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Culture & Purpose Leadership As Recruiting Tools
Staffing at the unit level from GM's to part-time hourly team members is one of the biggest challenges every restaurant and retailer faces. But it surprises me sometimes how companies overlook one simple tool -- and it's a tool that's probably already in place but not being utilized.
How did we get here to begin with? The candidate pool is shrinking in two key areas. First, a steady decline in the birth rate from 1990 to 2000 is an interesting point to recognize - but not likely big enough to blame for all our woes. The second, and larger culprit is our economy's shift away from manufacturing to technology. Now our candidate pool has a new set of choices to explore (computer repair, cell phone sales, e-commerce, etc.) that we weren't competing with a few years ago.
We're staring in the face of a big increase in minimum wage, the silver lining to that otherwise gray cloud hopefully mean an increase in retention -- but our "job" remains the same and at $15 and hour we're just matching and not likely exceeding the who and what we're competing against.
At the risk of throwing gasoline on the fire, I'll remind you that the employees we're talking about are more driven by lifestyle than they are money. They're not likely to respond to that "Now Hiring" sign in the window but they will gravitate to a brand's Culture and Purpose Driven Leadership.
Culture and Purpose are typically the children of someone or a team where titles begin with C and end in O. If not, partnering HR with Marketing and building Culture and Purpose into your overall branding strategy will generate significant results. But it gets even better...
If everyone can clearly distill Culture and Purpose into a distinct statement suddenly you've added a new number one seller to your product mix. Not only will this help you attract team members, it's also a great tool for building customer loyalty.
Now more than ever before we have two customers to satisfy, the one in front of the counter (external customers) AND the one behind it (internal customers). They both have a desire to align themselves with brands whose values match their own.
Regardless of your title, I encourage you to look at how your brand presents Culture and Purpose and it's role as a tool to help recruit and retain talent. Chances are what we're talking about is already in place and only needs your support to help it reach its full potential. The best news I have to share on this subject is that it promoting Culture and Purpose costs next to nothing -- social media is the best tool and Facebook, Youtube & Twitter are free.
Of course this is only my opinion, but it's one I value highly.
