Your Best Employees might Be on their Way Out 👀
More than ever before, top talent are open to new opportunities. Learn how to reduce the chances of them leaving your team by applying some of Nova's learnings.
Welcome back to Talent First. In this edition, we will dive into a question that often keeps managers wondering: Are any of my top performers willing to leave? How can I retain them? You might not like what you’ll read below, but the harsh reality is that we live in a very competitive talent arena. Don’t worry, as usual, we also share some reflections and insights of how we do it at Nova, that will help you take action.
Hey, we are Ramón Rodrigáñez Riesco and Andrea Marino, Co-Founders at Nova, the Global Top Talent Network.
Welcome to our latest release of 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. In this newsletter, we also share insights, failures, and lessons learned hoping that they can serve as an inspiration for entrepreneurs, managers, and our members.
In the previous editions we have uncovered the most important trait to engage top talent at your company (discover it here) and also addressed differences in career preferences across genders (learn more about here).
As the end of the year approaches, humans tend to recount the year and make checks and balances, often leading to existential reflections such as “Am I working at the right company? Am I leaving the life I want?”. Therefore, this edition focuses on the job status of top talent across sectors to provide you with unique insights from the talent report as well as some tools you can use to deal with talent retention and attraction.
Summary
🔎 What are the sectors where we could expect a higher turnover during 2024? - We share some valuable insights from the Nova Talent Report 2023 this time focusing on how top talent across industries approach the job market.
🌟 Attract the most talented candidates to your vacancies Now you can apply to post jobs for free through Nova, and receive top-quality applications.
A GENERATIONAL SHIFT, LIFE-LONG CAREERS ARE OVER
If you have missed our previous edition, let us bring you up to date. In May 2023, we surveyed over 1,000 members of the Nova network, graduates and professionals all pre-vetted based on their merits, asking them to share their preferences in three important areas of their career:
Current job: what do they value the most about their current employer and role? What could be improved?
Their ideal job: what would they value the most when looking for their next job and employer?
Current job status: openness to new opportunities, impact of the current downturn, etc.
This edition will focus on the latter, breaking it down per industry hoping to help you and your HR team when defining your attraction and retention priorities for 2024.
We all know that there are sectors and industries where turnover is more endemic and there is very little managers and organizations can do about it. However, by downloading the talent report and following the next editions we will share tools and reflections on how you can both prolong as much as possible the tenure of your top performers and get ready to replace them. Spoiler, as you will read below, you can impact the tenure more than you’d like to think.
We don’t know if it’s good or bad news for you, but today Millenials’ average tenure is 2.8 years and researchers already foresee that the Gen Z will rotate even faster, likely decreasing the current 2.3 years. So brace yourself for what’s coming, the talent arena will get even more interesting, to say the least.
“I’M OPEN TO LISTEN” IS THE NEW NORM
Let’s spend a few seconds analyzing together the current market snapshot of the talent job status before moving into recommendations.
Regardless of job satisfaction, top talent's default mode is that they are open to consider and listen to great opportunities. More than 1 every 2 employees, on average, would take a conversation with another employer or a headhunter to listen to potential new great opportunities.
This modus operandi has been accelerated by the recent economic cycles and that is now a market standard that contributes to making the talent war even fiercer.
This trend doesn’t vary significantly across sectors and therefore we can safely assume that is not related to the dynamics and lifestyle of certain sectors but rather a universal truth. However…
MARKETING LEADS THE WAY ON JOB HUNTING, FINANCE FOLLOWS CLOSELY
When focusing on talent who are proactively looking for a new Job, the gold medal goes to Marketing professionals, who are almost 40% more likely to make a job switch, given their appetite for a new job, than the reported average. They are followed very closely by professionals in the broad finance sectors where we can find a very similar tendency in both Finance, Risk & Insurance, and Investment Banking, PE & VC.
If you have a talent responsibility in one of those sectors, you can therefore expect to see a strong dynamism representing both a threat for your people looking elsewhere and also for you to be active in the attraction game to take advantage of this.
WHAT DO A LAWYER, A PRODUCT MANAGER, AND A SOFTWARE DEVELOPER HAVE IN COMMON?
It’s not the start of a funny joke, these three categories, apparently unrelated, are placing themselves at the bottom when it comes to proactively looking for a job, while of course keeping their ears open for potential great opportunities.
If you are wondering why and if as a manager or HR professional, you have something to do with this ranking, the answer is yes, you do.
In fact, now that we know who are the most and least active, it’s interesting to cross-reference this data with the reported job satisfaction of our members… 🥁 Tadaaa! There is a very clear correlation.
The Job Status clearly reflects the job satisfaction expressed by members in those industries.
We could dive into a debate around why that is, is it the vocational and curiosity-based nature of those careers? Is it the salary? However, we will leave the report in full to you to find out more about the root causes, you can download the full version here.
What we can draw as an overall conclusion, thus far in the article, is that as much as we wish to think that Gen Y and Z are a new type of bread when it comes to the way they navigate their careers, you cannot wash your hands and deny any responsibilities on how long they stay at your company. If you can increase their overall satisfaction, their attitude toward looking proactively for a new job decreases.
You cannot of course avoid very compelling and attractive opportunities reaching their horizon, but in case they leave for a better opportunity (new challenging role, higher compensation, new learning opportunity) and you have done all you could, you can only cheer for them and be happy for their advancement. It also means that you, as a manager and employer, were able to accelerate their development.
What now? Let’s see what are the levers you can play to increase job satisfaction and increase your employees’ tenure.
NOW TO THE MOST IMPORTANT PART, WHAT CAN YOU DO?
As a manager, your most important responsibility is to make sure your people perform at their best while also feeling valued and appreciated for what they do. This is far from easy especially for the first-time managers out there. The following are recommendations you can bring with you to increase your team's sense of belonging, commitment, and overall performance.
