Three topics from this years SIA to rock your business...

One of the brilliant yet challenging things about attending a conference such as the SIA is that there is so much rich, varied and relevant content, it's challenging to condense it down into bite-sized, implementable chunks that you can take back to your own business and put into action. I spent my three-hour plane journey back to Chicago, sifting through the pages of my chicken scratch notes that I've done my best to abridge into three key learns. I hope these will help any staffing leaders who were not fortunate enough to attend.

The great thing about leadership principals is that they can be effective and impactful at all levels of the seniority ladder. Whether you're the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, or a Senior Consultant planning on embarking on your first foray into management - these topics are relevant. 

So, what did I take away and what can YOU implement in your business tomorrow to drive success???

Technology - embrace or die

Recruitment is changing. Long gone are the days that a company’s success could be defined by the amount of times their sales people pick up the phone. Every second, innovation is driving the creation of new products designed to make our processes more efficient, our people more effective and our businesses more profitable.

For a startup this should inspire you as it's an opportunity to compete with those above. For an establish business it should scare and motivate you as the rest are coming and you need to stay ahead of curve.

Talking to the plethora of recruitment vendors present at the SIA was mind-blowing and highlighted the amount of tools you can have at your disposal, should you choose to listen. On the one hand I saw it as an exciting method of elevating my business above my competitors. On the other, I saw it as a stark and scary realization of just how good I needed to be to compete in this industry. In short, I understood that I need to embrace this innovation or face annihilation at the hands of the companies that do.

One tangible action I took away from this is to speak to at least 3 sales people each month about the innovative products they have on offer. This conference evolved the way I perceive sales people - prior to this I saw them as a time-sucking annoyance, selling a solution to a problem I did not have. Now I see them as my link to innovation. Am I going to buy everything I look at??? Of course not. But investigating 36 cutting edge innovations a year, will help me remain at the cusp of technology and based on what I learned this week, that's a place I need to be.

Build a "Talent Rich" Organization

There is an adage that the most precious commodity you have is Time. In staffing it's not, it's people. If there's one correlating factor linking together the successful business leaders I interacted with this week, it's that they all put the talent of their organization before anything else. If you do nothing else as a business leader but HIRE and RETAIN the best talent, you'd struggle to not be a success. So how do you build a "talent rich" organization according to these great leaders?

1) Exhaust all avenues of Internal Recruitment to attract the best talent and do not settle for anything but the best

2) Compensate competitively in all areas - including non-sales staff

3) Constantly develop the talent you have

Whenever you're next faced with an opportunity or problem, start the question with "who" and not with "how". Who can drive this business activity most effectively? Who can offer a solution to this problem we're facing? People are the answers, not actions and a "talent rich" organization understands that.

Purpose - not what you do, why you do it

Our final keynote speaker, author and business consultant Jason Jennings has consulted many of the world's finest business minds from Bill Gates to Warren Buffet to Ingvar Kampard. He's worked with the best and brightest companies in the world to analyze the themes behind their success and share these with the masses. Based on the vast array of data he's compiled, he found that Purpose was the golden thread linking it all together. So what is a "Purpose"? According to Jennings:

• It's bold
• It's not what you do, it's why you do it
• It's the non-financial reason of your business existence
• It fixes an injustice
• It's not a goal but a journey

I'd challenge you to ask yourself if your company/division/team has a true Purpose behind what you do. Engtal's purpose is to build a company that the world wants to work for - it's bold, why we do what we do, non-financial and injustice-fixing and will certainly be a journey we'll always be on!