Hiring for Growth

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Two existential questions I need to ask here:

What are we here for? 

Why does HR matter?

My guess: To find, hire, and keep great people. Everything we do is in some way based on those fundamental goals. But clearly, we’ve been struggling a bit. Maybe we’re still looking for that magic bullet. Maybe there actually is one:

Hire for growth. 

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that one sure-fire way to succeed in 2023 is to put growth first. But I want to talk about the common sense of it, not the science. We tend to lean into stats with all our might but we’re a wise bunch to begin with. We know more than we know we know. 

So let’s just talk about this. What do I mean by growth? 

I don’t mean business growth. We can take that as a given. I mean an individual’s growth: a person’s ability to develop their skills, understanding, experience, and career. Think about the last time you were at your desk / laptop / PC / mobile work app and felt that amazing sense that you were growing. It’s great, is it not? Or is it way too rare?

Wake up your culture

Actively engaging, attracting, and hiring people who want and most of all need to grow will transform a stale organizational culture — and that’s another must-do for 2023. This isn’t the year to rest on your old ways.

Looking for complex individuals who want and need to learn forces you to abandon a reliance on check-the-box skills as your main criteria. Now you need to discern if a candidate wants to be exposed to change, pressure, and new experiences. Fortunately we’re in an era when we’ve never had more digital hiring tools — more sensitive, more flexible, more scalable.

Work-life-career

Hiring for growth necessitates you focus on how candidates will be in the future. Everything along the hiring journey is viewed as part of a trajectory — hopefully, with your organization a big point on the upward curve. As an employer, hiring for growth and not just present-tense abilities and skills is an enormous plus for your brand. It provides a sense of hope and promise and inclusion.

It also adds a third dimension to the overall work-life dynamic that’s been profoundly missing: a hire’s overall career. We don’t just work and live in the present tense, after all. Let’s stop saying work-life. Let’s call it what it needs to be to keep employees interested in working for us: Work-life-career.

Everyone grows!

Is this an investment solely in people’s potential? Hardly. Every role requires qualifications and skills. But focusing on growth has a powerful impact: it forces your organization to grow too.

As you commit to the growth of the people you bring into your organization, you empower those in your organization to grow as well. Your recruiters learn how to recognize growth in a resume, a candidate, an interview — and peer over the wall of qualifications to see what could come next.

Your managers learn to look for growth on their team — to measure it, to encourage it, to reward it. And when your workforce is infused with new hires ready to grow, the rest of the workforce is challenged to reach a higher bar as well.

Pretty soon everyone is growing. It’s a whole thing.

Four cautions

How could hiring for growth not work?

1. Treating it like the flavor of the month. 

Nothing stymies growth more than insincerity or inconsistency. After feeling like we’ll get the chance to expand, we contract instead when we don’t — and recover by looking for a new employer or role.

2. Overlooking inclusiveness and diversity. 

You’re not actually committing to everyone’s growth — including your own culture’s if you’re not also improving DEI. The correlation between diversity and better decision-making was established back in 2017 — yet we’re still debating it. Time to, er, grow up on this one. 

3. Defining growth too narrowly. 

Don’t just think of what growth means mechanically or based on a set of tasks. If you do, you’ll miss out on great talent whose abilities could really round out your workforce.

4. Not promoting from within. 

It’s so important to make room for your employees to grow by adding them to the talent pool you draw on to fill open positions. If not, you’ll lose them. For women, it’s a vicious cycle the higher up the ladder you go. You lose out not just in great hires, but potential leaders — and mentors for another wave of hires.

Four questions to ask  

Growth isn’t hard to identify in a candidate. Start by asking the right questions.

 1. Talk about a task that made you stretch somehow. How did you tackle it? What did you learn?

2. Talk about an experience receiving some tough feedback. How did you respond to it?

3. Given the chance for more responsibility, what would prevent you from taking it on?

4. What kind of people do you like to work with? 

Four commitments

I’m going to make a prediction: This year won’t blindside us the way past years did. The pandemic isn’t completely over but we do have policies in place to handle it and keep people safe. The economy? Jury’s out for now, though I know a lot of you are concerned (me too). The Great Resignation will continue but we’re learning fast how to offset it with smarter hiring (see above) and better engagement and retention strategies. 

Given that, here are four commitments to people that resonate with me: 

1. Honor employee agency — and trust your employees know what conditions enable them to do their best work.

2. Recognize people’s hard work — and the ideas, time and energy they contribute day to day.

3. Make sure you’re recognizing everyone — and not accidentally leaving anyone out due to unconscious bias or reticent managers or a crazy quarter. All of those are reasons to recognize more people, more often.

4. Commit to training as well as recruiting from within — and shift your hiring mindset to looking at your own people for open roles. The impact on retention may surprise you.

What commitments are you making in terms of hiring for 2023?

Everyone grows. We’re all growing as well: this is a field packed with open-minded, open-hearted, open-to-a-challenge people. So what are your recruiting and talent acquisition plans for the year? 

Let me know in the comments. We thrive on each other’s feedback and ideas.

Finally, a shoutout to the great company I’m in as part of this list of 25 great women influencers in 2022 — a nice way to cap a phenomenal year. Here’s to a great year ahead!  

If you enjoyed this issue of The Buzz. I invite you to check the TalentCulture #WorkTrends Podcast, where I talk with leading HR experts, innovators, and practitioners about key issues and opportunities we’re facing in the modern world of work.

Best,

—MMB