“Attract quickly, hire slowly.”
That sentiment comes from Dave McClure, venture capitalist and founding partner at 500 Startups, an Internet start-up seed fund and incubator program in Mountain View, Calif. He was part of a panel discussion on recruiting at the War for Talent event this week, in San Francisco.
For me, that phrase epitomizes how company brands are built and maintained, and how reciprocal the ebb and flow of concept to founding team to scaling a company truly are. What’s interesting is that most new jobs are created by start-ups, but most of the employed work for larger companies. So if a startup makes it and grows, they become a multifaceted brand. Facebook is just one exciting example: They’re about to go public, but just look at LinkedIn, as well as many others.
At whatever point in the growth stage of a company, each person added to the team, whether full-time, part-time or contract, incrementally changes the persona of the company, the internal and external brands, which are what make the company a multifaceted brand. The goal is to encourage hopefully happy folks’ individual brands to shine through and share the larger brand love — which in turn drives further visibility and growth.
Hence, we have McClure’s “attract quickly, hire slowly” formula. Even if we applied that maxim primarily to start-ups, I’d argue that successful larger companies apply it, as well. Whether you believe hiring for cultural fit is a reality or not — and I bet many of you believe it is — the great diverse yet loosely unified collective is what makes the brand shine inside and out.
And a really big marketing and ad budget, too — at least to shine outward, because management, marketing and recruiting still own the “expression” of the unified external brand. The figurative “half-life” of that depends on how unified the internal brand is. It is important to note, however, that more than ever — before that internal brand solidifies — many on the company team are loyal to the work, not necessarily the brand. Keeping your teams excited about the work helps productivity go up; revenue increases, and the brand equity increases, too.
And then you can have a bigger marketing and ad budget, as well as the organic brand equity, to attract new customers (employees and buyers) quickly, create more exciting work quickly, and let the brand simmer to a slow boil.
We enjoyed all your tweeting wisdom yesterday. Following is a slide show of this week’s #TChat’s choicest tweets. If you missed the preview, just click here.
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