What are the traits your company should be looking for when hiring a leader?

Strong Understanding of Technology

The modern leader doesn’t need to come from a tech background necessarily. Although, having a strong understanding of technology has become crucial for leadership candidates. Technology has dramatically disrupted how business operates today. To effectively lead and drive business strategy, the modern leaders need to understand the technologies poised to impact their industries. The best leadership candidates will know how to adapt to new technologies and stay ahead of their competition.

Creative Strategist

Creativity and imagination can boost the performance of almost any professional, regardless of where they stand within a corporate structure. However, as a leader, having the ability to come up with new and innovative ideas that can propel the business forward, allows one to take on many challenges.

A great leader is going to be with your company for a solid chunk of time. In today’s fast-paced business climate, merely using the same strategies over and over will eventually stagnate. Sometimes the answer for growth is not to work harder, but to work differently. With an imaginative mind for strategy, a leader can create new angles to continue to grow your business.

Willing to Embrace Change

Being ready to embrace change has always been an important trait for leaders, but in today’s business environment change comes fast. When leaders don’t adapt to change quickly, their business pays the price. The flipside of that is the opportunity that comes with the rapid speed of change. If leaders recognize trends and act early enough, they can drive tremendous results.

Inspirational

A successful leader needs to maximize the performance of the people they lead. There are few better ways to get the most out of your team than inspiration. Inspirational leaders understand the importance of leading by example and the power of showing not telling. Any leader can tell their team what it takes to be successful, but the great leaders inspire through their own actions. Instead of telling employees to work hard, inspirational leaders put in the work themselves and show their team what a strong work ethic looks like.

Appetite for Learning

You’re probably noticing a trend here: the business world today is moving fast. The rapid pace of change demands a leader that is always staying attuned to what’s new and has the appetite to learn about the hottest trends, technologies, and business practices. A leader who loves to learn will always be keeping their eye out for the next great tool, resource, or strategy that will drive your business forward.

Need help finding a modern leader for your organization? Contact MJS Executive Search today.

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What should you do if you have open positions to fill? Although the advantage currently lies with job seekers, companies can still adapt their approach and land top talent.

Adjust Your Offerings

Due to tight competition for talent, many employers have increased wages to attract talent. That can be a good method, but many candidates are looking for more than high pay. Taking stock of what you offer to employees in the form of benefits and perks can be just as important, and cost less.

The benefits employees are looking for go beyond the traditional 401k and paid vacation. Partnering with new fintech companies to help employees with student debt has become very popular. Other employers are offering college savings plans for their staff to help them save for education.

Looking at what your company offers and what your ideal candidates are looking for can help you pivot to attract more talent.

Employer Branding

One of the key methods for attracting talent is by bolstering your employer brand. Your workplace culture, mission, and benefits are all key parts of your employer brand and need to be updated frequently.

A strong employer brand can overcome many of the hurdles caused by a tight labor market. For companies in “unattractive” industries, such as banking, employer brand is key to convincing candidates to come onboard. It is more than ping pong tables and amenities though, now more than ever, employees want to feel a connection to your mission and know that they are making an impact.

Your digital presence is often the first impression a prospective candidate sees. If you aren’t telling your company’s story, how will candidates know about the culture you’ve built or your values? Control the narrative and give your employer brand a strong digital presence.

Motivate Passive Candidates

If fewer people are looking for new jobs, your company needs to motivate passive candidates to leave their current job. Employees are comfortable staying with their current employer. The stability is very attractive, especially for those who were in the workforce for the 2008 recession. What will it take for your ideal candidate to leave that stability and join your organization?

Many companies are offering employee buyouts to candidates. These buyouts encourage people to leave their current job without worrying about staying long enough to receive bonuses they have earned. By giving them their bonus earlier through a buyout when they join your company, they are still rewarded for the work they did.

Learning what it takes for a passive candidate to jump ship can be difficult. The surest way to learn is to focus on them, and simply ask. Every candidate will have different requirements. Take the time to get to know what motivates them and listen to their needs and concerns. Use what you’ve learned to make personalized offerings catered to them.

Applying these methods can help your company reach the limited pool of talent available. Get in touch today to learn how we can give you the upper hand during your talent search.

