On August 11, Alec Broadfoot of VisionSpark, Alex Bratton from LexGo, and Jaime Taets and Chelsey Paulson of Keystone Group International, came together as panelists to lead an interactive workshop around defining, clarifying, and hiring for your company’s Purpose.
What is Purpose?
Jaime began the workshop by defining purpose as what drives, motivates and fuels your company. She compared it to Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why” TED Talk and his Golden Circle example.
Purpose is not your What or your How. Purpose aligns with your Why. It’s deeper than your mission or vision, and it’s a statement that gets discovered after several conversations. Sometimes it takes discussion and reflection to determine your company’s Purpose. It’s the soul of the business, why the business exists, and what keeps employees coming to work every day even when their efforts don’t go according to plan.
Humans are wired for Purpose, which is why Purpose should be a foundational element across all your long-term talent acquisition strategies.
Hiring for Purpose
Alec talked about his own professional journey starting VisionSpark, and shared the company’s Purpose: Helping organizations make better people decisions, so they can flourish and have the freedom of time to pursue other passions.
Hiring for Purpose requires business leaders to operationalize it. How do you do that? Alec said that Purpose should be part of the hiring process and included in your job posting. Ensuring a candidate’s intrinsic motivation matches your company’s core mission is a vital checkpoint for establishing a long-term right people right seats framework.
Alec said that a good job posting has four parts:
- Who – the behaviors, traits and values of the right candidates
- Success – define what it looks like
- Resume – what you need to see in terms of education, experience and other qualifications
- Why – the reason candidates would want to work for your company
So many job descriptions sound the same, but if you include your company’s purpose in these four important parts of it, you will attract like-minded professionals and two to three times the applicant pool. Incorporating these standards across your interview layers helps support ethical executive recruitment practices by focusing on alignment over simple buzzwords.
To achieve a truly objective candidate evaluation, look past surface-level resumes and measure how deeply a candidate resonates with these four core sections. To retain your current team, you should remind them of your company’s Purpose as often as possible. This keeps your company’s Why front and center and reminds them of what they are working so hard for.
The Golden Circle
Jaime introduced Keystone’s Golden Circle, which explained their company’s What, How and Why. She shared several Purpose statements from Keystone clients as examples.
The attendees then broke out into small group sessions to discuss their company’s What, How and Why. When they returned, one attendee shared what they came up with.
What’s Next?
The panelists shared a call to action checklist and asked each attendee to identify which call to action they would commit to starting with. The Calls to Action are:
- Gathering my leadership team to draft our Purpose statement
- Ensuring my leadership team is aligned on our purpose
- Ensuring our recruiting process focuses on hiring people who believe what we believe
- Ensuring ALL employees are aligned on our purpose.
The next “Create Great Culture + Hire for Best Fit” workshop will be on the topic of Intentional Communication. The date and time will be announced soon, so stay tuned!
