❗The Great TALENT Migration from Corporates to Startups — Part 2❗

In Part 1 of this article I wrote about what startups are doing to attract corporate talents and I discussed 4 principles:

Principle #1: Startups are fulfilling the selfish motives of top talents; self-learning!

Principle #2: Culture is intentional & Founders are making conscious decisions to shape it every day!

Principle #3: Talent acquisition is not done behind laptops anymore

Principle #4: Providing Flexibility while nurturing accountability

In Part 2, I will briefly go through what corporates might need to do differently “from the talents perspectives” to be able to remain relevant in a highly competitive talent market.

Yours Truly,

Amr El Selouky

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A lot of my friends working in talent acquisition in corporates tell me that they are absolutely astonished by the salaries some startups are able to offer to talents nowadays. Some of them have actually thought about jumping ship if these are the brackets we’re talking about. But many others are actually embracing this challenge a “good problem to have” as it will push their management teams to give them the space and budget to disrupt all aspects of the employee experience from recruitment to learning to internal communication to retention to stop the talent leak!

What are corporates doing wrong?

After a long discussions with several HR professionals, it hit me that most of them complained from their companies’ mentality when it comes to investing and pushing the HR function forward. I was told that many companies adopt this mentality of:

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

If the top management layer can’t feel or see the pain of the talent drainage, if they don’t get hurt in their bottom lines due to key talents quitting and if their employee satisfaction surveys don’t get hit; then there is no problem and they want to run things the way it always did because why reinvent the wheel!

While this might not be the case in all corporates, but its not uncommon for larger entities to be by default very cautious and slow before any major reformations in strategies, pay scales and structures.

The issue here is that startups ecosystem has no time to waste, the founders need these talents TODAY and will do anything at any cost to get them.

Some startups are going for full teams in specific corporates leaving them at the risk of not just losing their pipeline & iterating their succession plans, but also losing the time & financial investment put in developing these talents! (Trust me, most decent corporates spend a lot on developing their talents)

So let’s observe below 3 areas that corporates might want to start to reassess and look at differently in order to face the great talent migration to startups.

- Capitalizing on Data Driven HR Tools

In recent years there has been a shift in the business world where using data for better decision making is essential regardless of if we’re talking about marketing, sales, product or any domain.

In the HR domain unfortunately the recruitment organizations still lag behind in this area where data can be capitalized on for prospect identification instead of the “spray and pray approach” where candidates are bombarded with random LinkedIn messages and emails.

Honestly, the current detached and long hiring process should stay in the previous decade!

Now some might wonder, what does this have to do with talent retention?

Laszlo Bock, who led Google’s People Operations for years spoke a lot on how refocusing your resources on hiring better will have a higher return than almost any training program you can develop.

When using a personalized approach to hire candidates who are a better match to what the corporate world offers, you have a higher chance of natural talent retention! This topic needs an article on its own and if you’re an HR professional who figured out how to capitalize on data in recruitment and retention, please share your experience below for us to learn from you.

P.S. Check HR tools that use data analytics and automation to search for passive candidates who are not looking for a new job but might be a match for the role you have!

- Changing targeted candidates’ profiles to build an in-house startup culture

In simple terms, many corporates have a pre-established persona for their ideal candidate when it comes to their experience, background, education etc.…

Fundamentally this makes so much sense, but if you plan to slowly foster a startup culture that is more flexible and agile or maybe even build entire functions or business units to lead the innovative and strategic projects of the business, you might want to consider diversifying the talent pools you’re hiring from. You might want to consider:

· Failed entrepreneurs who are looking for a more stable entity to be a part of

· Talents with startup experience who want to gain more experience from corporates

· Talents who manage a side business/hustle but need to learn more in a corporate setup before expanding

· Freelancers/consultants who want to switch to or switch back to corporates

These talents have a lot to offer and can catalyze in moving the ‘culture set in stone’ to a more dynamic one by leveraging their entrepreneurial muscles and intrapreneurial capacities. This might even be a reason to retain talents who feel that this diversity of talents stretches and teaches them a lot.

- Leveraging matrix teams & cross-functional projects to increase talents’ learning curves

A lot of young talents are attracted to corporate rotation programs that allow them to live a few months in each function before they settle into what’s most suitable to their skills and ambitions. The moment these programs end, these talents are haunted by a single dimension career experience which can be a massive momentum stopper and buzz killer! This is a common concern that most of the outspoken young talents will share in closed rooms to their managers and HR business partners, but hardly find it addressed.

This is when young corporate talents are most vulnerable to be headhunted by startups that offer this excitement of the rotational program as a ‘lifestyle instead of a temporary experience’.

One way to deal with this is by creating more cross-functional projects and matrix teams that work on strategic projects and are fully backed up by functional managers who will not feel insecure about their employees focusing on other projects besides their core KPIs.

This engineered ‘intrapreneurial environment’ can become a sought-after perk that attracts and retains top young talents into your company. (Besides allowing them to grow their skillsets)

- Revisiting compensation & benefits packages (for SOME roles)

This is a huge topic that cannot be over simplified.

A friend of mine who recently quit from one of the top telecoms in the industry to go for a role in a startup told me: “If I work for a startup that pays me a pretty decent package, gives me a great learning environment, shares many intangible perks, and rewards me with stock options to feel like an owner and eventually cash-out if we make it; why should I ever go back to a corporate?”

I don’t have an answer, but I do know that sooner or later SOME roles in the corporate talent market will need to have their salary brackets readjusted because they are simply undervalued.

To wrap up,

The best validation for a company’s culture is the decision by exceptional talents to come and join it!

In bigger organizations by default there will be more politics, more bureaucracy, less risk and less freedom. But can the deeper pockets these corporates have allow them to empower their HR functions with the budget and the approvals to help them create the magnetic field that keep their talents not just from offers from startups, but also to equally advantageous self-employment options that are more common these days with the gig economy.

It’s a common misconception to think that talents are running after bean bags, free snacks and open spaces. In reality, they’re just looking for an environment that allows them to constantly be on top of their game by providing them with opportunities to learn, space to contribute & a lot of exciting challenges.