Matthew J. Schwartz is the Founder, President and CEO of MJS Executive Search with nearly two decades of experience in retained executive search. Matt’s expertise lies in bringing together key executives that exhibit passion and creativity with leading organizations in a wide range of functional areas such as Marketing, Sales, Digital, Interactive and more. From Digital and Social media to Machine Learning and AI, Matt is passionate about cutting edge technologies and is dedicated using his knowledge to help his clients remain or become leaders in their realm.

Founded in 2003, MJS Executive Search has established itself as a top retained executive search firm that identifies and places unique, hard to find executives in highly specialized roles.

If you are interested in learning more about our Transformational Talent solutions, contact MJS Executive Search today to learn more about how we can help your organization.

The post 3 Key Steps to Adjust Your Recruitment Efforts To Align with the Hot Labor Market appeared first on MJS Executive Search.

Is your recruitment strategy ready for the new year? Although these trends require organizational changes, the results will speak for themselves during your future talent searches. Let’s look at some of the biggest challenges affecting talent acquisition.

1. Implementing Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is making waves across industries. The possibilities for automation and efficiency are extremely attractive to many companies. When it comes to talent acquisition, AI is helping streamline the process by improving candidate screening, writing job descriptions, and more.

AI can help improve the experience for your customers, offering 24/7 support through automated chatbots. Simply using AI also brands your company as innovative and modern. For many employees and customers, a focus on innovation is very important. Staying on top of the AI trend will help you attract new customers as well as retain existing ones.

However, AI is not always an easy tool to implement. There are many considerations your company must face before using AI. Although it can vastly simplify data processing, you must make sure your data is well organized and structured for it to be of any use. Your company will also need to make sure you have the right talent on board to manage these new tools. Experience with automation and AI is quickly becoming a highly sought-after skill set.

2. Candidate Relocation

Digital hiring tools are making it easier to widen your search for talent outside of your local area. This creates a new challenge though, as employees are much less willing to relocate for a job as they used to be. Even if you can reach candidates across the globe, your company still must motivate them to leave. There are a few factors preventing candidates from relocating.

First, and most simple, most people are naturally resistant to change. Large changes like relocating are a tough sell even if the compensation is competitive. That brings us to the next challenge, relocating is expensive, for the candidate and the company. Couple that with the cost of living and housing prices and many candidates may pass up a great position in favor of staying put.

Make sure your company’s relocation packages are thorough enough and updated frequently. Personalizing these offerings for each qualified candidate goes a long way to entice them to relocate.

3. Tight Labor Market

Record unemployment is making every hiring manager’s job very difficult. There is an extremely limited pool of candidates for whom many companies are competing. Many companies are looking inward to attract top talent to their organization. So how do you attract talent from a small number of candidates?

Making sure your employer brand is modern, strong, and well represented goes a long way for both active and passive candidates. If a candidate finds your company online, they should be able to easily learn all there is to know about your culture, mission, and values.

It’s not only about attracting candidates. Much of the small pool is caused by a skills gap. Put simply, there are not enough trained candidates to fill the open positions. Many employers are investing in education programs or implementing stronger training to create their own talent pipeline.

4. Agile Organizations

I don’t need to tell you that business moves faster than ever today. The requirements for innovation and development are strict and changing frequently. The traditional methods and company structures are not equipped to tackle digital innovation. Companies are turning to agile structures to foster collaboration and drive efficient innovation

Agile isn’t simply about keeping up, it has many benefits to both your organization and the individual employees. The efficiency gained will obviously save you time and money, but it also enables both scalability and growth. On top of that, the autonomy your employees gain empower them to succeed and improve their overall experience.

With these benefits as well as the demand for digital innovation, it’s no wonder that many companies are adopting agile structures to equip them for the challenges ahead.

Learn how our team can help you face these challenges and stay ahead of the curve in 2019.

Matthew J. Schwartz is the Founder, President and CEO of MJS Executive Search with nearly two decades of experience in retained executive search. Matt’s expertise lies in bringing together key executives that exhibit passion and creativity with leading organizations in a wide range of functional areas such as Marketing, Sales, Digital, Interactive and more. From Digital and Social media to Machine Learning and AI, Matt is passionate about cutting edge technologies and is dedicated using his knowledge to help his clients remain or become leaders in their realm.

Founded in 2003, MJS Executive Search has established itself as a top retained executive search firm that identifies and places unique, hard to find executives in highly specialized roles.

