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Talent Recruitment: Polishing Your Diamonds
publication date: Jan 25, 2014
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author/source: Conor Kenny, Guest Columnist @ HospitalityEducators.com
Columnist Conor Kenny from Conor Kenny and Associateslooks closely at Talent Recruitment. Are you really keeping your best people?
It’s easy to hit a sinking ship. It’s easy to find fault and easy to trouble spot. Good leaders do the opposite; they unearth diamonds in places nobody else looked. They polish them and then they sparkle. Grooming your future shining stars is all about helping them to rise. The last few years have created a culture of ‘cut, cut, cut’ that was necessary but to grow a business, you need to fertilise and nurture your talent. If you do, you will have a strong culture that will attract good people. If you don’t, you will reap the rewards of a barren, dry landscape. It’s a cliché to say “People are my best asset” Perhaps, perhaps not. Your employees hold your future in their hands. That alone needs to inform your talent recruitment strategy. Talent Recruitment: Polishing Your DiamondsThe Perfect Employee? It’s an illusion to chase the perfect employee. They don’t exist; they are human and humans have flaws. It’s clever to recruit talent and know the failings but a few quick lessons might guide your thinking.
Today, more than ever, loyalty is a precious currency. Like trust, you don’t bestow loyalty, you earn it. Remember, followers imitate leaders and a ruthless captain may end up falling on his own sword. Loyalty does not mean money; it goes far deeper than that. It’s about opportunity, culture, a future and values. How are you on all of the above? Do you deserve my loyalty? Better still, have you earned it? The Desire to Learn Good people have one thing in common that shines above everything else. They want to learn. If you want to recruit, hold on to and then grow your best asset, you have to invest in their learning, their development and their growth. It’s no coincidence that the thirstiest learners I work with are our Management Development Programme students. Better still, the fact that they are there reveals lots about their leader, their organisation and their values. If there is no room to grow and learn, your diamond will seek polishing elsewhere. Finally, empty promises of a bright future somewhere over the rainbow are fatal. As an industry, the challenge is always to under promise and over deliver. We buy that and we believe it. Wouldn’t it be a really good idea to apply that to your rising stars too?
By Conor Kenny |
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