How we pulled in talented people and kept them.

I roll over in bed to check my phone in the morning. 

The first thing my eyes focus on is more negative Google reviews absolutely crushing us on service. 

I hold my breath a little, skimming over the words because they’re pretty familiar. 

I remember thinking, if only I could get my A team on every day we’d turn the customer experience around.

I was Co-Owner of a massive venue called A. Baker at the time.

My best team were spread thin across the 7-day roster between 7 am and 10 pm.

It meant they never got the chance to work alongside the other greats to build momentum.

Instead, they were stuck supervising too many people who shouldn’t have been hired. 

It was a tough gig.

I’d watch the good ones eventually get tired of it all and leave, just missing the next good hire coming in the door.

I could never get them working together long enough to build momentum and create a brilliant culture. 

 I didn’t know it at the time but I was learning (the hard way) many of the greatest recruiting lessons of my career.

After getting out of that business and reflecting on the experience, I started applying the lessons I've learned to my current business - Three Mills.

The results were freaken remarkable.

Today, I want to share a few powerful lessons about attracting great people and holding onto them long enough to gain momentum.

Let’s dive in...

The first thing to note is that the recruitment process starts long before you recruit anyone. 

It’s about becoming the type of company that excellent people want to work for. 

I didn’t have that back then.

It was an incredible venue, an exciting precinct and an excellent kitchen team, but the service team was a mixed bag. 

So at Three Mills, I started asking myself:

• Do I have the leadership ability to help talented people do their best work?
• Do we have a senior leadership team that brilliant people would want to work under?
• Does our company have a variety of options for those people to build meaningful career pathways?

Sometimes it was a no which helped me focus on that area.

Then I listed all of the things people would get from working for us as a start-up craft bakery (other than a low salary in a small-biz).

This is things like:

• Purpose
• Lifestyle
• Career development

In my research, I also looked at what attracted people to work for the biggest companies in the world, and why some left.

I noticed common themes like:

• People joined because of opportunity, impact, values, missions, lofty goals, and the ability of the senior leadership team. 
• Some then quit because they couldn't affect change quickly enough, were bogged down in policy and procedures and felt undervalued.

There was a line that stuck with me that read:

People join companies, then quit bad Managers.

So build the type of business that good people want to join, and select your leadership team wisely to keep them.

Here are 5 things I started doing at Three Mills that helped me build to 135 people in the first 5 years: 

1. Hire For Attitude.

I’d heard that line a million times… 

Hire for attitude and train the skillset. 

For some reason in previous businesses, I still kept defaulting to looking for people with hospitality experience over attitude. 

I wanted to shortcut the effort of training or not deal with it at all.

But when I started Three Mills, I stopped looking for people with the perfect skills and started hiring for attitudes.

I can only say this now but… Damn I wish I started this earlier!

Fast forward to today and it's one of the most difficult recruiting markets we've seen. 

If you were going to start recruiting for attitude from similar industries, now is the time. 

Then combine it with a consistent training program and you'll be unstoppable.

When we started the combo of attitude+training, we found people who really wanted employment with us and are grateful for the opportunity to learn. 

2. Build In-house Training Instead of Hoping Others Will Do It.

Simple, structured, on-the-job training that builds a culture of learning and sets people up for success in future jobs is crucial.

Yet, back in 2014 I never did it. 

I just looked for people who I thought didn't need training and hoped they would fix my problems.  

If you combine that lack of structure with the reality that lots of people think they have nothing to learn after school, you have a real cultural battle on your hands.

Here's how I started to turn that around…

I showed new hires the enormous value of working in small organisations. 

Places where you’re hands-on with every part of the process. 

I demonstrated how they can apply everything they were about to learn to their future jobs beyond Three Mills

I made it about them, and not about the business.

The result was, people started staying longer and were more productive. 

And without much effort, momentum started to build and we could leverage those experienced people to keep building our simple training programs.

3. Create Brilliant Onboarding Processes

I’ve written about this in previous emails.

Again, it’s not something that was on my radar a decade ago.

But at Three Mills I started doing it on a basic level and have been improving it year on year. 

Fast forward a few more years and I suspect I’ll write this email saying that it was one of the critical pillars of our success.

The key to good onboarding is this:

1. Make new hires feel special and part of the team early on. 
2. Set them up for long-term success.

You don’t need complex processes at the start.

Just set a few automated reminders or email sequences to drip-send them all of the necessary information they need to succeed in your business over the first 3 months.

(Not all at once in a massive starters pack)

This can be photos, stories about the past, infographics, supplier profiles, staff profiles, products, scavenger hunts challenges, videos, books, activities and social events, etc.

Remember, people like to learn in tiny snippets so break your entire company document down instead of bombarding them on day one.

4. Get Your Managers on Board

Don’t assume your management team are on board with training new hires. 

I made that assumption…

The typical small business approach is to “throw new people in the deep end”.

The result is a management team that is left looking like idiots picking up the pieces around their day-to-day roles.

Your job as a leader is to sell your Managers on the idea of helping to train new hires.

Reframe their role not as a Manager, but as a mentor or coach so they see the value in recruiting for attitude, and then training the skills. 

All of your efforts will crumble if your team aren’t up for training others.

5. Start Playing The Long Game.

Anyone who applies for a job is clearly a fan, future customer or future employee. 

This database of people who didn’t make it on your team is another opportunity to build your network by giving them a great experience during the recruitment process and keeping them in your pipeline for later. 

Every person you don’t hire goes on to mature, learn and develop new skills. 

They also have discussions with their friendship network who is acutely aware of their friend’s strengths and weaknesses. 

These more talented friends will value the strict recruiting process and potentially apply in the future too. 

Reaching out to those who missed out once or twice a year to check in and follow their progress will massively decrease your recruiting costs and lead to the healthiest pipeline of potential talent for the future. 

This one tiny behaviour changed the game for us.

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Here's a quick summary:

1. Become the type of business that talented people want to work for.

2. Hire for attitude (actually do it).

3. Build simple, relevant and structured on the job training.

4. Break down your onboarding process into tiny pieces.

5. Get your managers on board as coaches.

6. Set reminders to reach out to people who didn't make it onto your team.

I really hope this helps.