If you are interested in learning more about our Transformational Talent solutions, contact MJS Executive Search today to learn more about how we can help your organization.

The post 4 Talent Acquisition Challenges in 2019 and How to Overcome Them appeared first on MJS Executive Search.

There are steps that you can take to push through a challenging search, even if you’re facing a small pool of talent. Try adapting your methods with these tips to attract the limited talent you’ve found or even expand your search to find hidden talent.

Evaluate Your Search Process

A lot of success can come from the experience that candidates face when they engage with your company. Even if your compensation offers are competitive and your opportunity has promise, talent may look elsewhere if your process isn’t candidate-focused. Take the time to ensure your talent search isn’t simply serving your needs but also those of the candidates you wish to attract.

Streamlining your application and hiring process does a lot for candidate usability. With the digital changes that have spread across every facet of business, looking into technology to aid your search process can make or break a candidate’s experience.

Modern companies like Amazon move candidates through a process very quickly, and have found great success doing so. Candidates that are used to this type of accelerated experience are disappointed when they face a slower, more dated hiring process.

This experience coupled with your offerings beyond compensation can win over a lot of candidates. Think of things like office perks but also benefits packages. Good benefits and attractive perks can pull many candidates further toward signing on than compensation will.

Look Beyond Active Searchers

The scope of your talent search can also limit an already small pool of candidates. By limiting your search to candidates who are actively looking for work, you miss out on many passive candidates who may be the perfect fit for your organization. While there are many ways to attract active candidates, passive candidates are more challenging.

Just as you may have to look outside of compensation to attract candidates, you may have to change your offerings or strategy to not only reach passive candidates, but also to sway them towards leaving their current position. With unemployment as low as it is currently, many people are happy in their positions. Even so, those same people are willing to leave for the right opportunity, make sure you don’t rule them out and limit your pool.  Another good strategy is to look outside of your industry for candidates.

Look to Develop Internal Leaders

When you’ve exhausted your options externally, it may be time to look internally for your future leaders. Taking the time to develop leaders within your own team can lead to great success. The current connection employees have with your company, and their coworkers are not easily replaced.  Make sure that your organization is training your team on the modern skills that they have not developed internally.

According to some experts, developing an executive can take ten years total, not just at your organization. While you probably cannot leave a position open for that long, starting that process now can solve problems down the road. Keep an eye out for raw leadership talent in your organization. This talent can be easier to develop than simply searching for a new candidate, and now is the perfect time to start the process for the future of your leadership.

Partner with an Executive Search Firm

In the end, you may not have the time or the resources to maximize your talent search. That is the perfect reason to partner with an executive search firm. They have experience creating a candidate-focused environment for their searches. This makes it much easier for them to attract more talent than you could alone, but also to make the hiring process faster and simple for all parties.

Additionally, they have a network of passive candidates they are in contact with. Executive search firms have experience making attractive offers to passive candidates and convincing them to leave current positions. While you may encounter challenges finding passive candidates, executive search firms know where to look and what to say to bring passive candidates on board.

Matthew J. Schwartz is the Founder, President and CEO of MJS Executive Search with nearly two decades of experience in retained executive search. Matt’s expertise lies in bringing together key executives that exhibit passion and creativity with leading organizations in a wide range of functional areas such as Marketing, Sales, Digital, Interactive and more. From Digital and Social media to Machine Learning and AI, Matt is passionate about cutting-edge technologies and is dedicated using his knowledge to help his clients remain or become leaders in their realm.

Founded in 2003, MJS Executive Search has established itself as a top retained executive search firm that identifies and places unique, hard to find executives in highly specialized roles.

If you are interested in learning more about our Transformational Talent solutions, contact MJS Executive Search today to learn more about how we can help your organization. 

The post What To Do When Your Talent Pool Is Lacking appeared first on MJS Executive Search.

What specifically has changed about executive search recently? Quite a bit. While much of the industry looks the same, some changes are driving the industry forward and enlisting the help of innovations to stay ahead of the curve.

Smarter Talent Searches

Executive searches are getting smarter every day. They must keep up with the fast-paced speed of today’s on-the-go business world. Smart searching not only helps to expand talent pool, but it can help take the hassle our of screening candidates. Using browsing data, many companies are personalizing the hiring process.

