Building Your Team #3: Nurturing Your Hires (Classic)

What's up, everyone. This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder’s Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product. This week on Founder’s Journal, we're doing things a little differently. We are dropping our second miniseries ever all about how to build your team. Instead of just one episode, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday this week, we're giving you two: a new show that you won't want to miss, plus a classic episode you maybe haven't heard before.

You're listening to a classic episode right now, number three in the series, but make sure you catch today's new episode as well. All of these shows together give you the tips and tricks you need to build your dream team. If you missed one and two on Monday, go back and check those out. Today we are talking about the importance of building relationships with potential employees. Let's hop into it. 

How to keep recruiting relationships warm

So I was talking to a candidate for a writing role at Morning Brew earlier today, it was for one of the editorial roles related to our paid product. I was chatting with him and I just really enjoyed the conversation. He was sharp. He had a great sense of humor. He had multimedia content experience, so audio, video, and social, and he refers to himself as a human Swiss army knife. And he just generally seemed curious and excited to find ways to constantly be a better version of himself as a person and a professional. And so what I said to him at the end of the conversation was that we'll keep him updated on this role and either way, we'll let him know whether we'd like to move forward or not, but regardless we should keep the conversation going because I thought he'd be a great fit for the Brew. And this made me think about how far too often, as managers, as founders, we cut our ties with candidates because they may not be the exact perfect fit for the exact perfect role today.

And not to say that he's not a perfect fit for this role, but I made sure to keep the door open. And I think the overall learning from this very specific experience within Morning Brew is that building up your talent or recruiting CRM or pipeline should be an absolute priority as a business. Hiring great talent is priority number one for a company and finding great talent is one of the hardest things you can do in business, especially in the type of tight and competitive job market that we have today. And we have hired people that initially weren't interested in a job at Morning Brew, or initially we didn't have a role open for them, but we were like, wow, this is an incredible talent.

Let's continue to build this relationship because this is the type of person that we need on our team at some point in time for any role. 

And so here's a recent example. Recently we hired a GM of B2B media. He's been running our entire B2B media business. His name is Jacob Donnelly. So B2B Morning Brew means Retail Brew, Marketing Brew, Emerging Tech Brew, soon to be HR Brew, basically all of our content that is about job functions or industries. And my co-founder Austin and myself had probably been talking with Jacob and building a relationship with him for at least a year-and-a-half before hiring him, if not longer. I was originally introduced to Jacob because Austin told me about Jacob's newsletter, it's called A Media Operator, and he writes it about what's going on in the digital media industry. And so what happened was I signed up for his newsletter and I really enjoyed it. It got me thinking more deeply about media, and I just emailed Jacob back. I replied to one of his newsletters and we just started talking. And for many months the conversation wasn't about him coming to work at the Brew or having a role that was perfect for him because candidly, we didn't have a role with—that was perfect for him. He was too senior for what we were hiring for at the time when we met him, but I just enjoyed learning from someone who was as intellectually curious about media and just driven to make himself better just as I was.

And I actually remember probably three months after meeting him and talking to him about his newsletter, we actually had him come in to Morning Brew’s office and do a Lunch & Learn where he talked about SEO and how to build smart SEO strategies as a company. And I thought this was a perfect opportunity to one, continue to build a relationship with him and give him an opportunity to get visibility in front of people in the media industry and two, to take someone who had a ton of expertise in an area of business that we didn't know and teach it to our organization. And so the way that I think about it at the end of the day is that I believe skill sets are way easier to hire for than the combination of values that you're trying to hire for in your business.

Build a pipeline of people who embody your values

I think our values as a company are function- and discipline agnostic. And if we're truly serious about hiring, according to our values, building up a pipeline of people proactively that we believe hit all four of our values—which is super rare—we should be doing that as much as humanly possible. So using the example of Jacob Donnelly or this writer that I was talking about at the top of the episode, these are people that embodied our values and we needed to find a way to include them in the business because it's so rare to find people that embody all four. So our values at the Brew, they’re being empathetic, being intellectually curious, being purposeful, and being a challenger.

And so what we found is, because it's rare to find someone who's—has it on all of these different values, getting these people to continue to be in conversation with us and building a network of it is so important. And this can be counterintuitive to how a lot of people run their businesses, because oftentimes decisions in business are made for immediate results. But this is an example where if you spend time building relationships with potential hires or potential employees, you're not going to see the benefit of maintaining conversations with these people that you could end up hiring a year down the road. But why is investing in these relationships so important? We picked our values for a reason.

