Mark Galvan - Attracting and Retaining High Performing Talent, Part 1 (#80)

This episode of the Maximize Business Value Podcast is the first of a two-part series and it features host Tom Bronson and guest Mark Galvan, Managing Partner of ProForce. In this first episode, Tom and Mark lay the groundwork for Attracting and Retaining High Performing Talent, and the next episode will focus on implementation. Employer Branding, Online Reputation as an Employer and differentiating Talent Recruiting and Talent Attraction are just a few of the topics of the episode. Tune in to learn how the value of your business can be improved!

Mark Galvan is the Managing Partner of ProForce, which helps companies build an online reputation that makes them look attractive as an employer. The goal is to help small to mid-sized businesses find and choose the best applicants for a desired job. They are passionate about accelerating the growth of your organization by empowering your team to Attract the Right High-Performing Talent in your industry - Anytime, Anywhere!

Tom Bronson is the founder and President of Mastery Partners, a company that helps business owners maximize business value, design exit strategy, and transition their business on their terms. Mastery utilizes proven techniques and strategies that dramatically improve business value that was developed during Tom’s career 100 business transactions as either a business buyer or seller. As a business owner himself, he has been in your situation a hundred times, and he knows what it takes to craft the right strategy. Bronson is passionate about helping business owners and has the experience to do it. Want to chat more or think Tom can help you?  Reach out at tom@masterypartners.com or check out his book, Maximize Business Value, Begin with The Exit in Mind (2020).

Mastery Partners, where our mission is to equip business owners to Maximize Business Value so they can transition their business on their terms.  Our mission was born from the lessons we’ve learned from over 100 business transactions, which fuels our desire to share our experiences and wisdom so you can succeed.

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Tom Bronson is a serial entrepreneur and business owner. He is currently the founder and President of Mastery Partners, Mastery Mergers & Acquisitions, and the Business Transition Summit. All three companies empower business owners to maximize business value and serve business owners in different capacities to help them achieve their dream exit. As a business owner, Tom has been in your situation a hundred times and knows what it takes to craft the right strategy. Bronson is passionate about helping business owners and has the experience to do it. Tom has two books to help business owners on their journey to a dream exit: "Maximize Business Value Playbook," (2023), and "Maximize Business Value, Begin with the EXIT in Mind," (2020). Both are available on Amazon.
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Transcript

Announcer (5s):

The maximize business value podcast. This podcast is brought to you by mastery partners, where our mission is to equip business owners, to maximize business value so they can transition their business on their terms. Our mission was born from the lessons we've learned from over 100 business transactions, which fuels our desire to share our experiences and wisdom. So you can succeed. Now, here's your host, the CEO of mastery partners. Tom Bronson.

Tom Bronson (35s):

Hi everyone. This is Tom Bronson and welcome to maximize business value of podcast for business owners who are passionate about building long-term sustainable value in their businesses. So today we're starting a short two-part series with mark Galvan. He's the managing partner of pro force, a multifaceted business that develops strategies to attract and retain high performing talent. A topic that is very close to most business owners right now, I first met mark when he presented much of what you're going to learn in this short series to business navigators, the servant leadership organization that you hear me talk about so much when I heard Mark's message, I just knew that he had to be a guest on this podcast, so he could share his knowledge with our audience now, because this is going to be a lot of ground to cover.

Tom Bronson (1m 30s):

We're breaking this up into a mini series of two episodes. So today we're going to kind of lay some of the groundwork and then next week we're going to get into more of the implementation. So in this episode, we're going there to cover these topics, employer branding, your online reputation as an employer, and the difference between talent recruiting and talent attraction. I'm very excited to hear that. So welcome to maximize business value. Mark, tell us about pro force.

Mark Galvan (2m 5s):

Yeah, thanks, Tom. Really appreciate the opportunity to be here. Pro force is based in Dallas, Texas, but we serve companies all across the United States. It's a virtual delivery model and we've got everything that we need to do to be able to serve and support businesses anywhere. The company focuses almost entirely on helping organizations build a online reputation that makes them look attractive as an employer in, in this industry, we call it the employer brand and it's absolutely critical for being able to move from recruiting talent, to what we call a talent attraction model.

Mark Galvan (2m 46s):

So we also provide recruiting support where it's needed for clients, but the real focus and value proposition is helping our clients transform their online reputation as an employer of choice.

Tom Bronson (2m 60s):

That that is so wonderful. And I think that these are probably terms that people are may not be familiar with, right. And, you know, talent attraction versus talent recruiting. Cause we all talk about recruiting. So I'm really excited to kind of unpack a little bit of this today, but before we get there, let's set the stage and give us a little bit about your background and why you started pro force.

Mark Galvan (3m 24s):

Well, this goes back years because as an operations manager, my background was leading operations, leading teams. I was with Accenture for nine years and I had a team of 250 people in north America. And I was always dependent upon HR for supplying me resources for the team. And I was always frustrated that somebody would send me a candidate for a job. And all I would get was one candidate. I wanted a choice. I wanted to think that I was being able to choose the best of a litter if you will. And that never happened. And so as I move forward in my career and started working with small to midsize companies in the area of consulting, outsourcing HR and talent, I decided that somebody needed to focus on this idea of bringing the best people into the organization and creating an environment where businesses could attract people.

