Gautam Ghosh’s post, “The Brand is the Talent,” (also seems to work if you say the talent is the brand) makes some great points and directs you to a short, pithy video of Tom Peters speaking (on a slide that says “Brand = Talent”) and a blog post from Peters called “Competing To Achieve Excellence: You Are Your Only Competitor!“.
Ghosh singles out a passage in Peters’ post in which Peters says in part:

it’s not an externally directed “war to snatch talent from the other guy” by “being more aggressive than the competition”—but an internally directed competition against ourselves (and our outrageously strong beliefs about people) in which we aim to create an unimaginably attractive workplace.

I also like Peters’ comment that:

I contend that the bedrock of finding and keeping and co-creating with great folks is not about clever tools to induce prospective “thems” to “shop [live] with us,” but a 99% internal effort to create such an exciting, spirited, entrepreneurial, diverse, humane “professional home” that people will be lining up by the gazillions (physically or electronically) to try and get a chance to come and live in our house and become what they’d never imagined they could become!

Peters also links to a set of his slides on the topic.
However, the money quote for my post comes from Ghosh’s post:

Think about great retention. And great recruiting will happen.

I had an interesting conversation with a law student who asked for a bit of my time to get a little advice about the job market and the profession this weekend. It made me think about recruiting and how many firms seem to focus on recruiting in ways that are difficult to fathom. The approaches make little sense and the turnover among those recruited is immense. Years ago, when I was on the steering committee for the St. Louis Minority Clerkship Program, I was struck by how the role of retention was far more significant that the role of recruiting in making positive steps in improving diversity in law firms. Unfortunately, the lack of emphasis on retention resulted in poorer results over the long term than the improvements in minority recruiting promised.
All of this fits in with the thinking and preparation I’m doing for the upcoming webinar that I’m doing about the role technology can play in law firm recruiting and lawyer retention. The role that the use of technology can play in recruiting seems to get all the attention, but the role technology can play in retention is the more important piece of the puzzle and the part that I want to emphasize in the webinar. If you are interested in these topics, I hope you’ll attend the webinar, but I also hope that you’ll read the posts I’ve mentioned and think about their implications.
[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (https://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]
Upcoming webinar: On September 27 at 12:00 Central, Aspen Knowledge will present Frank Gillman and Dennis Kennedy on “Winning the Battle for Legal Talent with Technology.” Information and registration information here. Please mention that you heard about the webinar on DennisKennedy.Blog.
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