This past month I’ve had a number of CEOs reach out asking for help attracting talent. With a shortage of talented software engineers, digital marketing managers, and SaaS sales reps, competition is strong to attract the best and brightest. Many CEOs have a hard time owning this but a failure to attract talent starts with them.
Here are a few thoughts on CEOs and attracting talent:
- Talent is attracted to environments that promote autonomy, mastery, and purpose (see Dan Pink’s book Drive)
- Corporate culture starts at the top and strong cultures attract strong talent
- Absent a strong culture and interesting work, companies that can afford it resort to paying well above market salaries
- Best practices for retaining employees also apply to recruiting employees
- Recruiting and attracting talent should be viewed as first-class initiatives, and not ignored
Attracting talent is one of the top five priorities of a CEO, and most CEOs neglect it. When a startup is having a hard time recruiting talent, know that it starts with the CEO.
What else? What are some other thoughts on the idea that the failure to attract talent starts with the CEO?
David Cummings on Startups 
This is really great info. Just so you know this is the topic we will be addressing amongst others at our April 7th member only lunch session that I am leading with two experts in this area. We are really looking froward to it!