Mark Galvan (4m 21s):

That way we have the choice of the best person, not just hiring somebody because we have to check off the box.

Tom Bronson (4m 29s):

I love that. It's it is. I just got back from a conference where I was a speaker in Orlando. And of course I hear locally that, you know, talent, recruitment, talent retention is a hot topic, but it's everywhere right now. So this is a giant opportunity for folks to really learn how to change their strategies and really attract the right kinds of people. So let's dive into the deep end. We're not going to wait in today, mark. We're just going to dive right into the deep end. We're hearing more and more about employer branding and you, and you gave us that term in the set-up as it relates to talent problems and recruiting issues.

Tom Bronson (5m 14s):

So what is employer branding?

Mark Galvan (5m 18s):

Yeah, typically when we think of branding, we think of the marketing team and the website and the public perception of the business. And for most companies, that's the consumer brand, the target audiences. Typically whoever's buying the products and services. That's the consumer brand. The audience is completely different. Those are customers or clients, but if the employer brand has a very different audience, it's your target candidate pool, your future employees, the employer brand is the public's perception of your organization as an employer. And that's different from your talent brand, which is the public's of your organization's talent.

Mark Galvan (6m 1s):

W we all think of companies that have amazing people. That's the brand they have as their talent. And then the culture is different as well, largely determined by leadership. So there's a culture brand that is different from the others. And the thing that attracts candidates to a business is a very compelling, authentic employer brand, which is different from all of the above.

Tom Bronson (6m 26s):

You know, you're absolutely right. When we think about branding, I really in my mind goes to, you know, Coca-Cola and the, you know, the brand of the products, the brand of the services. But as I, as I think about what you're saying here, employer branding, you know, there are some big companies that do a fairly decent job of this. You know, Southwest airlines comes to mind, you know, based here in Dallas, Virgin companies, you know, under Richard Branson, he does a lot about that kind of thing. But, but this is something that, that even small employers should be paying attention to. So why should business owners even care about, let's say I've got a small shop. I have 25 employees, 50 employees. Why should I even care about employer branding?

Mark Galvan (7m 10s):

So when we look at any organization, an enterprise architect would view the business in terms of its different dimensions. For example, people processed technology, information, compliance, materials, facilities, all of these dimensions make up the enterprise stack, but the single most important element to that business model is the people later because the people make decisions over all of the other elements of the business. So the one most important predictor of future success is the quality of talent that gets brought into the organization because they affect everything else, all the decisions.

Mark Galvan (7m 52s):

So we can look at the quality of people and forecast what the future is going to look like for that organization, just because of that. So if a business is really committed to growing their organization, they've got to be able to focus on bringing in the very best people for their operation.

Tom Bronson (8m 11s):

That is a mag. I want to be sure. I wrote that down most important gauge for future success is the ability to attach and retain talent. I'm paraphrasing there, but that is absolutely brilliant. I mean, w w how did you say it,

Mark Galvan (8m 26s):

Th the, the best predictor of future success is the quality of the talent businesses able to attract.

Tom Bronson (8m 35s):

Wow, that's boy. That is so true. Right? We think about our products and services. We think about, we all know that we need to have people. And when employers tell us, you know, their most important asset is their people. Sometimes they don't really treat it that way. We think of our products as sometimes our most important assets, but, but you're in order to have sustainable success, I never thought about, you know, the, the ability to attract and retain good talent and, and have good people is the, is the best litmus test for making sure that you can guarantee longterm sustained success. That's that's we can just stop right there.

Tom Bronson (9m 18s):

So is there a way to recognize when a company's recruiting or talent acquisition function is struggling?

Mark Galvan (9m 26s):

Yeah. Typically there's a bunch of symptoms. Sometimes they are measured as part of the existing scorecard or metrics of an organization. For example, the time to fill positions is extended or excessive cost to fill jobs, the increasing salaries in order to be able to attract people. A lot of times we see organizations throwing additional bonuses. I've, I've heard of huge bonuses recently to just get people into jobs. Then what we also see sometimes is an indicator is lower quality of talent. People being brought in just to fill the job, not necessarily high quality or high performing people, candidate engagement is another indicator.

Mark Galvan (10m 10s):

I talked to somebody this week, a president of a company where they have two thirds of employees that ghost the, the business after they get started, they just don't show up again. How do you deal with that? Those are, these are signs and symptoms. That there's a problem, but I want to suggest that in a lot of mature organizations, you can have a mature operating model for talent acquisition, HR recruiting. It's all the scorecard looks green because you're filling positions. They're timely. They, they you've got your cost to fill metrics that are green, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're bringing in the right people because we're frequently not measuring the quality of the talent or the future contributions they make.