We give recommendations also looking at what matters the most to top talent when choosing their ideal job, something we addressed in the previous edition. Let’s start.
1. CELEBRATE VICTORIES AND BUILD A CULTURE OF STRENGTHS APPRECIATION
At Nova, since the very first month, we have run a monthly Town Hall meeting, this is probably the favorite meeting of the entire company (maybe matched by our legendary product demos that have always a completely random theme from Harry Potter to Halloween, but this is a story for another time that maybe Cristian, our Head of Product, can tell you more about).
In this meeting, we spend 10 minutes celebrating the champions of the month (500 minutes considering the people attending), highlighting the principles they have lived by, and recognizing their extraordinary results. We also acknowledge some of the strengths we have witnessed during the month. Why do we do that?
It’s of course intuitively beneficial to acknowledge people's successes but there is also a lot of science showing that building a culture where feedback on strengths is recurrent has a huge positive effect on employees’ performance. It’s also interesting to notice that the feedback that emphasizes strength is the most powerful type of feedback you can give.
So the question to you is, how good are you at celebrating your people's strengths and turning this into a pillar of your culture? Have you ever run a team workshop to create that norm among your people?
2. TRANSPARENCY ON COMPENSATION AND CAREER IS KEY
We have seen in earlier articles, that a fast career progression and a high compensation are key elements for top talent when choosing their ideal role. We have learned this the hard way while building Nova. One of our 12 principles is that we “Hire and Develop only Novas” meaning those individuals who pass the Nova selection process, the top 3% of talent.
Having built what Reed Hastings defines as “high talent density” in its recommended book “No Rules, Rules”, it’s one of the things we are most proud of as co-founders, however, it’s also something very hard to maintain and requires constant attention.
During the second year, many of the people who were leaving Nova to move to their next job mentioned in their exit interviews a lack of clear career progression.
It was an obvious reflection but caught us off-guard. We are a startup, so: why should we plan for careers with a 5-10 years horizon? Let’s figure it out over time! Our approach to this topic, still makes sense in our minds, when you build a fast-growing company you tend to focus on urgent matters, and the question “What will my people do in 3 years?” was a problem for the future. We got this completely wrong.
When we heard this recurring feedback, we went to the drawing board and sketched out a career path for each one of our departments. Kudos to Williams, our CTO, because he was the first, and well ahead of time, to build a clear career path with a clear salary for the tech team and we all took inspiration from him. It’s not because we keep Williams’ opinion in high regard (not only for that), it was because our tech team has experienced a much lower rotation compared to the industry average, so we knew we could learn something from that.
Today, at Nova, you can access a Notion page and see all department's career paths and the associated salary for each role.
In hindsight, it was one very important move for several reasons:
We created transparency around salaries. Every person knows how much their colleagues earn based on their role titles. No room for negotiation both when you arrive at Nova and when you get promoted. If you want a higher salary, both the manager and the employee need to be confident with taking on extra responsibilities and ownership.
Top performers can project themselves into the future. They now know that there is a place for them and that they can keep learning and testing new limits as they grow. They can see in the job descriptions of those roles what tasks they stop doing and what responsibilities they unlock.
Employees can explore autonomously other departments’ careers. If they get to that existential crisis “Is this the right role”?, and trust us, young talent might have one of those moments every 6 months, they can see what Nova as a company can offer if they apply to join another department. What skills they will learn, what challenges they will face, etc.
So our question to you is, how well do your people know how far their performance and effort can bring them during a certain amount of time? Is that information communicated recurrently and accessible? If not, don’t wait as you will risk losing some of your top employees.
3. MEASURE QUARTERLY, FEEDBACK INSTANTLY
12 months into the game, we tested a simple employee monitoring tool, the Nova-Lux. It started as a monthly anonymous survey and then became quarterly. Despite taking only 5 minutes, we realized was more insightful to track progress every quarter. The Nova-Lux is a simple set of questions that never change (at the very bottom you can read those questions if you want to tweak them and implement them at your company).
When we introduced it and collected the results, we asked ourselves: “Why did we wait so long before launching this?” It was an eye-opener. It was like going to the doctor to take a body scan. We could see areas of urgency, monitor why and when people felt the most stressed, and also take immediate actions to mitigate the risks (i.e. company retreats, topics to address in the monthly town hall, points for the managers to keep extra attention to, etc.).
Do you have already in place a monitoring tool to check how is your team doing from an engagement perspective? If not, go on Typeform (NOW) and build it, it takes very little and the return is very high.
The importance of a feedback culture is paramount too. Once you walk the transparency line, do it fully both on process and on people.
Since the very early days, we have always incentivized immediate feedback. When something is working well or not, achievements and failures, we want to acknowledge them on the spot. It’s not uncommon that we as co-founders get challenged and corrected during large meetings (and we love it).
Besides this ongoing operating system, we also take the time every quarter to run more formal feedback sessions. Managers and their people take the time to have more structured feedback. It takes significant time if you do the math, however, we do believe it’s helping us build a world-class organization when it comes to attracting and retaining top talent. In fact, “leaders who support self-improvement” score second as one of the most important traits top talent look for in their ideal work environment.
Now, over to you, how are you making sure that all people feel entitled to give feedback and challenge each other's opinions? Do you have a formal system in place to make this part of your routines?
If you are left wondering, if Nova is now the perfect place for top talent to work the answer is not yet… we wish it would be this easy. However, we did start comparing ourselves to the best global employers and there are a few achievements we can be proud of. At the same time, we have learned many more hard lessons and many others will happen as we move forward. We can promise though one thing, we will keep sharing those in this newsletter so if you don’t want to miss out, subscribe and make sure you follow our journey as we build the global top talent network.
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