A friend recently shared a Forbes article with me entitled Top Ten Reasons Why Large Companies Fail to Keep Their Best Talent which I found informative and useful in understanding my own recent thoughts on this topic. Rather than review each of those reasons here, I encourage you to read the original. Instead I would like to share with you the flip side of that coin based on my own recent experiences.

Attracting Top Talent
Before you can work on keeping your top talent, you have to find them and convince them to join your team. Here are five things you should be doing to attract top talent:

1. Choose a competent and effective recruiter. This can make all the difference. Don’t just hire an agency and let them blast a job description to every Tom, Dick and Mary of the tech world. Know specifically who is representing your company. Make sure that she knows how to find and filter top talent for you. Ensure that she has the communication and people skills required to manage the phone and in-person interviews and coordinate with the hiring manager to make his job even easier rather than just dumping a pile of resumes on a desk and waiting to get paid.
2. Do more than one phone screen. Give at least two top team members the chance to phone screen the candidate. Make sure they are prepared and understand what they should ask. Then have one or two managers or potential peers conduct a phone screen as well. Never rely on the resume alone to decide whether you will do a face to face interview.
3. Have the candidate interview with more than just the hiring manager. Have potential peers and even potential subordinates interview the candidate as well. And when possible, have a peer or supervisor of the hiring manager conduct an interview. Meet with and collect the thoughts and opinions of every interviewer and carefully consider their input.
4. Assure that every interviewer is positive and upbeat about your company but equally honest and transparent about the challenges and opportunities within the company which the candidate may be able to help resolve or improve. Don’t paint a dismal picture but don’t put a shine on a dull spot. Any intelligent candidate who gets different stories from interviewers will think twice before accepting an offer. Transparency and honesty from the bottom to the top of the company will be a refreshing and attractive quality. And don’t worry about scaring off a candidate who is afraid of a blemish. You don’t want to hire someone who wants to work for a perfect company with no opportunities to contribute to the solutions of the real problems that every company has.
5. Follow up and answer a candidates questions after the interview process is complete and make a decision as quickly as possible. If you will have some delays before you can make a decision, keep the lines of communication open and keep the candidate up to date. This kind of follow through is often overlooked and companies often take for granted that the candidate will sit still and wait. They won’t. To keep a fish on a hook, as they say, you have to work the line. Let it go slack, and you’ll lose.

Keeping Top Talent
Once you have hired a key employee, make an opposites list from the Forbes article and work toward eliminating the reasons that top talent walks out the door. Of the ten, here are my top picks recast as things you should do to keep top talent on your team:

1. Give your employees an opportunity to have a voice in key policy and process decisions. Listen to your people with an open mind, prepared to change your mind if you have overlooked something. Your top talent will often have better ideas than you may think.
2. Take the time to provide regular feedback to your employees. Annual reviews are great, but follow up with periodic reviews of goals, professional development, projects and opportunities for improvement. And always find a way to share positive feedback. When you acknowledge achievements and performance, publicly and privately, you’ll get even more of the same.
3. Make sure that your team members know that you care about their professional career development. The small amount of time you invest in helping your team map their future success will yield returns in happy, dedicated employees much greater even than the recent gains in the gold market.
4. Steer a steady ship that can make tactical adjustments in course but is on a solid strategic heading. If you run into stormy waters, keep faith with your employees and stay on course. If you need to make strategic course changes, involve your top talent in that decision making. Getting on a boat headed for Hawaii and finding out that the captain has decided to go to Alaska instead without even talking to you can be more than demoralizing.
5. Build teams of people who can work well together, who are talented and skilled and willing to pull their own weight and then some. Passionate people will help to bring out the best in team members who are having a bad day, but it is impossible to fix a team member who fundamentally lacks the requisite skills and desire to acquire them.
6. Be open minded and tolerant of opposing points of view. If you do not invite honest discussion with your team at appropriate times, you will lose your top talent and end up with a team that affirms any decision you make, even those that will send you off a cliff that you did not have the foresight to recognize.
7. You can teach management skills to a leader. But teaching leadership skills to a manager is not so easy. Look for leaders who can motivate and rally teams. You can hire a clerk or accountant to take care of the bean counting. But you may not recover from having a leaderless team and the resultant chaos and confusion and serial loss of top talent that will result. Do not be afraid to amputate and stop the bleeding. Keeping a failed manager long beyond the point of recognizing the problem to avoid the pain of change is an ominous sign to your top talent that you lack the leadership required to steer the ship successfully to port and they will abandon ship at the first reasonable moment.

If you’re making New Year’s resolutions with respect to your company, I urge you to review these lists, and the plethora of others available on the web from sources far more authoritative than me. Take positive action to attract and keep your top talent. And if you find yourself looking for a company that exhibits these desirable qualities, keep up your search. They are out there. And while no company is perfect, there are certainly some that far and away exceed others. So whatever you do, don’t give up hope of a better day.