Mark Galvan (10m 58s):

Instead, that's a pain point that operations feels down the road. So these are all symptoms.

Tom Bronson (11m 6s):

The I'd be willing to bet that a lot of small businesses don't pay attention to time to fill positions and, you know, perhaps success rates when they're hiring people. I, because I think when you think about a metric of time to fill a position, it's time to fill it with the right person. How many times do employers go out and fill a position to check a box? And three months down the road, six months down the road, you know, 12 months down the road, it's not the right person. It's not the right fit. And you wind up separating whether it's voluntary or involuntary on the employee's part. And then you have to go fill that position again.

Tom Bronson (11m 47s):

And so to me, that's still filling that same position, right? Because it wasn't filled right the first time. I mean, do you see that as a, as a challenge that that employers many times are willing to settle to fill a position?

Mark Galvan (12m 3s):

Yeah, absolutely. It becomes an operational pain point and a lot of leaders will say, look, anybody is better than nobody because we're now beginning to feel problems or consequences of these issues. For example, quality problems, safety issues, poor customer satisfaction, time to serve SLA all start to get impacted based on vacancies or what we sometimes refer to as the cost of poor talent.

Tom Bronson (12m 37s):

That's I want to hear about that. You, you mentioned that, and I'm going to ask about that. And just one second, anybody is better than nobody. I just think that that is a common misperception of business owners, you know, oh, we just need to fill it and get it going because the wrong person in a position can do more damage than having then waiting a little bit longer and still kind of fighting through the storm of trying to get back to the type of the level of service that you want to provide. But it's better to have that pain on the front end than having the pain of dealing with filling the position with the wrong person.

Tom Bronson (13m 20s):

Honestly, that's, you know, my opinion and I've, I've experienced that so many times. So, so do you calculate all that stuff when you, when you talk about kind of the cost of poor talent, you know, and, and what that does, what does, what does the cost of poor talent mean to you?

Mark Galvan (13m 36s):

Okay, so what you're talking about now is typically within the framework of what we call the business case, because typically there's an operational leader or a CIO or CFO or VP of operations or HR, that's responsible for authorizing additional labor or backfilling jobs. So they've got to be fully aware of why we're going down this path, why we're hiring more people or why we're back-filling jobs. But just because we make the business case financially doesn't necessarily mean that we're capturing the full consequences of this cost of poor talent.

Mark Galvan (14m 18s):

For, for example, I would argue that the, the biggest cost is the impact on leadership. For a, for example, if a line manager hires the wrong person, they're not ramping up properly, they just don't get it. Or maybe they don't want it. They are not engaged. And there's mistakes or training is incomplete. Who covers either it's another person or it's a supervisor. We see all the time supervisors jumping in and either putting out fires. And then that causes the manager to have to jump in and handle supervisory jaws, because they're being distracted by the fires at the lower level.

Mark Galvan (14m 58s):

And it just rolls up that cost to the business impacts leadership. And it's, it's terrible because their potential to achieve their objectives is now compromised. It creates high stress. They're distracted because they're fixing other people's problems. And they're prevented from making higher level contributions. They can't focus on the bigger opportunities. And that is orders of magnitude greater than these operational things that we can easily measure.

Tom Bronson (15m 32s):

W it's it's I see that all the time, the people hire folks to fill positions, and then they wind up doing the work themselves. Anyway, and to me, that's a symptom of, of poor documentation. You know, you don't have your processes documented, things like that. It's one thing to attract the right person, but it's another thing to get them trained and fully operational. Right. And, and I I'm sure that this resonates with our audience. Can it get any worse than that?

Mark Galvan (16m 3s):

Yeah. These are consequences that continue. If they, if they play themselves out, you can lose revenue. I mean, I'm sure there's somebody listening right now who has lost a contract because they missed SLA or they had something go sideways that was unrecoverable. I've seen contracts completely destroyed with clients because there was a data privacy breach. I mean, just stupid, silly things that happen because of people, process technology, whatever is not being executed properly. But again, it goes back to that enterprise stack. Who's making the decisions, it's the people,

Tom Bronson (16m 43s):

Right? The people closest to the problem. Right.

Mark Galvan (16m 47s):

Always.

Tom Bronson (16m 48s):

Yeah. Yeah. I just we've, we've really talked about in a prior podcast, you know, the, the need for business owners to really develop processes and part of that onboarding process, as you know, not only did the people not do their jobs, but they need to be onboarded properly. If you attract the right people, let's say that, that for whatever reason, you've got a great employer brand and you attract the right people, but on the other side of the door, if it doesn't work, then, then you're cutting off your nose in spite of your face. Right? So I just, I it's a frustrating,

Mark Galvan (17m 30s):

Yeah. If you let me interject real quick, I think, well, what you're describing is a pervasive issue and it is aligned with what I call the talent supply chain. And that gives us a picture of the overall end-to-end process of what it takes to identify attract higher, and then deploy, engage and retain somebody. If you think about that entire end to end process, that talent supply chain, there's a bunch of individuals responsible for the work. You have a sourcer and a recruiter and HR and the hiring supervisor and hiring authority, the manager and the people that are involved in training and orientation.

