It's all about Talent

In this edition, we dive deeper into how we have built, or at least believe to, an organization that is capable of attracting and retaining the best talent in the market.

Hey, we are Ramón Rodrigáñez Riesco and Andrea Marino , Co-Founders at Nova , the Global Top Talent Network.

Welcome to Talent First, our newsletter where those who believe that talent is the most important resource in the economy get together.

Every week we cover a new topic related to attracting, hiring, developing, and retaining talent, as well as the learnings from our journey building Nova.

Summary:

1. 🔎 What did we learn about building a top talent magnet? We reflect on those decisions that increased our ability to attract and retain top talent. We will share some of the most effective initiatives in increasing our value proposition as an employer. As usual, we hope they will serve as inspiration and input for further discussions.

It’s all about Talent

We have said this many times, this universal truth applies to both our vision and the way we are building Nova into a world-class organization. We live in a world where individuals are highly leveraged, top talent can have an impact that is hundreds of times higher compared to a few decades ago. This is due to technology becoming more accessible than ever, a commodity in most cases. We love how talent has increased in importance because a small team of committed people can challenge global multinationals in ways it was not possible before. This is why we say it out loud, it’s all about talent, today more than ever.

With that in mind, since our journey as founders began, we knew that to impact the world and create the global top talent community of reference we had to be the first to walk the talk and only hire top talent. Those were the days when we started to shape our principles and “Hire and develop only Novas” became one of those. After many years and iterations, today we can proudly say that Nova is an organization with high talent density, where every team member is exceptional, not only professionally, but also from a human perspective, which for us is equally important.

So, how did we manage to attract top talent with a relatively unknown brand, limited perks and benefits, and competing against the best employers?

Invest in what truly matters

The considerations that follow, are partly the results of luck, especially the early wins, and the results of the increased awareness and maturity we developed as founders over time. All of them can be applied in all contexts regardless of company size and all of them don’t require a big budget to achieve. What we learned is that it’s not about adding fancy perks to your value proposition to employees, it’s about understanding what truly matters to them. So let’s start to uncover, what have been the ingredients of our secret sauce on talent attraction and retention.

1. The bigger the challenge, the brighter the talent

Our latest Talent Report, spoke clearly, top talent seeks big challenges more than anything else. Top talent is willing to accept a role with lower financial stability as long as it represents a higher and more interesting challenge to solve (source: Nova Top Talent Report 2023).

In hindsight, we started the talent attraction game in a better position than we initially thought, we were in fact up to a significant challenge, identifying and connecting the world’s most brilliant minds isn’t something you can achieve overnight. Thanks to that, every role at Nova has always been full of complex challenges, those worth solving and that can teach you meaningful lessons. We have seen some of our best people join as interns and develop at lightspeed through hardships and while they might not realize it when they assess themselves, we are impressed to realize how fast top talent develops when faced with problems they’ve never solved before.

3 of our current managers started as interns. It can sometimes be a hurtful process, but it pays off in faster growth and a higher degree of satisfaction.

Making your roles challenging enough so people can thrive and grow is a delicate balance and you want to keep things in the flow zone. However, this is not something you can design scientifically and usually in an early stage you can often fall into the anxiety zone. However, if you are running a team in a large corporation, it’s all about shaping the role in a way that makes people feel excited about solving the challenge and stepping outside of their comfort zone.

2. Build your company on radical transparency and continuous feedback

Transparency is a key value for us as co-founders. If you have read previous editions, you might have noticed how open we are with pretty much all aspects of our business. Transparency is highly overlooked and as organizations grow, it fades away quickly behind layers of politics and gossip. We hate that, and please keep us accountable, if Nova will ever become a company driven by politics it means we have failed as leaders.

