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Attracting, selecting, and retaining top talent is a challenge for many businesses. Join long-time executive search professional Scott Peterson, alongside Steve Yakesh, President of Direct Hire & Executive Leadership Search at one of the leading executive search firms, to discuss insights and techniques to assist companies to achieve their best results. If you’re an executive leader looking for advice on hiring the best talent for your company, you’ll want to hear this advice from these industry experts.
Steve Yakesh | President, Direct Hire & Executive Leadership Search
As President of Direct Hire & Executive Search, Steve Yakesh leads Versique’s award-winning permanent placement division with more than 20 years of experience. Additionally, he guides strategy for Versique’s twelve practice areas, including IT, HR, Finance & Accounting, Engineering & Operations, Sales, CPG, Digital Marketing, Executive Retained Search, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Family Owned and Demand Generation.
Scott Peterson | Vice President, Executive Leadership Search
Scott Peterson leads the Retained Executive Search division at Versique as the Senior Practice Director. In his role, Scott fills critically-important senior level positions such as CEO, CFO, CIO, COO. Scott has over 20 years of experience in executive recruiting. Additionally, Scott has also served on the Board of Directors the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire Foundation, Medina Golf and Country Club, as well as several youth sports organizations.
Podcast Transcription
| Speaker_2: | 00:02 | Get ready for your weekly dose of talent strategies and tactics from industry leaders to help you attract, select and retain your top talent. You’re listening to Inside Executive Search with Steve Yakesh and Scott Peterson. |
| Speaker_3: | 00:30 | Hello and Welcome to the Inside Executive Search podcast. My name is Steve Yakesh and this show is for business owners, board members and executives, exploring strategies and tactics to attract, select and retain the very best. If you’re not feeling 100% confident that you have the right plan to recruit the best, keep listening, this podcast will help you get there. That said, I’d like to bring in the ever-talented Mr. Scott Peterson. Thank you very much! Well not many people say that anymore. In the past they did. Just not now. I used to be a lot more talented. All right. Anyways, welcome everybody to the podcast. This is our first podcast in our third segment, which is about retention. So the game plan today is to just give you a quick review of the selection podcasts. So I think we had five episodes. |
| Speaker_3: | 01:28 | Well plus the bonus, the offer one. Yeah. So, we’ve got six of those and that we’ll do a quick review and then also give the listeners a preview of the upcoming four or five, which are all going to be around, retention strategies, tactics, best practices, etc. Sound good? That sounds perfect. All right, well I’ll recap for us. So, we went through the selection process and really to simplify it came down to four main components. One is who should be on the team and what is their role in that? So that’s kind of the first two. The third one is how to evaluate and whether it’s behavioral based questions, cultural questions and then we had a pretty lengthy part about the assessments and the different types and then when just to kind of the pace, how do you keep momentum in the interview process etc. |
| Speaker_3: | 02:28 | We originally ended that series on interview bias, the different types, but then we went plus one based on some listener feedback they wanted to hear about delivering offers, onboarding, counteroffer and that. If any of the listeners are struggling, just go back to our channel and you can kind of isolate each one of those topics when it comes to how to best select the right person. Right. Perfect. Did I do okay? I think yeah, you did fine. I think they should go back and listen to all the episodes though to really get the full impact. All 11. All right. So, I’m going to turn it over to you a little bit here, Scott. |
| Speaker_3: | 03:16 | For a preview on retention, we’ve kind of bucketed them in what we think will be four podcasts, but there’s probably what, seven, eight, nine different topics but we’ll bucket them into four. Maybe another super podcast episode and we’ll go plus one. You never know based on the feedback we get and based on some reflecting after a podcast episode, sometimes we get some bonus thoughts coming through our minds. The super show! All right, I will walk us through some of what we’ll be talking about here in upcoming weeks. |
| Speaker_4: | 03:59 | Yeah, revisit one thing for sure and that’s getting back to our original podcasts, which seems like a year ago. The archives. But so, the job fit, culture fit and career fit. So, if you do those three things well, your odds of retention are higher. So, don’t skip those early episodes if you’re listening today because those really build to getting the retention that we want to talk about. So again, job, culture and career critical to the job are to the retention piece, at least in the early stages. Second one would be onboarding and orientation. How are we going to get this candidate? Whatever position they are. Could be executive, if it’s a CEO, they might be sitting down with the business owner for a period of time. They might be talking to board of directors and board chairman. What’s the plan of getting them up to speed on the business, where they’re at today, where they want to go, challenges, staffing issues, whatever those things are, getting them orientated to the organization |
| Speaker_3: | 05:18 | free as possible. Cool. And then that’s a good segue into the third topic is tools for your executives, right? Yeah. You want to encourage your executives to join peer groups. |