Mark Galvan (18m 11s):

And just all of these stakeholders, the, the idea that the candidates experience is going to be consistent all the way through. And they're going to be treated the same way is, is unrealistic because there's no single value stream owner or process owner over that entire end-to-end value stream.

Tom Bronson (18m 32s):

Yeah, I totally agree. And that's a big challenge. So before we take a quick break, these are a lot of issues that, that we've brought up here. Why are most organizations not addressing these issues?

Mark Galvan (18m 49s):

Well, I would say the first one is blind spots. For example, you've got HR that typically is responsible for compliance and human resources related activities, not talent acquisition. So they point the finger over to talent acquisition, talent acquisition says, yeah, this is not really my problem. It's somebody else's problem. Branding is marketing's problem. And marketing says, no, we don't deal with things on the internet. We supply information to the web development team and the web development team says, no, this really isn't our issue. We don't develop content. We just put up and hang up things that are given to us.

Mark Galvan (19m 31s):

You really need to talk to somebody in the CEO's office. And the CEO says, no, I don't handle that in our part of the organization, we delegate that entirely to HR. It's like, hello, there's no owner. And everyone has their own blind spots. Nobody can see the bigger picture. And another is just status quo. We've always done things this way and trying to get, especially the larger the organization, the worst it is, get them moving, making an adjustment is terrible. And then siloed teams. I mean, all of these issues impact why we're going to have it, recognize the problem and take an action to do something about it.

Mark Galvan (20m 12s):

We see that happening only in the very largest organizations, but I would tell you honestly, that small to midsize companies need this stuff the most, because a bad hiring decision disproportionately impacts them.

Tom Bronson (20m 25s):

Oh yeah. Yeah. If you think about it, let's say you have 10 employees and you need to hire one, that's 10% of your workforce, right? If you make a bad hire, it's 10% of your business that you're dealing with, you know, bigger companies, 50 people, and you need to hire three, it's a high percentage of challenge in big companies. They perhaps can cover that over. Right. So, and you talked about silos, you know, it's, it's funny, the, in big organizations, you'll wind up with these silos, right? You know, sales and marketing and operations and HR and finance and all of this and small companies, typically when they start out, there's no such things, there's no boundaries, right.

Tom Bronson (21m 8s):

Everybody's kind of helping out and doing things. It doesn't take long for these silos to build. And when they build them, they're building them out of stone.

Mark Galvan (21m 19s):

Yeah. Th there's a, there's an author by the name of Eliahu gold rat who wrote a book called the goal. And in that book, he teaches a concept called local Optima. And that means that an organization is optimizing a element exclusive of its enterprise impact. So that's where it goes back to talent. Acquisition could be all green. We've hired all of our positions speed to fill cost to bill. All of our metrics are green. However, we hired the wrong people. And so we have all these red impacts, you know, operational metrics that are on fire in other places because of the damage we sent downstream.

Mark Galvan (22m 2s):

So local Optima is, is not, it's an evidence of silos, but it's a terrible enterprise level impact.

Tom Bronson (22m 9s):

I'm going to put a link. That's one of my favorite books. The goal when my company, one of my companies was acquired by a big publicly traded company. They had a project every year that they called leadership week. That was sort of like, you know, fraternity hazing, a little bit for corporate structure. I'm kidding. It's it was, they brought in all of the people who had been elevated into leadership into a, a resort and the Florida keys. And you start with just a small group of people and you're one-on-one with the CEO and the COO. And you know, you BA two days, one day with the CEO one day with a COO or vice versa.

Tom Bronson (22m 52s):

And then that second day they bring in another group of people. And now you're teaching as the new leader, you're teaching the new group that came in while the CEO and COO are sitting there. But, but one of the things I loved about that program is they sent us four books in advance about a month before. And they said, do not come unless you've read this book or these books. And the goal was one of them. And it's been one of my favorites ever since. I know you mentioned that when, when you were speaking at business navigators, I love it so much. In fact, you've reminded me. I it's over here on my shelf, the I'm going to put a link to that book on our website so that folks can go in and get that book. If you haven't read it.

Tom Bronson (23m 33s):

It's a great, great book. Look, we need to take a break. I'm starting to get, I'm starting to get winded mark. So we're talking with mark Galvan. Let's take a quick break. We'll be back in 30 seconds.

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Tom Bronson (24m 39s):

We're back with mark Galvan, managing partner of pro force. And we're talking about things that business owners need to be thinking about to attract and retain the very best talent kind of before the break, we talked about this book now, how do you pronounce it? I think it's, is it Elion new gold rat? Yeah. Yeah. So a great book. We're going to put a link to this on our website. I had to grab it off my shelf to show you what it looked like before that. So let's, let's keep rolling here. You talk a lot about talent attraction. All right. Most business owners talk about recruiting, right? Let's go recruit. We need to recruit some people hire people.

