Welcome to Talent First

In our first issue, we introduce the Talent First newsletter, discuss the Talent War post "Great Resignation" and showcase the first Novas open for a change

---

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

Welcome to Talent First, our monthly newsletter where those who believe that talent is the most important and scarce resource in the economy get together to learn about attracting, hiring, developing, and retaining talent.

---

Summary

1. Welcome to Talent First - Why are we writting this newsletter, how we chose the name and what can you expect.

2. Talent War post “Great Resignation” - How to attract and retain Millenial and Gen Z top talent in the next 12 months when up to 70% plan to change jobs.

3. Novas open for a change - The high potentials of Nova who are now open to a career change but don't disclose it elsewhere. You can contact them directly for free.

---

1️⃣ Why Talent First?

We (Andrea and Ramón) designed the principles of Nova when we launched in January 2020. One of them (#5) is Impact, which we describe as: “Positive impact is part of our value chain. We are always willing to go one step further to help people who need us, both inside and outside the Nova community.”

We believe that a cool way to have such an impact is by sharing our learnings of building with the world. Since both of us have loved writing for many years (Andrea keeps a diary since he was a teenager), it from the beginning we have tried to share these learnings in writing, in the form of articles or posts.

We started by writing website blog posts and Medium articles during the pandemic, but this 1-off efforts where too broad in the topics they covered and did not create any “editorial” line and did not have enough coherence to deliver significant impact.

That’s why, at the end of 2022, we reflected on the way we were sharing insights and trying to create that impact we strive for. We decided to:

1. Shift our writing efforts to a Substack newsletter which could be more cohesive and easy to follow. We read newsletters such as Dealflow, Suma Positiva, Startup Riders, Not Boring or No Solo Suerte and we enjoy them way more than 1-off blog posts.

2. Focus on a specific target segment whom we believe we can help.

3. Add value that is as tangible as possible, not just insights and learnings.

After a lot of reflection, we came back to a core belief of ours (with which many people may disagree) to find our topic and target audience. We believe that, since the tech revolution of late XXth century, talent is the most scarce and valuable resource on Earth.

This belief has somehow been part of our pitch deck since we launched. We found this slide of late 2019 which explains it quite well:

Thus, we decided to concentrate on the Talent space, as:

• It is the industry where we spend most of our awake time and we are constaly gathering insights and having access to thought leaders in the space

• We have not found major tools, communities or newsletters out there which can help with one of the biggest challenge for any founder or manager in a company: dealing with talent.

This newsletter will therefore be focused on helping founders, managers and HR teams with the challenging yet highly rewarding task of attracting, hiring, developing and retaining talent.

On top of sharing learning and insights from ourselves and great people in the space, we also wanted to have an impact by helping concretely this target audience with one of its biggest challenges: hiring top talent.

In the current Talent War, top talent is more and more demanded, which makes them typically passive on massive platforms like LinkedIn (i.e. top talent does not apply proactively to jobs as they get many requests and is hard to know if they are open for a change at a point in time).

The way we have decided to provide readers with concrete help it is by sharing the anonymized profiles of those Novas (i.e. top talented individuals, prevetted for their merit, who are part of our community), who are today open for a job.

Therefore, through our newsletter, you will receive the top talent ready for a career change directly on your inbox.

With this belief, this target group and this unique value proposition combining talent insights with introductions to the top talent available on the market, the name, Talent First, was an easy choice.

Let’s get into the content for this first issue.

---

2️⃣ The Talent War post Great Resignation

Despite "the great resignation" going into full force during 2021 and 2022, 70% of Millennials and Gen Z are still planning to change jobs within the next 12 months according to a recent study conducted by LinkedIn and CensusWide.

This means that employers of all kinds need to be prepared to manage a shaky work environment. Employers are now constantly under pressure not only on attracting fresh top talent to the organization but also increasing retention over time.

