How do you attract and retain talent?
By growing them from the start.
Small and medium sized #Salesforce Partners will find it more difficult to grow and retain talent than the bigger GSI’s (Global System Integrators) sometimes because they aren’t able to match the salary, perks and benefits.
A few of the students in my Consulting Masterclass programmes who have pivoted from their own industries to join the Salesforce ecosystem have found it tough getting jobs.
The pandemic has forced many partners to reduce headcounts as companies freeze projects. However, the Salesforce market has exploded since the new year, as the future feels more stable with Brexit more or less ‘done and dusted’ and vaccination programme in place.
Jobs postings for Salesforce consultants, PMs, developers, QA has skyrocketed.
If you’re an SMB Consulting Partner, try to think about your talent growth strategy.
Grow and nurture junior talent because that will foster a tighter team of people who will stay because they want to, not because someone waves more money and perks at them – which will be the situation at the moment.
Hire graduates and new talent, and then send them to my Masterclasses.
So: Grow your own cucumber. 🥒
And that’s my cheeky pitch for today. 😁
Transcript
Hi. One of the challenges of small consulting partners, such as Salesforce, or Microsoft, is talent, recruiting talent, it’s not easy.
Because if you’re in the industry, and you’re a developer, or you’re a functional consultant with strong Ba, business analysis skills, and you’ve been in the game for a while, and you’ve got a lot of experience, you can demand quite a high salary. And that’s what attracts a lot of people into the sort of career.
If you are a small to medium size, or boutique size partner, is quite difficult to recruit and retain great talent, unless you’ve got a really good culture or you’ve got something special that keeps people there.
The reason for that is that a lot of us are looking for career progression. And we always want more, one better things. And sometimes we see companies or the size of companies as stepping stones.
So it might be that you have your sights set on a really large partner, a GSI, or a global systems integrator.
But you can’t quite get there yet.
So what you do is you join a small partners, you build your experience, and then you move on to a larger one, and so on and so forth.
And that’s just kind of human nature, the need to grow and get better. But this poses a challenge.
If you’ve answered the call of Salesforce in the fact that they are not really a rising star, because they they are one of the biggest software as a service company, but they seem to be seem to carry on growing and exploding and you want to hitch your waggon there on the company by starting up your own partner, how then do you grow and retain your own talent.
One method that larger consulting partners have found is to start up their own graduate recruitment programme graduate placement programme.
In this way they go into the universities and they get the biggest and the brightest, bring them in and induct them into the culture of your business. And they stay mainly because of the connections they make.
And if you make sure that your hygiene factors, the basic factors that keep people in a company, you pay the way you treat them and make sure they they have good internal challenges and progression and security, then they’re more likely to stay with you, especially if they’ve got a really strong cohort of people that they have been there that they came in with.
This is not something that a lot of small to medium sized partners can invest in, because it takes a lot of work. And you still may not get or retain the talent at the end of it. Because a lot of factors come into play.
And that’s the reason why I’ve designed my training programme, my math classes consulting master classes, that helps these partners at this end of the spectrum, to very quickly ramp up the skill set required to be a consultant and work well in a team.
And that by shortcutting, the process of getting and retaining young, new talent, the options that are open to them are offer really high salary to try and recruit somebody who’s really experienced to work on your project or investor time to grow and nurture younger talent.
But to have an internal graduate placement programme can be quite costly, which is why as I said I came up with this training master class programmes that helps them get there much much quicker because I feel that There’s so many new talent in the Salesforce ecosystem that know how to configure product and not use a product because of that amazing elearning platform that is trailhead, but they still don’t have the skills required to actually put it in a business.
How do you successfully implement a new system that goes along with managing, motivating change, and getting people to help you get to the end point of a really good system that users can use to enhance their work life.
So that’s the that’s the tip I wanted to share with you today, which is have a think about how you want to develop your own team and not just hire people from the outside because it’s always good to grow your own.
I mean, I grow cucumbers last year, and it was the best cucumber ever. I don’t have green fingers. So a lot of things die, but my cucumber kind of was okay.
And it was better than the one in the supermarket. So that’s my silly analogy. There you go.
I hope you found it useful. And I wish you a fantastic day.