Tom Bronson (25m 21s):

What is the difference between talent recruiting and talent attraction?

Mark Galvan (25m 28s):

Okay. So this is a huge paradigm difference because in a recruiting model, but typically we're pulling, trying to convince people to come in. Sometimes in the industry it's referred to as the post and prey recruiting method, where you post a job and, you know, pray, somebody applies. So you can try to convince them to come on board. So you're, you're, you're screening based on minimum qualifications, but ultimately you're wasting an enormous amount of time on unqualified people. And everybody in that space knows you get 99 people for, you know, unqualified for every one person that gets hired great candidates, typically disengage from the process.

Mark Galvan (26m 10s):

That's a key marker for a recruiting model because they're not looking for a job. Great candidates are looking for an opportunity and recruiting models are typically not a VIP recruiting. They, they don't look like executive head hunting. They they're, they're a cattle call. If you will, recruiting is not focused on the, the bigger picture of the business. They're focused on filling a job. So they're, they're marketing a job opportunity. Attracting talent is completely different. It looks more like executive head hunting, where you're treating everybody like a VIP. You have messaging that creates high levels of engagement.

Mark Galvan (26m 50s):

There is a very high-performing people that are attracted to what you're doing. Candidates are attracted because of both cultural fit, as well as alignment with career goals. There's a sensitivity to the width of the candidate, that this is a huge marker between the two. The <inaudible> is the what's in it for me, you know, the radio station, everybody listens to w I, I F M if the candidate has a wisdom that the company has a completely different with them, the what's in it for me, for the business is what are you going to do for me? But the candidate tasking the same thing. And when you change that paradigm and you start communicating, here's what our employee value proposition is to our target candidate.

Mark Galvan (27m 37s):

People want to come in and all of a sudden, you're, you're being able to pick from the best people, because you're attracting high quality and higher volume. It's a completely different paradigm.

Tom Bronson (27m 51s):

I love that post and pray. I have a description of most people's marketing efforts to go out and find new customers. And I think it matches up, well, I call it the shotgun approach. It's where you stand out in a field and you shoot a shotgun in the air, and you hope that a BB lands, you know, in the right spot. Right? And, and that's the same thing that most people do when they're recruiting. They post and pray. I've been, I've been a victim of that because I've not done the processes myself as well, where we are going to go hire folks. You know, as soon as you post on one of these job boards, of course not today, it's, it's harder to attract people today, but, but a few years ago during I remember, especially, you know, kind of 2009, 2010, when our unemployment rate was so high, you know, you go post something and in 24 hours you got 300 resumes.

Tom Bronson (28m 42s):

How do you even, how do you even deal with that? Right?

Mark Galvan (28m 46s):

That's a separate conversation. But you know, as you're talking about these two differences, these two paradigms of recruiting talent versus attracting talent, I'd like to call attention to one other thing. That is a key differentiator. And that is in a recruiting model. You typically have a recruiting organization, a team, talent acquisition, they're running the numbers. They're executing a process. Everything is very mechanical. And even the conversations, if you listened to their conversations with candidates, they're, they're interrogating the candidate to try to scream them out because they're trying to get the numbers because they're being measured on speed to fill time, to fill, et cetera.

Mark Galvan (29m 28s):

That is a highly mechanical approach in a talent attraction model. You have recruiting that is vested in the vision mission culture of the company. They believe in the leadership in their communication sends the message, but they believe in what they're saying. And that again is attractive to the right people. When you have a candidate that says, wow, I love what you're saying. Wow, you really love the company you work for while you're really passionate about what you're doing. I would love to work for a company like that. When you hear that from a candidate, you know, you're looking at a talent attraction model, it's another differentiator and it's not common.

Tom Bronson (30m 11s):

And so I would say probably, I dunno, I dunno if you have stats to support this 99% of businesses are in a talent recruitment versus what you're describing as talent attraction with Julia. I mean, it's a high percentage, right?

Mark Galvan (30m 25s):

Yeah. I would, I would give a little more Liberty to than the numbers. I think probably 10 to 15% of businesses honestly have started to implement these employer, branding talent, attraction strategies. And that's where we've learned what works and what doesn't for about eight years now, we've been refining our approach to helping clients, but we haven't pioneered everything ourselves. A lot of it has been learning from the global corporations. I had an opportunity to talk with somebody from Toyota about a year ago, that was responsible for their north American employer branding. They had millions of dollars and a full-time team of nine people to install this employer, branding strategy just for north America.

Mark Galvan (31m 12s):

Well, how do you extrapolate those best practices to a small to mid-size company that's competing for the same talent pool. That's what we do. And we've learned from what they've already done

Tom Bronson (31m 26s):

Well, so are their way. I mean, this is a whole different strategy and it's going to require a business owners and HR professionals to kind of back up and retool their whole strategy. Is there information that really kind of supports that there's a case for doing this to switching to a talent attraction model from a talent recruitment model?

