Challenge them and you will win their hearts
We explore the biggest insight of the Top Talent Report 2023 and the science behind it.
Hey, we are Ramón Rodrigáñez and Andrea Marino, 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 resource in the economy get together to learn and discuss attracting, hiring, developing, and retaining talent.
Summary
🔎 The biggest insight of the Top Talent Report (2023) - why challenging work is the most relevant characteristic of a role for top talent.
🌟 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.
💥 The biggest insight of the Top Talent Report 2023
In May 2023, we launched a new edition of the Nova Top Talent Report, which we had not issued in the past 2 years. In this survey, answered by over 1.000 Novas, we asked our members about 3 things:
About their current job
About their ideal job
About their current status (open to jobs or not, impact of the current downturn, etc.)
In our questions about current and past employment, we segmented the assessment of a job into 4 different areas:
Characteristics of the employer: has the company a good reputation? Is it famous for its market success or its fast growth? Does it have an inspiring purpose? Is it known for its high moral standards?
Characteristics of the work environment: Is the company highly transparent? Does it foster meritocracy or diversity? Is the environment creative and friendly?
Characteristics of the role: does it offer a variety of assignments? Are there any international opportunities? Is it challenging? Is it more individual or team-oriented work?
Characteristics of the compensation model: is the base salary competitive? How is the work-life balance? How fast is career growth? Does it offer a good reference for future careers or high commissions and incentives?
Novas were able to choose the top 3 characteristics out of ~8 options across those 4 areas. Results are very interesting and we will discuss many of them in detail in upcoming issues, but today we wanted to focus on the only result which was consistent across geographies, roles, and seniority levels: challenging work is the most relevant characteristic of a role for top talent.
But why? The fact that great people like “challenging” work is something that resonates with us and kind of makes sense, but it’s not that easy to explain.
If you think about it, humans tend to minimize the effort we put into tasks and be as efficient as possible. Actually, most of our technology has been designed with the purpose of lowering the complexity and effort required in accomplishing tasks.
So why then do top talent want to make their lives “more complex” in a challenging job, when they may have the opportunity to earn as much and maybe even have a better work-life balance elsewhere? Why bother with challenges? Wouldn’t it be better to have a variety of assignments to satisfy their curiosity? Or to be able to work internationally?
The answer was not obvious, so we wanted to look for the science behind this key insight, as a better understanding should help us craft jobs that, by being challenging, can attract better talent and retain it for longer.
🔬The science around challenging work
There are 2 reasons we have found that can explain our finding, one more physiological and one more psychological, although both are clearly linked:
The dopamine effect of challenges
The Maslow Pyramid
We will try to explore both to understand if we can make sense of this counter-intuitive finding.
The dopamine effect of challenges
For our brains to perform all the fantastic things they are capable of, they rely on a network of neurons that communicate via molecules known as neurotransmitters. Although there are plenty of them, dopamine is among the most important ones, and it is associated with happiness and pleasure.
You may have read about the perverse effects of social media and “likes” on people, particularly teenagers. They are caused by an addiction to the dopamine our body releases when we get social approval, in this case in the form of likes.
Dopamine is also the reason why we feel pleasure when interacting with people, eating, or having sex. As with most things in life, addiction problems come when excessive use makes us not feel it anymore as much so we need extra doses to maintain its impact.
However, dopamine is responsible for a lot more than just providing pleasure and thus rewarding certain behaviors. It is actually the most abundant neurotransmitter in our brain, and a lack or excess of it is associated with mental illnesses or diseases such as Parkinson.
The main functions of dopamine are:
Pleasure and reward mechanism
Movement coordination
Socializing
Memory and learning
Sleep (together with melatonin)
Mood (together with serotonin)
Pain and nausea
Prolactin regulation
The reason why challenging work is the most appealing to Novas is that, when a job is challenging, you typically learn new things and dopamine opens a communication channel with the hypothalamus in order for you to remember it. In doing so, it also provides you with a feeling of pleasure which rewards this behavior and incentivized you to repeat it again.
It’s the same that happens with sports and games: the more challenging, the more addictive they become. That is why you should always present a job as challenging to top talent if you want to hire them.
However, as it happens with food or social media, too much can be problematic and an addiction to the dopamine effect of challenging work can bring bad consequences. We actually believe it is what creates the addiction to work and the so-called “workaholics”: we bet you haven’t met people addicted to jobs that are not hard.
When we think of a workaholic, we typically picture an entrepreneur, an investment banker, or a consultant working +60h/week, and that is because those roles are typically hard, high-paying white-collar jobs where you constantly need to learn new things. You don’t get blue-collar, low-pay workaholics, and that is because, although those jobs may be as hard or even harder physically and mentally, they are not a challenge that makes you learn new things, and therefore your dopamine is not released and you do not get any pleasure nor reward for your hard work.