This new talent arena requires employers to go beyond just defining a nice Employee Value Proposition (EVP) and launch occasional "look good" campaigns with fancy hashtags (i.e. #ILoveMyJob) and ask themselves what makes them authentic, what are their strengths and weaknesses and incorporate those in all touch points with candidates and employees. In the following lines, we provide you with some reflections and insights on how to maximize the effectiveness of your talent attraction and retention strategies.

The Talent War is just getting started.

1. Know your Talent Audience

The first step in leveraging your employer brand is understanding who you are trying to reach. The Millennial and Gen Z generations have different expectations when it comes to their workplace than previous generations, so employers need to consider this when crafting a strategy for retaining top talent.

Millennials and Gen Z demand flexibility, transparency, work-life balance, professional development opportunities, and competitive compensation packages. At Nova, we are constantly monitoring our members' career preferences to anticipate trends and support our partners in their attraction challenges. The ones below are some of the preferences extracted from our annual survey, we hope they can give you some guidance and insights.

What does top talent look for?

Data from Nova’s member survey (2021)

Role Characteristics

1. Challenging work

2. Flexible working conditions

3. Variety of assignments

Salary and Advancement

1. Competitive base salary

2. Leadership Opportunities

3. High future earnings

People and Culture

1. Leaders who support personal development

2. Recognizing performance

3. A friendly work environment

Company Reputation and Image

1. Inspiring leadership

2. Market success

3. Attractive and exciting products and services

2. Communicate with authenticity

On the attraction side, don’t be tempted to formulate an EVP that aligns exactly with what matters to your target audience, it’s important to be authentic. What you communicate has to match what people will find once inside the door, authenticity is more important than perfection, so acknowledge your weaknesses, they are also part of your unique identity and make you more credible.

On the retention side, keep your employees engaged by investing in team activities or by offering learning and development opportunities. Recent statistics show that companies with engaged employees earn up to 2.5 times more income than competitors whose employees have a low engagement level. What is more, employees with a high engagement level are 87% less likely to leave a company than employees with a low engagement level.

“employees with a high engagement level are 87% less likely to leave a company”

Among your employees, try to identify those that contribute to fostering a healthy company culture and give them the necessary resources to keep doing so. There is no better way to build a great culture. At Nova, we are very lucky to have 3 or 4 key “culture-builders” on the team.

3. Let only the right people in

An effective recruitment process is key in ensuring that you hire the right people who fit into your company culture and foster an environment where the top talent wants to stay and grow long-term.

Recruiting should focus on finding candidates that match your values. To this purpose, designing a selection process that tests all applicants on all dimensions allows you to detect the best-fitting candidates in a holistic way as opposed to a traditional funnel approach where you end up rejecting potentially great candidates based on very limited and specific information (you can read more about the importance of designing a holistic selection process and how it improves accuracy by 45% compared to traditional processes here).

The summary

Bringing it all together, building and leveraging an authentic employer brand, is key to retaining top talent in today’s environment. It requires you as an employer or HR manager to understand what motivates them, create a positive workplace culture where they feel valued, respected, and appreciated, invest in employee engagement initiatives, and finally develop an effective recruitment process so the right candidates are hired.

Doing all of these things can significantly increase your chances of attracting and keeping key players within your organization long term. It may seem daunting at first but with some time investment upfront you can ensure that you remain ahead of the competition.

---

3️⃣ Novas open for a change

And now, we want to introduce you to +50 Novas (i.e. top talented, pre-vetted individuals) who are passively looking for new job opportunities. You can reach out to them with your open vacancies for free!

PS: At Nova, our mission is to become the Talent Agents of the most talented people in Business and Tech. We have created a merit-based access community of+18.000 pre-vetted, high-potential individuals who trust us to help them achieve their full potential through networking, development, and career acceleration opportunities.

Every month, we share the anonymized profiles of Novas who are now open for a change so that Founders, Manager and HR Teams can contact them directly and avoid the time wasted on chasing candidates who are not ready for a change on LinkedIn.

---

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.

—

Andrea & Ramón
Co-Founders at Nova