Mark Galvan (31m 47s):

Yeah, absolutely matter of fact, we have a download that I can make available. That is kind of like the business case for why this is so critical, but the stats are really compelling. If you look at like indeed and Glassdoor and all the big head hunting companies, they publish numbers on sometimes on an annual basis. And what we know today is somewhere between 84 and 88% of job seekers say that the employer reputation impacts whether or not they would want to apply something like 60, 70% of employees. Won't take a job with a company that has an online negative reputation, and they go look the same way.

Mark Galvan (32m 29s):

We go looking for online support for picking a restaurant or a place to visit, or a theater or something that we're buying as a consumer candidates do the same thing today. They go online and they're looking for social proof that the company is authentic. It's got a good culture, it's got good leadership. And if they find anything negative, the most judicious employees, the top performing people are the ones that exercise the most due diligence. They completely disengaged. 92% of employees say in these stats that they would consider leaving their job.

Mark Galvan (33m 10s):

If they could go work for a company with a better reputation. So, I mean, the numbers seem to suggest that if you're the company, that's got the great reputation and you're managing that properly, you can steal anybody you want to.

Tom Bronson (33m 24s):

Yep. Yep. You're absolutely right. So how can someone tell if their organization needs to improve their employer brand?

Mark Galvan (33m 35s):

Well, one of the things that either

Tom Bronson (33m 36s):

Way on that, on the stat you gave us, you said about 15, 10 or 15% are doing it. There's 85% of businesses then that are not paying good attention to their employer brand. I would argue it might be higher than that, but Hey, you're the, you're the expert.

Mark Galvan (33m 50s):

Well, and those would be almost a hundred percent squarely in the small to midsize space.

Tom Bronson (33m 59s):

Can you tell if you need to improve this?

Mark Galvan (34m 2s):

Well, I can tell, for example, if somebody got on a, you know, a short call with me or one of our team members, we would very quickly go out and look at who they are online. And we would basically be wearing the hat of if we're a candidate, what would we be looking for? Well, we would go to their website. Okay. But you know, all that content has been approved by HR and legal. So it doesn't have a lot of social proof value, but we'll look at their career portal. So if you don't have a careers page with a robust portal that supports your communication to candidates, then you know, there's a first big mistake.

Mark Galvan (34m 45s):

Another thing that we would look at is w w what is, what is the employee population saying about their own company? So if you go to Glassdoor and indeed, and these organizations that provide a place for not just current employees, but also former employees, and what a lot of people don't realize is candidates that interview, but never get hired. They're given an opportunity to go voice their opinion about the company on these platforms. So the, the most striking thing is that if you go to one of these platforms where there's employee comments, there's frequently a button that says was this helpful.

Mark Galvan (35m 27s):

And what you find is that the negative comments have the most clicks. In other words, the people that are reviewing this content, probably future, considering your company for a job, they're clicking on the negative comments as the ones that are the most helpful it's striking. So you can go out and look at that yourself for your own business. I mean, in, in forty-five minutes to an hour, we can very, very quickly look at all these data points. And there's a few others and determine if an organization's got problems that could be the source for why they're not attracting people, why they're not getting quality people, why they're not hitting their numbers, why they have all these other symptoms and problems.

Tom Bronson (36m 12s):

Retailers and restaurants are always paying attention to their online reputation on places like Yelp, you know, and, and other review sites. But a lot of business owners may not know about like glass door right now. That's where people can go and post reviews. If they've worked for the company or interviewed with the company and they have opportunity to do that, I would suggest for everybody listening to this podcast, if you haven't looked at your glass door, then you should probably go have a look at that and just kind of see how well, how people are thinking. And I bet if you have 15 employees or more, you probably have a glass door page.

Mark Galvan (36m 51s):

So, so Tom, let me give you a quick story, because we had a client a while back who was a, a software development company, and they were so focused on their consumer brand. They had a beautiful website. They have a great product. They have good culture to the degree that all of their leadership are very ethical. They're spiritual people. They just are just good people, but they were not attracting great candidates. And it was just a Nygma new. Why are we not being able to find? So they were forced into the box of look, someone's better than no one. And they were hiring people that they didn't stick.

Mark Galvan (37m 31s):

They had attitude problems. And so it was showing up in cost of operations, turnover, mistakes that were impacting the client. So they came to us and they said, look, we need some help figuring this out. But one of the data points that was very significant is they, they had an indeed profile online that was completely unmanaged. It wasn't claimed, and yet it was accumulating negative comments by former employees. So who's the most vocal. It's always the people that are ticked off, you know, mad have an ax to grind. They're mad at their, their supervisor. You know, whatever happened to them, you know, it was all unjustified, right?

Mark Galvan (38m 14s):

They're the ones that are the most vocal. So they had people going out and posting stuff online and they didn't even know it. And, and their, their employer profile was completely unclaimed. So not only were they not managing a positive environment online, they were not responding to the negative stuff and were getting hammered. So it doesn't take a candidate more than a few seconds to go online and do a search and get this information. And what do they click? They say the negative comments are the most helpful because in a candidates mind, they're avoiding a disaster. Whoa. I don't want to apply there. And they completely move on.

