Talent Today: How to Build a World-Class Team
The start of June kicked off the excitement of Inventures, a conference where startups, entrepreneurs, and investors come together for creative collisions. This year, the conference took place in Calgary, Alberta, with Harvest Builders and some of its close partners joining together for a roundtable on how companies can navigate recruitment and talent acquisition to build world-class teams in the midst of a challenging market.
An expert panel of leaders experienced in finding talent and growing their skills shared their insights on the experience of doing so in a tough market. As Arlin Dueck says, “there’s a variety of reasons why, in the last number of years, hiring has been so difficult. Not the least is the pandemic, and that has created a unique challenge.” Whether companies have been committed to remaining in the office or working remotely, these speakers shared insights on recruiting internationally and growing and scaling giant companies such as SkipTheDishes and Neo Financial to inform effective talent management strategies in a down market.
Know your strengths
You don’t build a unicorn company in three years without knowing your strengths. Kris Read describes how starting Neo around the time of the pandemic forced the team to ask: “What kinds of people do we have? What kind of culture do we have? What kind of problems do we have? We chose our strategy and approach to be what would allow us to succeed in those contexts.” Asking those questions will help to identify your niche so you can market it — not just as a product for consumers, but also as an opportunity for talent. “You’ll get tons and tons of passionate people joining, saying ‘this is the best place I’ve ever worked’ — and it’s because you hit their niche,” Kris says. When you recruit for a unique opportunity, you will find the people who respond to that, are aligned with your passions, and will drive growth.
Don’t just work with entrepreneurs, create them
Having developed Harvest’s incubator bootcamps to upskill tech talent, Adile Abbadi-MacIntosh is an expert on building talent. For Adile, it’s more than just the opportunity to raise the bar of what talent can do: “An incubator process can also be used as part of onboarding to instruct people and help them understand the processes that run inside of a company.” Your efforts to build and develop skills, to invest in learning, will spur the business as great minds gain confidence, discover what they are capable of, and find their place in your company.
Prioritize your team’s wellbeing
With his experiences in international hiring and recruiting tech talent, Ilya Brotzky knows what makes a difference to a successful placement no matter where talent gets hired: “Hire great HR leaders,” he says. “And if you’re at your earliest stage, do it sooner than you would expect.” When you’re trying to build your team, you need someone to help you manage onboarding, performance reviews, management, and promotions. You need to put your best foot forward as a culture in order to attract the talent that will help you to take off.
Even when the market changes and things are uncertain, it’s still possible to build world-class teams that will drive your business forward and launch it to new heights.
Check out more from this Inventures talk here:
Interested in learning how Harvest can help you with your talent management strategy? Find out more here.