This data helps to serve positions that are more relevant to a candidate’s interests, whether by company, industry, or title. Not only can this personal experience save time for recruiters and hiring managers vetting candidates, but it also saves those same candidates time. A streamlined, candidate-focused hiring process creates a much more positive experience, one that is likely to foster great candidate leads during future talent searches.

Digital Disruption

The business news cycle is continuously talking about artificial intelligence and its effect on all industries. Just as “the cloud” took the business world by storm, AI is booked as the solution to all headaches that face many businesses. However, what is AI doing in the world of executive search?

Automation is the real advantage of AI in the recruiting industry. Programs that automate candidate screening, job posting, and even client and candidate interactions through chatbots. These necessary tasks that would typically take a lot of time away from the search are being automated and giving executive recruiters more time to find and place candidates.

Although the time savings that AI offers any industry are great, many experts a leery of full automation. Much of the executive search industry is based around face-to-face interactions; a trend that likely won’t be replaced by machines.

Data and Regulations

The other side of the coin surrounding technology and data in recruiting is the new rules and regulations that come with it. The collection of users’ browsing and personal data has been a hot-button issue concerning both privacy and security. With many large-scale data breaches in the news, governments around the world are cracking down on what data can be collected and how it can be used.

Strict compliance with new regulations is imperative for any hiring director, but especially executive search firms. One failure can be costly and could even lead to a business being forced to shut its doors. Make sure your team is not only aware of the changing regulations affecting executive search, and make sure you have safeties in place to prevent any incidents

Consulting Partnerships

On top of the changes facing talent searches, the expectations of executive search firms are shifting too. Many firms reach out to their partners and client outside of active searches to act as a consultant. By keeping in contact, the search firm can offer extra services to address the needs their clients have.

Along the same line, this constant communication allows search firms to identify areas that may need more attention than others and adapt their services to serve their clients better. This allows the firms to be agile and make sure they are effective, but also to build new and ongoing relationships even when clients aren’t in need of talent.

Are you looking for an executive search partner to go above and beyond to suit your needs?

Let MJS Executive Search Find You Transformational Talent

Does your company need a dynamic and forward-thinking leader? Get in touch today and learn more about how we find and place transformational talent.

The post How the World of Executive Search is Changing appeared first on MJS Executive Search.

In 1995, 30.5% of job seekers were willing to relocate for a new job. Today, that number has dwindled all the way down to 11.3%. What is the cause of such a dramatic resistance to relocation? Let’s take a look.

Resistance to Change

Before we get into the weeds about why people are resistant to relocating for a new job in today’s business climate, it’s important to note that, in general, people are psychologically resistant to change. Most people begin to process change by experiencing fear psychologically. Change interrupts our connection to the status quo, evoking said fear.

There’s a great deal of change involved in relocating. Moving to a new place for a job requires finding a new home, routine, social circle—even mundane things such as new coffee shops, grocery stores, and restaurants require change.

Relocation is Expensive

While people have always been resistant to change, one of the modern contributors to people being less likely to move is the financial element of relocation. When you look at the data and see when the sharpest decline in willingness to move occurs, it’s right around the early 2000s. Thinking of the economic trends of the time, it’s a period that represents the dot.com bubble bursting. Extrapolate that out, and you can deduce that companies are unable to offer as competitive of relocation packages as they were previously.

In the 1980s and 90s, relocating employees found themselves receiving generous relocation packages that cover most of the moving costs. Some even provided employees with a full package that would include buying their previous home, so there was no stress and pressure to sell the home while preparing to move. In today’s market, that has become quite rare.

Volatile Cost of Living and Housing Prices

Piggybacking off the expense of relocation, is the volatility of today’s housing market. For the past few years, housing prices have skyrocketed across the country and inventory has plunged, making it challenging for relocating people to find a new home. Housing prices are growing at twice the rate of inflation, making it incredibly difficult for people to pick up and move. Even for people who feel secure enough to face the market financially, there’s the issue of low inventory that dissuades people from considering a move.

When it comes to changing markets for work, the highly variant cost of living prices from one city to another is also contributing to people being less likely to relocate. To financially justify the move, employees would need to receive significant pay raises to account for the higher cost of living. A 100k salary in Cleveland differs greatly from Austin, and Austin differs greatly from San Francisco.