Mark Galvan (38m 56s):

That's why we say the highest quality people. They're not even in your candidate pool, they've disengaged because what they found online.

Tom Bronson (39m 3s):

Yeah. And, and you know, that description. Thank you for telling that story because I'd be willing to bet that many employers that are listening to this today are the same way. They they've got a great company. They really have a good culture. They put out good product and their, and their brand, their consumer-facing brand is good, but they don't pay any attention to the employer brand. And so it's really important. Thank you for sharing that story and your story with us. Is there some sort of a formula or a framework that organizations can use to improve their employer brand?

Mark Galvan (39m 38s):

Yeah, actually what we've identified is that there are five elements or shifts that have been made to move away from this traditional recruiting model, which in most respects, it hasn't changed for 30 years. I mean, as long as we've been using the internet and recruiting people, nothing's really changed until most recently when there's been this advent of employer, branding strategy being implemented. And when we look at what the pioneers in the field have done, and what we've tested, what we found is that there's essentially five major components to moving to this paradigm.

Mark Galvan (40m 20s):

One is creating what we call experiential constancy. And that is that the candidate experience is consistent all the way through the entire process. For example, the, the job posting and the information on the career portal, and then what they find on, you know, employee comments online and what they see in the website, the way they interact with the recruiters, their interaction with the interviewer, you know, all of those things have a consistency to them. It makes the candidate feel like it's an authentic and genuine company.

Mark Galvan (40m 60s):

When there's a disconnect in that end-to-end talent supply chain process. It's like having a weak link in a chain. And we've all seen this where a candidate, they apply, they're excited. They interview. And then somewhere down the line, they're gone, they disengage. And we liked them. They were considered qualified, but they, they saw something or they experienced something that was a showstopper. So creating experiential constancy is critical. The second one is creating two way authentic communication. This is actually a big deal. And it's a problem when candidates lie on their resume, we all, we all know that.

Mark Galvan (41m 45s):

And we know that that happens right, lie on their resume. Shocker news use flash, but we find the employers lie on their resume to you. You go online and you look at their website and they have pictures of, you know, their culture and their environment. And you can find all of those photos that stock photos someplace else. They're not real that they claim things that are not true. They have promises that are not kept. And then they're describing their organization in a way that's inauthentic. It doesn't matter what you have on fire or what problems you have.

Mark Galvan (42m 26s):

You gotta be transparent and authentic with people. People are adults. And what we teach is that what we've seen that is the most effective is if you lead with two way authentic communication, that means being brutally transparent about the good, the bad, the ugly, and what that does to the candidate is remarkable. You can tell them a bunch of terrible stuff, and they'll, they'll say, you know what, thanks for telling me. I appreciate that. That says a lot about you. And all of a sudden, what was perceived as a negative is no longer a negative. The third thing is probably the most important shift that we've seen as critical in a model like this is using a secret weapon that we call candidate persona marketing.

Mark Galvan (43m 11s):

This is having a very clear understanding of your ideal candidate. This is a marketing concept, and that's why you don't ever see it on the HR and talent acquisition side of the house. Persona marketing is having like an avatar, a understanding of your perfect customers in this case, the candidates, the customer, who are they, what what's important to them, what would they want out of their career would be all of these questions when you answer them, you know exactly what to say and how to connect with them. I would say the reason this is so important is it creates what we call chemistry, you know, in, you know, if you go on match.com, you, you know, if you're, if you're single and you're looking for a mate, you can find somebody that's perfect on paper.

Mark Galvan (43m 57s):

But if you don't have cheddar chemistry, it's not going to work well the same way it, that the company and the candidate could be perfect on paper for each other. But if there's no chemistry, we call that cultural fit. Then it's not going to work. And we cultivate that with persona marketing, and then finally having a control strategy to be able to control all of your online information that impacts your reputation is critical. And then the last shift that I think is really important is if you, if you do this yourself using team members, it's kind of like DIY surgery is really, really messy and expensive.

Mark Galvan (44m 38s):

It's better to go use, third-party help or hire expert help that has already been through the process and can make sure that you avoid problems in deploying something like this.

Tom Bronson (44m 52s):

Okay. What did you call it? DIY surgery.

Mark Galvan (44m 59s):

Very extensive and very messy.

Tom Bronson (45m 1s):

Yeah. And then by the way, you have to go do it the right way anyway, right? Yeah. Clean up. That is awesome. Boy, that is a mouthful. I love these five shifts. And that's really kind of was the focus of your, of your talk with business navigators. So that is a mouthful. This is a lot of things to digest. Why is this so important for employers to pay attention to right now?

Mark Galvan (45m 28s):

Well, first of all, these shifts impact everything. I mean, how you communicate your mission, your vision, job, postings, your the way you interview candidates, the way you screen people, you're your total rewards, how they're presented to people, your core values, your diversity and inclusion commitments. You know, even the way you reject candidates, this step has to permeate everything. And I think the reason why it's so important now is the war for talent has gotten worse and worse over the last couple of years. And honestly, we see in some markets, the COVID pandemic issues has exacerbated even more.