| Speaker_4: | 05:26 | So leadership groups such as Vistage, Allied Executive here in Minneapolis, but anything group that can be that sounding board for your executives. So just think of yourself as a CEO of a company. When you have a question or a concern about something, who do you bounce that off of? All the people that report to you, because then they might say, well, he doesn’t know what he’s doing, or he doesn’t understand what we’re going through. So, to have peer groups that you can ask questions in a free, nonjudgmental way is important for longevity of your candidates as well. |
| Speaker_3: | 06:05 | Cool. We talked about offers, right, and how to present them and how to structure them, all the different components, but how about compensation for retention. What do you mean by that? |
| Speaker_4: | 06:18 | Yeah, so obviously you have negotiated your original compensation package and that’s going to be the first year let’s say, but I would encourage companies and whether that sits with an HR typically probably does or board of directors has a compensation committee typically, they should be reviewing the compensation for the organization, especially at the executive level to make sure that they’re staying competitive, and make sure that total rewards and other things that are maybe nonmonetary. Just recently Target has announced a new paternity and maternity leave and doubling and they’re giving 20 extra days a year for if your kid’s school gets canceled because of a blizzard and you have to stay home or find alternative daycare for them, they’re going to cover those things for 20 days. So those are the kinds of things that companies need to stay up with and learn what their competition is doing. My guess is after Target made that announcement yesterday, some significant corporations are |
| Speaker_3: | 07:21 | I mean if I am another large Fortune 500 in town and I look over to my counterparts across Nicolette Avenue and Target is offering this, maybe I’m going to take a call from a recruiter or go out and visit target’s career page. Right? Yeah. |
| Speaker_4: | 07:43 | And for those that don’t know Nicolette Avenue, that’s the big road in downtown Minneapolis that Target’s headquarters is on. Yeah, exactly. All right. What else are we going to talk about in future podcasts? Yeah. So, another component is how do you continually recognize and reward that executive that you just hired? Certainly, as part of their compensation package, their long-term incentive plan, their bonus, but there’s other things you can do if they have other milestones or gates that they have to accomplish for the company and lead the company through to recognize them. The board of directors can recognize them. It can be monetary or nonmonetary but don’t ever forget these types of positions like to be recognized as well. Yeah, everybody does. |
| Speaker_3: | 08:27 | How about work life balance? It seems like it’s always in the news and people are talking about flex time. |
| Speaker_4: | 08:36 | Yeah, but it’s like the word, it’s like life harmony. I don’t know what we want to call it anymore, but it usually means everybody that isn’t an executive, right. Everyone else gets work life balance or tries to get it from an organization or we just talked about Target doing those things to create that work life balance. I would argue that you need to keep your executives in that space too, because now you can attract some very talented people that might want or need or really liked these extra benefits, total rewards that we talk about today. |
| Speaker_3: | 09:15 | Yeah. Let’s face it. Just because you have a large title doesn’t mean you don’t have a life after work either. You don’t have to work 80 hours a week, right? Yep, exactly. All right, we have two more we’re going to cover, what are those? |
| Speaker_4: | 09:26 | Yeah, so, then how does the person know that they’re performing up to what you expected them to do? So again, if you’re the CEO of a company, you might have a business owner, you might have a chairman of the board. I’m doing some formal check in with you, whether that’s a 30, 60, 90 days, could be a one, three, six, nine, twelve month, making sure that that first year that you have alignment and what you brought them in to do and that’s what they’re able to accomplish. That gets them either back on track or you give them a high five and they stay on that track. It’s just important communication that they’re, receiving feedback, that they’re either doing things right or they need to pivot and try something else. |
| Speaker_3: | 10:16 | Yeah. No, that’s a good point. We’ll get into it in the podcast coming up, but I think everybody talks about high levels of communication, feedback, work, life balance, all these things that we’re previewing for everybody, but the executives get ignored, so I’m excited to go through the next handful of podcasts with you. I think based on that list we’ve got a good four, if not five additional podcasts to cover in the weeks to come. |
| Speaker_4: | 10:50 | Yeah and if there is anything you ever hear on these podcasts that you have questions about or need more clarification, I know we say seek us out on LinkedIn and Versique.com, but we would love to hear from you. If there is anything you would like to hear you ever hear on these podcasts, please let us know. We are open to suggestions. You can contact us through our website, versique.com and LinkedIn. We hope to make these more interactive. |
| Speaker_3: | 11:09 | These are typically 10 minute podcasts, maybe 12 last week was I hear was 19. Taylor, how long was last week’s? 20 minutes. So that one’s a little bit longer, but you know, if you ever want to go in deeper dialogue maybe we kept it too high level and you want to go deeper, like you said, Scott, it would be fun to have people reach out and ask questions. Perfect. Cool. So like Scott said, look us up on versique.com or LinkedIn. Track us down if you’ve got further questions. Subscribe to us on all the podcast channels. If you continue to like what you hear and look forward to dive in deep into retention strategies, tactics, and maybe a guest speaker. Oh, another cliffhanger. All right, everybody, thanks for listening. We will talk to you next week. |
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