How’s your corporate culture?

A recent meeting with one of the most prolific Head Hunters in Asia has given me renewed insights into the way a lot of large corporates are run He told me that you can ask any reasonable size company’s Executive Officers about their corporate Culture and they will simply give you one of three answers:

One of Success
One of Status Quo
One of Decline

It will always be one of those

My meetings with my Head Hunter Guy are always fascinating as he is so passionate about his industry. He can get quite emotionally charged when it comes to how talent is hired. I asked him who his main competitors are and he told me; there isn’t any other recruiters who have his hit rate to get the top people placed in the right positions for his clients in the time he takes, and for them to be really happy in work and not to leave, but when pushed on the issue of competitors; he told me:

“I suppose the only thorn in my side is HR Departments.

Now HR Departments bless them, come with all the emotional baggage of a marriage, you have to work with them day in and day out, and you cannot tell me that a certain amount of office politics that come with all employees is absent from the good old HR department.
Managing office morale is a hundreds blogs for another day, and when you mix in these kind of feelings with recruitment, it really can hamper progress on a grand scale, especially when emotion gets in the way of finding the very life blood of your business.

If there is one side of business that to me is vital to outsource is recruitment! A decent head hunter will see your business from the outside and not the inside where HR sees it, and will know what is needed to bring fresh ideas and a more dynamic culture to your office to motivate everyone, and he has just the person not only to bring the skill sets to enhance the bottom line, but will also have an insight into the type of character that will fit in and make everyone feel their presence in a positive way.

We all at one time or another, know that kind of person who we can’t wait to come in to work, because their character just lifts everyone, well it’s a head Hunters job not to just find the right skill sets, but to know the types of characters who can change moods and raise morale in any environment.

Now quite often I see ads in the papers for companies and it makes me sigh deeply for them, and the HR who placed these ads are labouring under the misapprehension that the talent they need to come in and turn around the profits and lift everyone in the office is sat at home jobless, miserable and reading the classifieds, oh right that’s the guy for us!
The people who have this kind of game changing talent are not at home, they are working right now at their competitors, they are currently making everyone in their office smile and pushing their profits and turning their corporate culture around to one of success,

HR departments sadly, have no real idea how to get those people, I do!”

The first question I ask Executives when they are just enquiring is my favourite loaded one:

‘How long have you been trying to fill the role?’

I know how damn long they have been trying to hire someone, that’s my job, and it’s so hard not to appear patronising, i want to sneer, because that’s how I feel inside! I want to scream:

‘SIX Months! SIX MONTHS!! Are you kidding me?’

What’s that time delay cost your business? Oh you can’t really tell, but it’s a lot? I know how much it’s cost your business, but you don’t want to hear that right now!

After a little pause; the sucker punch:

So how is your corporate culture?”

To find out what NOT finding the right people is costing your business, and how to find the very best people to lift morale and change your corporate culture around to one of success:

Contact Smith Goldman!