Expensive for Employers

What role are employers playing on the downward trend of relocation? Each of these reasons could potentially be mitigated if employers offered compensation packages that made a move worth it. However, that can be hard to justify. A company can simply hire talent within their market and save 20-35% on relocation/compensation incentive.

The tradeoff that companies make by neglecting to seek out relocation candidates is that they limit their applicant pools. One interesting trend some companies are deploying to combat both the unwillingness of talent to move and shrinking applicant pools is to do the relocation themselves. By moving to cost-friendly and talent-rich cities, companies can leverage a strong base of talent and offer more competitive relocation packages to out-of-market talent.

Companies Need To Stive To Stand Out

In today’s labor market where talent is hard to find, some companies may have to seek talent outside of their area. With talent being less likely to relocate than in year’s past due to a resistance to change, high moving expenses, volatile housing prices, and disappearing relocation packages, companies will have to be proactive and competitive when wooing out-of-market talent.

Having trouble finding the right talent in your area?

Let MJS Executive Search Find You Transformational Talent

Does your company need a dynamic and forward-thinking leader? Get in touch today and learn more about how we find and place transformational talent. 

The post Why Today’s Talent is Less Willing to Relocate Than They Used to Be appeared first on MJS Executive Search.

How did we get here? Where is all the talent hiding?  Let’s take a look at why the labor market is in its current state as well as how recruiters and hiring managers can navigate the talent shortage.

Low Unemployment

The most obvious, and possibly biggest, reason for the current talent shortage is the historically low unemployment rate. While it’s heartening to see the number so low, it presents a challenge for companies attracting qualified applicants. It’s far easier to recruit an unemployed candidate than an employed one, and with fewer people out of work, the number of organic applicants is naturally going to dip.

Hand in hand with the low unemployment rate is the growing number of jobs in the economy, which is causing economists to forecast the unemployment rate to fall even lower.

To combat the shrunken talent pools brought upon by low unemployment, hiring managers and recruiters need to broaden their search criteria. If you’re hiring for a position that usually requires ten years of experience, you’re going to want to encourage candidates with seven years to apply.

Passive Candidates

A passive candidate is one who is employed and not actively looking for a job. With so many people possessing gainful employment, there are more passive candidates in the market than usual. A recent study found that 73 percent of the workforce is passive.

Recruiting a passive candidate represents a greater challenge than targeting an active one, but passive candidates do offer a ton of promise. Why? Here are three reasons.

1. They’re highly qualified.
2. Since passive candidates are not actively searching for work, chances are your company will be the only one they are interviewing with.
3. Passive candidates are going to be more loyal to your company as they’re demonstrating loyalty to their current employer by not actively pursuing other opportunities.

The Rise of Company Culture and Brand

Another reason you might be low on applications might be due to your employment brand and reputation. The internet has enabled employees to share their experiences and amplify their message. Ten years ago, if an employee had a negative experience working for your company, the only damage they could do to your employment brand was through the number of people they told. Now, with sites like Glassdoor publishing employee experiences for the world to see, a negative employee experience can be seen by anyone who is considering applying to your company.

The expectations for employee experience are also higher than they use to be. The rise of start-ups and forward-thinking brands has brought great awareness to what kind of culture and benefits a company can provide to their employees. In a labor market where candidates have been introduced to employee-centric workplaces and competitive benefits, the job alone will no longer attract candidates.

Today’s talent is motivated by office perks, diversity and inclusion, a strong passionate mission statement, and work-life balance. Available talent will be chomping at the bit to join your team if your culture and brand are vibrant.

Skills Gap & Insufficient Training

One of the most common complaints we hear from hiring managers and recruiters is that there is not enough qualified talent in the market. More specifically, that candidates lack the skills required to perform the roles they’re applying for.

Why do candidates lack skills? Many employers like to lay the blame at the feet of education. A recent Gallup report found that only 33% of business leaders believe that education institutions are graduating students with the skills and competencies that their businesses need. But part of the skills gap issue is a training deficit. Companies don’t invest in training and development like they use to. Company sponsored management training programs for recent grads have all but disappeared.

To combat the hiring challenges caused by the skills gap, companies will need to invest in training their employees. If you can’t find the talent with the skills your business needs, find candidates with potential and help them develop the skills.

Learn how MJS Executive Search can assist you in finding the candidate you’re looking for during the talent shortage.