Mark Galvan (46m 10s):

I mean, just a year or so ago, even Vistige was publishing surveys that 87% of CEOs list talent as one of their top challenges. And they expect to increase costs and investment in hiring people. But also almost half of all businesses say that they can't find the people that they want to find for their organization. It's not that they're not there. We can find them. I can, we can go online and find people all day long. The issue is they can't attract them. That's a different issue. So it, today it's even more challenging depending on what vertical industry you're in or what challenges you have as a result of the pandemic warehouse, operations, supply chain, virtualized, workforces, you know, there's a bunch of sectors and different business models that are disproportionally impact by everything that's happening right now.

Mark Galvan (47m 9s):

So all of this, it makes this critical timing. You know, one more thing. One more thing I'll add is that, you know, we talk about maybe 10 to 15% of companies have already implemented this type of strategy. One way to look at that is if you're a company that says, we want to do this, we to implement a talent attraction model and really take control of our employer brand, you differentiate yourself from all of the other players that are fighting for the same talent pool almost instantly. And right now we have this window of opportunity for companies to create competitive advantage. That's extraordinary by doing this.

Mark Galvan (47m 50s):

So that's not going to last forever. We're going to get past the phase where early adopters and the preponderance of companies have adopted this stuff, and then it'll be, you know, status quo. But for now it's a huge differentiator.

Tom Bronson (48m 6s):

I couldn't agree with you more completely. I mean, they, this will become standard practice at some point down the road to differentiate yourself today, you need to be an early adopter of some of these strategies. Look, yes, this has been a great conversation, but before we go, what would you recommend to an organization that really wants to improve their employer brand?

Mark Galvan (48m 31s):

Yeah, first of all, I think what we'll do is we'll provide access to a resource that a business can use to go do a self-assessment. If you will, a series of questions that can be asked to basically do a quick evaluation, a litmus test on how are you doing? Where do you have hotspots that might be impacting your ability to attract people? And we can certainly make that available. I would also suggest that for your listeners, you know, we'll dedicate 45 minutes to an hour to anybody that wants to set up a complimentary, no obligation call with us where we'll do a deep dive, ask them some questions and take a look at what they've got, showed them.

Mark Galvan (49m 14s):

You know, what we see and see if we can give them some insights. I think that is probably one of the most valuable things because guaranteed they'll go away with some eye opening eye popping insights. So we're happy to be able to offer that.

Tom Bronson (49m 31s):

That is awesome. Thank you for, for doing that. And of course, we'll have more time next week to do a little bit of a deeper dive. I have to give a little disclaimer here because our, our longtime listeners know that when we get to this point in the podcast, I asked the same two questions. We're not doing that this week since Mark's going to be right back with us next week, don't worry. We're going to get right into those two last questions next week. I know many of you listen to all the way to hear that, but, but don't worry. We'll be back there next week. So, mark, this has been a great walk today through all, a lot of this stuff to sort of set the stage for our conversation next week. How can our viewers and listeners get in touch with you?

Mark Galvan (50m 10s):

Yeah. Our website is pro force P R O F O R C E proforceCo.com. And there's a variety of information there. There's a whole page on thought leadership resources, downloads client case. You can reach out to us directly through one of the contact forms there, but there's also some other information that people can listen to. That goes into a little bit more depth, but you know, that's probably the best way to get ahold of us through the website pro force code.com. Awesome.

Tom Bronson (50m 44s):

Awesome. Look, mark. This has been a great conversation today. I wish we could go on and here's the good news we can. We're going to have another episode next week. That gets a little bit deeper into this and I'm really looking forward to that, mark. Thank you for being our guest today.

Mark Galvan (51m 0s):

Yeah. Thank you very much. This is a lot of fun, which forward to the next session.

Tom Bronson (51m 4s):

Absolutely. You can find mark galvan at proforceco.com. You can find him on LinkedIn or if you're up for it, you can find him right back here. Next week, when we wrap up this mini series, do not miss it. We're going to give you some practical advice about how to go out and implement this stuff. This is the maximize business value podcast, where we give practical advice to business owners on how to build long-term sustainable value in your business. Be sure to tune in each week and follow us wherever you found this podcast, add your comments. We love your comments and we respond to them all.

Tom Bronson (51m 45s):

So until next time, I'm Tom Bronson reminding you to be intentional about developing your employer brand while you maximize business value.

Announcer (52m 1s):

Thank you for tuning into the maximize business value podcast with Tom Bronson. This podcast is brought to you by mastery partners, where our mission is to equip business owners to maximize business value so they can transition on their terms, learn more on how to build long-term sustainable business value and get free value building tools by visiting our website, www.masterypartners.com that's master with a Y masterypartners.com. Check it out.

Tom Bronson (52m 47s):

That was perfect. I wouldn't make any changes.