How to Attract Top Talent: Interview with Joe Jaffe, CEO and Co-Founder of Evol8tion
Attracting talent is undeniably a big challenge for today’s brands. Marketers struggle to promote their industry and communicate its career opportunities, while academic curricula needs to evolve to meet the changing needs of brands in a digital, data-driven world. Joe Jaffe, CEO and co-founder of Evol8tion, is passionate about recruiting top-tier tech talent into the advertising industry. Evolu8tion works to close the skill gap that exists between big brands and small, agile startups by facilitating collaboration. Jaffe discussed his belief that every corporation has a “startup soulmate” and explained how brands can work with startups to solve business challenges and create the kind of environments that attract Millennials.
Q. Do you have any tips for brands on how to attract talent with tech and data analysis skill sets?
A. This will probably be one of the biggest imperatives for large corporations and brands to consider over the coming years: how to attract and retain the best and brightest Millennials and those in the generation that proceeds them. During the past five years, we’ve seen two things: younger talent resigning from their jobs to join innovation boutiques or startups and those that joined startups having more senior-level positions than people who stayed the course in larger brands.
Young Millennials don’t care if they’re not on a career track in a big company. They’re coding and developing on the side and need to be in a flexible environment. For every step forward in a large corporation, there is a step back. This creates an environment that Millennials do not want to work in. It’s almost impossible for a company to go one quarter without a reorganization, restructure, budget cut, new CEO, new CMO, or new agency. It’s no wonder there is an acute lack of innovation, progress, speed, and other startup-like qualities at the corporate level.
Q. What are the top three cultural traits that companies can learn from startups?
A. No. 1: Have not just a tolerance, but an appetite, for risk.
Risk-adverse culture is crippling organizations. If you interview entrepreneurs and ask if they’ve ever failed, they’ll reply “today or yesterday?” They’ve been told “no” so many times that they take it for granted. The concept of risk is relative today. Sticking to the status quo is much riskier than trying to make a breakthrough.
No. 2: Pivot
Taking risks leads to pivoting. Brands have to change course when they fail. Pivoting is a natural part of startup culture, and it’s something they’ve been able to teach brands.
No. 3: Collaboration
Evol8tion has done close to 70 pilot programs, and brands are blown away when they do “design sprints” with startups. Everyone is in the meeting and chiming in. More importantly, engineers and developers challenge corporate, siloed environments, which are impediments to innovation.
Q. What is a first step that brands can take toward incorporating their “startup soulmates” into their businesses?
A. Evol8tion’s process is called the “bowtie framework.” Ultimately, the process is a solution that consists of four steps: education, evaluation, execution, and exit. The first step, education, allows brands to become empowered through knowledge. Some brand managers have a point of view on something that they haven’t experienced themselves and need to be educated.
Once you roll up your sleeves and try it out, that’s when you understand the power and potential of technology. This is about applying technology solutions to real business problems and challenges. Otherwise, it’s a solution to a non-existent problem. The next step is a test. It’s important to get one small win under your belt. The education component comes first, then a small win, or even a loss. But, create a pilot as proof of concept.
The goal is to get to the point where you’re spending 10 percent of your marketing budget on innovation. Most brands are flat lining because they are more worried about automating than innovating, but they just end up automating the status quo. Brands have to be more inspiring and effective in terms of how they connect with customers. They should be experiencing things like Pokémon Go, rather than reading about them.
Q. Does this change for brands with limited budgets?
A. It’s more difficult to get senior-level buy in to invest in a workshop that develops employee skills than it is to invest in a super bowl commercial, even though it’s a lot cheaper. If a smaller company can’t invest 10 percent of its marketing budget in innovation, it can divide by 10 until it’s doable. For 0.1 percent, brands can get a lot for their money. Innovative initiatives can be quite expensive if a brand does them by itself. But, costs go down when it works with tech startups.
For more information on attracting and keeping top talent, check out the ANA’s Insight Brief on Recruiting Talent. For more information on improving organizational culture, read new research from the ANA.
Source
"How to Attract Top Talent: Interview with Joe Jaffe, CEO and Co-Founder of Evol8tion." ANA, 2016.