Let MJS Executive Search Find You Transformational Talent

Does your company need a dynamic and forward-thinking leader? Get in touch today and learn more about how we find and place transformational talent. 

The post Where Is All the Talent Hiding? How to Navigate the Talent Shortage appeared first on MJS Executive Search.

AI and machine learning could provide value to most businesses, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that companies should be racing to implement. To help you determine if you’re ready, here are some questions for business leaders to consider when weighing the decision.

Is Your Data Strategy Organized?

The first question you should ask yourself if you’re trying to discover if your company is ready to implement AI and machine learning is what types of data you would plan on having the new technology analyze. The artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies that your company implements will only be as effective as the data you feed into them.

If your company does not have an organized and strategic process in place for collecting, storing, and analyzing data, you need to start there before adopting AI and machine learning technology. Companies that are currently using a few different legacy systems to collect data or have not fully integrated systems after a merger or acquisition should steer away, for the time being, of AI and machine learning.

If your data is clearly organized and unified, machine learning and artificial intelligence can be tremendous assets for your company. Machine learning applications can be designed to improve outcomes continuously as they receive new data, enabling your company always to have the most updated and cutting-edge insights.

How Would AI & Machine Learning Impact my Customer’s Experience?

The ultimate question about whether or not your business should invest in new technology is whether or not it will deliver a return on investment. That is a multi-faceted question when it comes to AI and machine learning, but one of those questions is to consider your customer expectations. Ask yourself if your consumers, and the consumers you want to pry away from your competitors, expect, or desire, an AI-powered experience.

If your answer is yes, the experience of our customers will be improved through AI and machine learning, then you should probably explore them.

Additionally, if your competition has implemented these new technologies and are increasing profits as a result, then you probably want to adopt them into your own company.

How will AI & Machine Learning Improve Your Company’s Business Practices?

There’s a ton of potential to improve business practice with AI and machine learning. Think about how many elements of your business strategy are informed by data? AI and machine learning can enhance the capabilities, speed, efficiency, and intelligence of any of your business practices that use data. Marketing, sales, HR, operations, logistics, IT—the list of departments in your company that could experience a bump from adopting AI and machine learning are endless.

Find AI and Machine Learning Talent with MJS Executive Search

If you’ve determined that your company is ready to adopt AI and machine learning, you’re going to need to hire experienced talent to help you implement, train, and manage these new technologies for your company. One of our functional specialties here at MJS Executive Search is AI and machine learning. Contact us today to learn about our vast network of AI and Machine learning talent.

Let MJS Executive Search Find You Transformational Talent

Does your company need a dynamic and forward-thinking leader? Get in touch today and learn more about how we find and place transformational talent. 

The post Is My Company Ready for AI & Machine Learning? appeared first on MJS Executive Search.

For legacy companies of that scale, a lot of time and resources are being allocated to finding a way to compete against the new generation of pure digital startups. What do companies of this size need to do to adapt and change their business strategies to prepare for the future? How do they become more customer centric and less product centric?

It all comes down to reimagining their business practices, hiring dynamic leaders, and paying attention to their customers.

What is Business Reimagination?

Business reimagination refers to the creation, adaptation, or modification of business practices with the ultimate goal of modernization. As a recruiter, my role in helping companies implement business reimagination is by finding the rare and dynamic talent that can guide companies through the process.

The key to hiring leadership in today’s business climate is to find candidates that not only solve the problems of today, but have the skill set, intuition, and growth potential to solve the issues of tomorrow. Technology is driving change at a rapid pace, so it’s vital that organizations don’t fixate on the in-the-moment challenges.

A question that I hear a lot is “where should I start with business reimagination?” It’s a difficult question to answer because it varies depending on the size, culture, and work environment of the company. For large legacy organizations, change can be slow. It’s not realistic to expect that a dynamic CEO hire can step in and with the snap of their fingers shift business operations. Instead, organizations need to build a culture of business reimagination, which starts with hiring the right people and becoming more customer centric, not product centric.

Shifting to Customer Centricity

The pure digital startups that are having the most success in today’s market are the ones who are customer centric. Customer-centric companies focus on providing the best solution for their customers, as opposed to product-centric companies, who focus on creating the best product.

The danger of focusing on products is you become vulnerable to falling behind customer trends and getting lapped by the next big thing. Think Blockbuster not recognizing the customers demand for video streaming, or Kodak not identifying the customer desire for digital image storage, or MapQuest getting swept into obscurity by the convenience of Google Maps.

