No one is complaining of an overabundance of technical talent. The lack of highly skilled tech workers is a challenge everywhere. And while there are some common strategies for attracting and retaining talent, each region and industry has a different starting point that requires careful planning about strategies that will work best long term. The Granite State touts itself as a high-tech haven with a large highly educated, skilled workforce. Much of NH’s tech workforce, though, is the result of in-migration, and trends show in-migration in NH is slowing. There’s been more emphasis on cultivating our homegrown talent, but NH will still need to compete to keep them here when Boston-area wages are tempting them away.
For NH, the five key tenets to attracting technical talent are: purpose, challenge, infrastructure, compensation and abandoning insular attitudes.
Purpose and Vision
People leave managers, not companies. Managers and leaders often fail to make a compelling connection between the role of a technical contributor and the firm’s purpose and vision. To attract talent, share a compelling vision for how the company will make the world a better place. And most importantly, create a sense of purpose by connecting the individual’s role and responsibilities to the vision. Explain how their contributions are critical to fulfilling the vision. To retain talent, repeat this process frequently, both as the vision for the company evolves and the individual’s role, responsibilities, and those of fellow team members continue to evolve.
Challenge and Opportunity
To build and scale a company based on a vision of “what could be,” it’s imperative to see people for “who they could be.” The easy part is to create opportunities for staff to be challenged, requiring them to develop new skills and relationships.
The hard part, yet most critical, is to provide the resources and support network for those skills and relationships to be developed. Specialized industry conferences, local technology meetups and more formal educational programs are effective ways for technical staff to step out of the day-to-day routine and learn something new while developing relationships with peers at other organizations embarking on similar journeys. This is highly effective for attracting talent too, as your staff can be your most effective recruiters.
Be sure to enable an environment where knowledge can be shared with the team; the “lunch and learn” is a particular effective and efficient format for knowledge sharing.
Infrastructure
Talent will vote with their feet when faced with continued infrastructure frustration, and will see a lack of investment as a sign of poor long-term viability of a company and a region. Take ownership of the issues. Find out what concerns your team members have, and fight for those concerns. If it’s transportation, get involved in important discussions like extending commuter rail service from Boston. If it’s an office environment that is too noisy and prevents opportunities for focus, change the layout.
For the talent already on the team, these efforts make a huge impact when they see their concerns are taken seriously. For the talent yet to join, the first impression of getting to your office and walking in only happens once, and you can be certain they’re imagining in that moment if that is someplace they would be excited to be every day.
Compensation
Have meaningful compensation discussions with staff. Understand their individual risk versus reward profile for how they think about salary, bonuses, equity and benefit compensation. Depending on the stage of the company, what’s possible for compensation will evolve, but so will the expectations of your team members as they evolve their careers.
Some of those conversations will evolve together, while others will not. For conversations about divergent expectations, avoid trying to prolong a relationship that is fundamentally flawed; instead, help that team member find the right opportunity for them (either elsewhere in your organization, or some place else). They will remember that forever, and in some cases, may return. Welcome them with open arms.
The dialogue and process here are more critical for a successful long-term relationship than the final compensation number. Talent that makes an employment decision based solely on a number will likely leave for the next opportunity shortly thereafter for the next number. Companies and team members that embrace constructive dialogues on evolving compensation will build more sustainable value over the long-term.
Abandon Insular Attitudes
Work closely with other organizations to further common causes; aligned voices are stronger together than apart. Embrace your neighbors, and think as one ecosystem. For comparison, drive an hour North, East or South in central California, you’re still a part of the “Bay Area” or “Silicon Valley” tech ecosystems, yet in the Northeast, artificial barriers are erected between “Boston,” “Manchester,” “Portsmouth,” “Durham,” and others. Tear those barriers down, and work together.
Attend and help promote awareness for events held by multiple regional tech councils (nhhtc.org and masstlc.org). Get involved in multiple entrepreneurial philanthropic communities (efnh.org and tugg.org). Make yourself available as a mentor to multiple startup accelerators and supporting organizations (techstars.com, alphaloft.org and i-lab.harvard.edu among others). Connect employees with professors and faculty throughout the region as guest lecturers (start with alma maters).
The closer NH works together with its neighbors, the louder and more compelling the tech community’s story as a region will become, not only in attracting new technical talent and retaining those we already have, but inspiring the next generation to pursue a career in technology and fulfill that pursuit here.
Cory von Wallenstein is CEO of Adored, a Manchester mobile loyalty and real-time promotion startup he co-founded after a six-year tenure at Dyn Inc. where he was CTO. For more information, visit getadored.com.
Current Issue - May 2024