverse array of voices, the more likely you are to get a great sense of how your employees are currently experiencing and perceiving your organization. People always ask me for potential questions. So I've got actually two slides of potential questions. I also just love these as illustrative because I think it's so interesting to really create channels for your team to ask and answer questions. What makes our team, our department different from other places that you might have done this job in the past? How would you describe our communication style collectively? Some businesses, by the way, pride themselves on being direct. No one gets their feelings hurt. We just go straight to the point that works fantastically For some people, it can also be incredibly stressful and challenging for others. And the more that you just understand, acknowledge, and communicate how work gets done, what are the communication style, the less likely you are to have unmet expectations or frustrations.

(20:40)

Moving on again, how does work get done? What are norms and strategies for distributed work? What are some of the expectations we have around how people interact? Do we facilitate the right kind of virtual or in-person events, et cetera? What are you needing or what do you want that you're not getting? How has the employee company supported or perhaps not done as good of job as we could have in supporting? By the way, I love asking dual positive and negative questions. Something that might sound like, what is one of the things that you think we should be proudest of about our culture here and what is one of the things that you think we should be aware of and working on about our culture here? Cause if you give someone a chance to tell you something positive, they will be more likely to be honest about the negative as well without feeling like they're just being a complainer or that they're going to be judged for answering your questions.

(21:31)

Once you have this kind of level of insight into the employee experience, I think it's important to take a really kind of good look at where are we succeeding, where are we below the bar, and what are the things that we want to focus on changing? I have found that employees understand no workplace is perfect, no workplace is frankly even close to perfect. Every group of humans has its own challenges. However, the workplaces that are I think most effective at this exercise will take all of the feedback. They will be unflinching about the listening and the processing, and then they will say, here are two things, three things that we want to change, that we want to be different or better at. And then they will actually communicate that to both their existing team members as well as perspective employees. This is a really important step because again I think people are much more understanding of coming with you on the journey if they understand where you're trying to go and they feel that there's been honesty in that path, in that communication.

(22:35)

And again, for future team members, especially in an environment where we're seeing more employees feel comfortable quitting in short periods of time, if they don't feel like the experience that they're expecting is the one they have, the more that you can bring this sort of transparency upfront, the better. Again, I have found that a lot of employees will willingly sign on to companies that have challenges that they're working on as long as they feel like the company knows about the challenge and is committed to making it better. A lot of people get excited about being part of a team that is making something better, that is improving something. And I think because we're in such a time of change with what the workplace means to all of us, there's a lot of enthusiasm for people to help push that forward and to help be part of businesses that are being better.

(23:20)

And very finally you have to iterate. This is not unfortunately or fortunately a one and done process because our teams are changing. The broader context in which we do work is changing. And so I would recommend, depending on the pace of change in your organization, the resources available that the more you can think about understanding your strengths and weaknesses and revising what you communicate as frequently as feels reasonable for you. But at a minimum, every six to 18 months the better. And I will just in closing, leave you with my kind of last few words, which is, I think in many sectors of the world but particularly of work and workplace, we are moving towards more of a focus on authenticity. Probably all heard the statement that many people of all ages frankly want to bring their whole selves to work. And that businesses that understand and accept and participate in that authenticity and in the art of alignment are likely to be more successful.

(24:26)

And as a very small note from my own personal experience, as some of you may notice, I have slightly pink hair. I've wanted to dye my hair pink for the last 10 years. But I thought to myself, Katherine, like you run a company that's all about professionalism. Also, when I started my business was in my mid twenties. I was a very young founder and ceo and I thought I couldn't afford to not being taken seriously. And yet with the pandemic with summer 2020 and all of the upheaval, I realized life is short and maybe I should just do it now. It took me two years. I actually did this two weeks ago. I had a little bit of anxiety, by the way, about showing up at a professional conference with pink hair. I was like, I really hope nobody regrets asking me to be the speaker.

(25:11)

But you know what, again, I think we are seeing this massive change and it is being driven by so many trends across the workforce, but employees are saying, this is who I am. This is how I'm living my life. And I want to find a business that will align, that will accept, that will welcome and match. And I think businesses that are successful are saying, we are collections of humans at the end of the day. And by kind of leading from a place of authenticity, of that alignment and accepting, celebrating the diversity of our teams, but also acknowledging who we are and who we are not, we will all be more successful together. So thank you so much. I hope you have a fantastic time at the rest of the conference. And thank you again for letting me be with you for a little bit.