Austin and I thought about, what is the version of ourselves as people that we want to be later in our career? And so let's pick values that we want to strive to embody and surround ourselves with people who already have these values. So we find people who are empathetic, intellectually curious, purposeful, and have a challenger mentality because we want to be ten out of tens in those values by the end of our career as ourselves. And I think the big thing to emphasize here is that most companies just have a general lack of emphasis or thoughtfulness around keeping, hiring, and recruiting relationships warm with people that embody your values. Generally, all you hear about is a sales pipeline, a sales CRM in a business. Using Salesforce or any sales CRM is such an important piece of the business because it is tied to revenue of the business, and I think the way to remember this is at the end of the day, revenue in a business would not exist without people in the business. So taking your recruiting and people CRM as seriously as your sales CRM, I think that is a key to unlocking incredible success as a business that most founders and managers don't focus on. So now that you understand the point, I want to provide a few ways that I see us at Morning Brew better managing our recruiting and people CRM so that you can think about it in the context of your company. 

Three strategies to make the hires you want and need

The first strategy is hiring a dedicated recruiter or talent acquisition manager earlier than you think to build out a process around keeping relationships with VIP candidates warm. And I promise you that investment will decrease the price you end up paying for external recruiters in the future, because you are proactively building relationships with potential employees. The second is having an organized ATS, and before you say to me, I have no idea what an ATS is, I had no idea what it originally meant and I asked our HR person before this episode what it meant. It means applicant tracking system and basically all it is, is a piece of software where you track your recruiting. So think Salesforce for people, and you can build a standard process around managing your whole recruiting process in your applicant tracking system, where you have a way of filing away your most exciting candidates who may not have been a fit for the role, but you believe should be in kind of this VIP group that you continue to nurture periodically.

That's another great way to organize your CRM for the people who you want to keep fostering relationships with. So these are two ways that you build your talent pipeline proactively. I'll talk about one more way to nurture your hires after a quick break. 

Okay, let's hop back into it. So we've talked about hiring a dedicated recruiter faster and earlier than you think you need to in the life of your business. And we've talked about using an organized ATS, or applicant tracking system, which basically acts as the people version of Salesforce or a sales CRM. 

Now the third strategy for building a pipeline of talent is something that I've seen a lot of companies across many industries do, and that is creating some sort of fellowship program where basically you have the ability to build relationships with and help develop young talent very shortly after they graduate from college and start their careers.

I've seen the Atlantic and Business Insider do this in media. I've seen accelerator programs like Techstars do this in the startup and investing world. And I think this idea of building a collective of young talent, who applies to a fellowship program is a win-win. Young professionals gain exposure to a real-world business, but also a company or you as a manager, get exposure and build relationships with great young talent where you hopefully are the first impression that they have out of school. And I think this can be a really powerful thing, not just for Morning Brew, but honestly, for any company. One other idea that I had was something that we don't currently do, but it's almost similar to what a Harvard Business Review or a Fast Company or a Forbes would do, which is a contributor network where you end up working with non full-time writers that can apply to be contributors to Morning Brew.

And the whole idea is that we can actually build an incubator of great business writing talent, who isn't full-time at the start, they just contribute great long form website content or video content or social content. But over time, as we build a relationship, this can be a great kind of filter for finding awesome talent and building a relationship with them before we decided we want to hire them full time. I almost think about it like a farm system in major league baseball. 

Where to get started

So if you're just trying to think about where do you start with all of this, right? You buy into the idea of building a great talent pipeline because hiring people is more important than anything, but you don't have the means to use an ATS right now, or a hire an internal recruiter, where do you start? Honestly, it's going to sound like stupid simple, but this is where you start. Just keep a spreadsheet for yourself of every time you connect with someone that you aren't sure how you would slot them into a role in your company, or they applied for a role and they're just not a perfect fit right now, but you think they embody all of the values of your company. Also, an interesting thing to think about here is you don't even have to do this when you have a company. Say you're someone who has a side hustle, you're thinking about going full-time with your company, but you aren't yet. Start this spreadsheet early, start as you have your networking conversations, build up this CRM so when you go full-time, you are so far ahead of the game in hiring talent and just find ways to revisit your spreadsheet regularly and keep the relationship warm.

So for everyone that has been listening, my main lesson from my conversation with this amazing young editorial candidate earlier is we need to take our people and hiring CRMs just as seriously as we take our sales CRMs. And there are a number of things like I just mentioned that we can do from low-lift to high-lift to make sure we are building these relationships often and early as a company. And I promise you, it pays off literally a dozen employees at Morning Brew right now are people that we didn't immediately recruit or hire upon meeting them. It took time to know if they'd be a good fit. It took time for them to know if we'd be a good fit for them, and also took time for a role to open up that would make sense for them to fill.

Now, I'd love to hear from you. What specifically do you do to keep relationships going with candidates that impress you, but now is not the right time to hire them? Send an email to alex@morningbrew.com or DME on Twitter @BusinessBarista with any thoughts or questions that you have about the episode. And finally, if you enjoyed the show, please leave a review for Founder’s Journal on Apple Podcasts. It is the number one way to grow the show, so I'd love for you to help me and this community get to 750 reviews for the pod. As always, thank you so much for listening and I'll catch you next episode.