And Carrie On

I had the opportunity to travel this week to Dallas for the CASE IV Senior Leader experience. The topic was an in-depth conversation about talent management and discussed ways we could better recruit and retain talent in our shops.

As a recent senior leader, I was a little nervous the conversation might be too advanced for me (spoiler, that was totally my imposter syndrome). The conversation was rich, meaningful, and offered several great takeaways. I also felt that I added value to it as well.

Here are three takeaways that I found particularly meaningful.

Creative Recruitment Strategies

Recruiting great people is hard, especially in a world of stagnant salaries. That means we have to work to make the pool of candidates larger. We discussed several tips to get job postings in front of people. Some of the suggestions involved personal asks to our networks, building a list of talent for future roles (like a search firm), removing some required job experience to focus more on transferable skills, using local professional organizations to find those outside of the higher education profession, and (my personal favorite) engaging our university colleges to share job positions with program graduates who might be a fit.

In the Interview

We also discussed ways to make sure the final candidates, especially those interviewing for leadership roles, could get a sense of the intangibles about the university and the team. We discussed strategies to curate moments of impact for candidates, and some of the strategies we discussed involved bringing an outside perspective into the interview (from a community member or other division leader), taking the candidate on a tour of either campus or the local community, having lunch in the cafeteria/student union, and providing unstructured time with the team to assess fit and to give the candidate a chance to candidly inquire about the role and expectations.

Retention

The final major section we discussed focused on retention. We framed the conversation knowing that sometimes money and titles can’t be changed, so what were other ways to provide support. We talked specific strategies to have conversations with each staff member to understand how they defined growth and understand what they might be they be looking for. We also talked about how to regularly clarify future desires to ensure we capitalize on opportunities that align with their interests. Additionally, we talked about the overall culture and ways to assess how we could do better as an organization. One strategy was using regular or micro surveys to elicit feedback from the team. A broad sense is that it was feasible to approach one to two topics yearly.

Closing Thoughts

I found the time together to discuss these challenges with other leaders quite rich and impactful. It’s review season on campus, and this is timely because the conversation will help me do a better job of structuring what is important to the team and what things they are looking for in future growth.

I’d love to hear ideas you have for recruiting great talent, how to structure and interview, and ways to retain great leaders.

Retaining