I remember a partner at a top-tier consulting firm which was one of the most successful at the Madrid office. He was not there anymore for the money, as he had earned way more than what he would be able to spend in his lifetime. In a casual conversation late one evening he confessed that the main reason he stayed was that he loved the intellectual challenge of helping his clients. Now we know the reason he loved it: he got to learn new things and he was “addicted” to the dopamine effect of the constant challenge.
One may argue there may be other reasons behind top talent working long hours in these types of jobs (greed for instance), but certainly the challenge is one of them and it’s what Novas consistently reported as their most important factor, regardless of country, seniority or role.
The Maslow Pyramid of needs
Although the physiological effect of challenging work is the one we just explained and is due to dopamine, we can also understand it through Maslow’s Pyramid of human needs.
The Maslow pyramid groups our needs as human beings into 5 categories, so that one does not feel the need of one category until the previous one has been fulfilled (or at least does not feel it to the same extent). The five categories are:
Basic physiological needs: we cannot live without food, water, clothes, or shelter. Until we have those needs covered, they are our main and almost sole priority. For centuries, most people have lived worried basically about this initial category of needs.
Safety: once we have what we need to live, we care about surviving as much as possible. The need for safety is wired into our brains so deeply that, in case of danger, nothing else matters.
Belonging: once we have our basic needs covered and we feel safe, human beings need to feel loved and belong to something greater, typically family, friends, and society. That is why, when people feel lonely, they tend to be unhappy and suffer from depression more often regardless of how successful are their professional careers.
Recognition: once we have our basic needs covered and we belong to something greater than us, we want to feel recognized for our value. This is why the Nova badge, like the ones from top universities or famous employers, is so important for top talent: it is a signal that recognizes their effort and ambitions.
Self-fulfillment / Self-actualization: finally, when all the rest has been taken care of, we aim to self-fulfill or self-actualize, which means becoming our best self, achieving our full potential in order to have a positive impact on the world or the people who surround us.
As you can see, our desire to learn and become our best selves is a luxury that most people don’t enjoy. As long as you have basic needs uncovered, as long as you don’t feel safe, as long as you don’t feel loved, and as long as you don’t feel socially recognized, challenging work is not a priority, as some of those more “basic” needs get ahead in your priority list.
However, most highly talented individuals like Novas have their basic needs covered. They typically have good jobs in peaceful countries so that the more basic needs are covered.
Through their families, friends, colleagues, and communities like Nova, they feel they belong to something greater than themselves. Also, the “badges” in their CV, such as the Nova certificate, and the approval from their colleagues make them feel recognized for their value.
And that is why, whenever all of that is covered, top talent seek a job that challenges them and pushes them to their limit in terms of learning and development: because they want to achieve their full potential.
👉The implications for you, founders/managers/HR professionals
There are 3 concrete ways in which we, as founders, managers, or HR professionals should take this:
Understand how challenging are jobs within your organization and decide where you really need top talent and where not, so that you can adapt accordingly. It’s easy to say you want to hire only top talent, but the reality is that some jobs are not intellectually challenging enough for them. Regardless of the compensation, make sure to understand how complex roles are before deciding where you really want the best. Maybe you need to rethink the task split and the roles available at your organization because if you hire average talent for roles that are complex, they will perform poorly (*up to 8x worse than top performed, according to McKinsey), feel stressed, and probably leave. The opposite is also true: we are witnessing more and more Novas, particularly from younger generations, leave high-paying jobs with great conditions simply because they got bored.
Gamify the experience for top talent. Games are awesome at creating challenges and reinforcing learning through dopamine-led reward loops. The more you can bring insights from games into the experience of top talent at your company, the higher your capacity of attracting and retaining top talent. It may seem difficult, and it can actually get as difficult (challenging 😉) as you wish, but you can start by simply breaking your career ladder into smaller steps and setting down concrete goals, challenges, and learning outcomes at each step. For instance, instead of promoting people every 2 years, do it yearly and break the salary raises into smaller increases. This way, you can offer new challenges to your teams and get them promoted more times to reward their accomplishments.
Recognize top talent for its value. Recognition is just below self-actualization in the Maslow Pyramid of needs, and we often see organizations losing on great talent because they did not invest time and effort to make them feel recognized and almost “needed”.
If you have challenges that are attractive for top talent, keep reading and meet some of our members open for a job below.
👀 Novas open for a change
As in every newsletter, 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 HR Managers and Founders can contact them directly and avoid wasting time on spamming candidates who are not ready for a change on LinkedIn.
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Andrea & Ramón
Co-Founders at Nova
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