Going to the topic, since the very early days, we have invested significant time and effort in communicating properly (check this edition if you want to know more about communication at Nova), and we can be very proud of many things that contributed to make Nova a place where transparency thrives:

1. Share without fear - Every month we comment on our P&L, our cash situation, and any mistakes made. One section in our monthly town hall is dedicated to f**k-ups and lessons learned from them. We encourage people to take the word and share with the entire company what mistakes they have made and what we can all learn from them. It’s quite daunting if you think about it, people tend to hide mistakes until they get normalized and celebrated as leverage to avoid them in the future.
2. Feedback each other constantly and openly - Feedback is such a strong component of our culture that from the very early days, we always made available a written document guiding our people on how to give and receive feedback. That was key to running our periodic formal review session but also to dealing with feedback as well as possible. It’s never easy and it’s in our human nature to instinctively be defensive when receiving feedback, so it’s not enough to read guidelines, as usual, you also need to lead by example. It has happened a few times that we as co-founders would receive constructive feedback during company-wide meetings. We do our best to acknowledge and thank people and don’t debate it before having reflected on it. Not accepting feedback well, has been in some cases a reason strong enough to let people go due to cultural misfit.
3. Make salaries something people don’t need to negotiate - We have invested quite some time in building internal career paths where each seniority has a known salary level. This way, our people know that there is no margin for negotiations and politics, the only thing they can negotiate is whether they are ready to be promoted and take on the higher responsibilities (and salary) that come with it.
4. Ask people how they feel about their work and reflect on the results openly - We launched the Nova LUX during the second year of our journey. The Nova Lux is a simple employee survey built on Typeform, nothing fancy but very insightful. We measure some key indicators and collect qualitative feedback on how our people are feeling at work. The areas we monitor are work-life balance, talent density, feedback culture, clarity on vision and tasks, quality of management, team spirit, and feeling valued. The Nova-Lux has made the difference between day and night (pun intended), before the LUX we could not detect early signs of discontent or ideas on how to make Nova a company able to attract and retain top talent. If you don’t have an Employee survey in place, go do it, now.

3. Build a meritocratic organization

Everybody says, “we are a meritocratic organization”. However, studies show that as organizations grow the risk of rewarding “friends” or people who are closer to the managers increases. It’s natural and we cannot change human nature, however, we can put in place processes that ensure meritocracy thrives and top performers are recognized and rewarded. This is how we believe we have cracked the code at Nova around building a merit-based organization.

1. We establish individual scorecards for every employee regardless of seniority. Our people know what’s the definition of success in their role and what quantitative and qualitative KPIs they will be measured upon at the end of the year.
2. Create a process for managers to be able to score and reflect on their people's performance. At Nova, each employee is scored by their managers and ranked against the rest of the organization to identify top performers. It’s very hard when you employ top talent across the entire company, but in this way, as a manager, you are forced to make tradeoff decisions.
3. Promotions are proposed during 2 windows of opportunity during the year by managers and each case is discussed in a joint meeting where all managers can share their perspective on the person being proposed for the promotion. While we don’t look for a homonymous decision process, we do want managers to challenge each other and compare people in similar roles to better align around the definition of good performance and what criteria and skills unlock a promotion.

4. Build an organization that generates psychological safety

As a startup we have always been under a lot of pressure, which means that the focus is often on performance, reaching targets, and survival. It’s not for everyone as you know, and in that environment, it’s easy to neglect some of the basic things of running a high-functioning team. Teams with high psychological safety report better engagement, reduced turnover rates, and higher productivity (Gallup, 2017) and the good news is that it can be free to achieve, so it doesn’t go with your budget. As co-founders, we have invested a lot of time with our people, not because we must but because we love it. We have tried our best to be approachable leaders, always open to discussing all sorts of ideas and trying our best to be emphatic. However, as early-stage founder time is scarce and it’s easy not to dedicate enough time to people, we regret that we couldn’t do it in any other way.

Learning from the LUX and observations, we finally created the role of the Head of People, a role that our dear Cristina Mateo started just a couple of months ago and has already had a tremendous impact on our organization. Not only she is a passionate psychologist but she has been leading our talent agent team for years accumulating a lot of knowledge about professional development. Cristina offers team members to have 1 optional coaching session per month during which she can support our people with practical advice but also by offering a trusted space where they can share fears, doubts, and more. Cristina, together with the culture we have established has gone a long way in creating a safe organization. Though we are not perfect, we can be proud of what we have reached with the little resources at hand.

As a small company you, most likely, will not have the budget to afford expensive learning and development initiatives. However, we believe that psychological safety is more important in setting the ground for a high-performing team and can be valued a lot by your people. So there are no excuses, make sure you set the infrastructure for your people to feel safe and thrive in your company whatever it will mean for you.

Thanks for reading Talent First. If you liked this issue, don't forget to hit ❤️

We would be grateful if you share it by email or social media with other people who might like it or who might be looking to hire top talent.

Share now