If your organization is not paying attention to the customer, you’ll have trouble modernizing and competing in the future. To shift your company’s business mentality, start with hiring transformational talent.

Hiring Transformational Talent is a Great Place to Start

While it’s unrealistic to expect swift and pronounced change after a single hire, designing a hiring process that identifies and prioritizes transformational talent is a sure-fire way to modernize an organization’s culture.

Transformational talent possesses the ability to alter the course of a company. Bringing a fresh set of eyes to an organizational, transformational talent provides an outside perspective and the leadership to help shepherd a company through change.

Learn 5 ways to identify transformational talent.

Let MJS Executive Search Find You Transformational Talent

Does your company need a dynamic and forward-thinking leader? Get in touch today and learn more about how we find and place transformational talent. 

The post The Challenge of Business Reimagination appeared first on MJS Executive Search.

To ensure that your organization has a positive corporate culture, steps need to be taken to regularly get a pulse of your culture, which will then inform the changes you make.

It all starts with getting a real-time measurement of your culture.

Establish a Baseline Measurement

As your company moves forward with monitoring corporate culture, you’re going to want to be able to compare the data you gather with past measurements. If your organization hasn’t already, conduct a survey with your employees to get an initial measurement. Design your survey to highlight the components of your corporate culture. Each organization is going to stress different things when it comes to culture, so make sure your survey is custom-built for your employees. What an accounting firm recognizes as focus areas will be different from a corporate retailer.

When building your survey, strive to make the questions, and the response scoring rubric, as clear and as concise as possible. Keep in mind that you’re going to be conducting a series of surveys as you monitor your corporate culture, so deploy a scoring system that is metric-friendly. Questions that call for a range score is much preferred than a simple yes-no format. Always stress to your employees that the survey is confidential, as you want them to be as forthcoming as possible.

Identify Your Strengths & Weaknesses

Once you’ve compiled the results of your culture survey, pour over the data and discover your strengths and weaknesses.  In the same way that you’d review the data of a campaign or a quarterly report, highlight the insights of the survey and create an action plan. Save all of the data but focus on a couple strengths and a couple weaknesses.

For your focus areas, set a measurable goal for the next survey. For example, if on a scale if 1-10 your employees rated your company’s commitment to work-life balance as an 8.4, you could set the goal of reaching 8.7 on the next survey.

Share the Results with Your Employees

Another common mistake that companies make is failing to be transparent with their employees. They’ll conduct a survey, and then keep the results to themselves. Once you’ve compiled and reviewed the data, share the results with the team. Your employees only know how they perceive the corporate culture and will want to know how the overall company does.

Make sure that you also share the goals with your employees. If you decided to set a goal of having a 7.5 rating or higher for overall culture approval, let the team know that. By demonstrating that you genuinely care about improving their overall experience of working for you, your employees’ buy-in will improve.

Schedule Future Measurements

Schedule out your corporate culture surveys on a regular cadence. Ideally, you’d want to do one once a quarter, so there is plenty of time for you to monitor any progress and regressions subsequent results reveal. At the end of a year, share with your employees some of the yearly measurements as a way to demonstrate all the gains your corporate culture has achieved.

Market Your Results as a Recruiting Tool

As you compile data overtime and groom your corporate culture, you’ll eventually have a very impressive, and tangible, recruiting tool at your disposal. As you compete for talent in the tight job market, being able to demonstrate your corporate culture can be a powerful tool.  Most companies will have a few lines in their candidate pitch that highlights corporate culture but showing candidates your culture in raw data puts a lot more weight behind your statement.

Depending on your survey, you can get pretty granular with how you use it as a marketing tool. If you’re surveying departments and teams individually to get a pulse on how they feel about leadership, you can advertise leadership approval to candidates in the specific departments they’re interviewing in. People go to work for great companies, but they also want to work for great people. Having metrics to showcase your great people can be a valuable asset in your company’s recruiting efforts.

It’s hard to monitor how strong or weak your corporate culture is if you’re not compiling data. But conducting structured and regular culture surveys with your employees, you can measure and monitor how your employees are enjoying the experience of working for you.

Want to learn more about corporate culture? Discover how to create a workplace that prioritizes wellness.

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