https://youtu.be/J1XNsdeRqi8
Chelle Johnson is a seasoned career and talent leader, strategist and coach with over 20 years of experience with medium-sized to fortune 50 companies. She is also the founder and CEO of Best You Career Advantage, an online visionary career coaching service that supports clients through all stages of career search and development. We talk about attracting the best talents, the benefits of emotional onboarding, and creating a culture of inclusivity, diversity, and belonging.
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Attract Talent with Chelle Johnson
Our guest is Chelle Johnson, who is a seasoned talent attraction and acquisition specialist who owns her craft at fortune companies like Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, and Comcast. She lived and worked in Asia, Latin America, has an MBA. She also speaks Spanish, and she believes in diversity and inclusion and how this process can be leveraged by employers to attract talent. So welcome to the show, Chelle.
Thank you so much. Super excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
It's great to have you here. So let's start, you know, my first question is really your journey. So you've been with these fortune companies for many, many years, and then you broke out and you started your own entrepreneurial venture. How did this come about and how's it going?
So I have been super blessed in my career to work for some of the best companies in the world. And in 2019, I just felt really burnt out and completely like my soul had been sucked into the corporate institution. And so I decided to make a change for me. So I started my company, Best You Career Advantage in the fourth quarter of 2019. And you know, who knew that in March of 2020 we would have this huge pandemic, but I was really lucky because unemployment was at the highest at 14.4%.
So I got to be of service to all of those people that were laid off and really scared in 2020. So I've only been in business for about a year and a half, and it's actually going quite well. I love it. I'm able to do what I'm driven by and what I'm passionate about, which is helping high achievers in STEM, which is science, technology, engineering, and math, to really have an abundant life and abundant career.
That's awesome. And don't us, small businesses, small to medium size or privately owned businesses, don't we need those people to recruit into our ranks so that we can accomplish what we want to accomplish with great talent. So how should business owners think about this whole idea of talent acquisition. It's no longer hiring, it's about acquiring the fuel for our organizations that can actually move it forward. What should be the right mindset for that?
So, small companies and entrepreneurs absolutely need to think about the talent that they bring on because the employees represent your brand, your entire product. And so, talent acquisition for small employers and small companies is really essential. And I've actually done several, I've recruited several directors and vice presidents for small companies throughout the United States in the past year, and really understanding where they want to take sales, for example, in building sales and lead generation and CRM systems, bringing in the right person, it will make or break your company.
The same can be true with bringing in a technology person or the right human resources person. So aligning the right talent to the business is what makes or breaks the product, the customer engagement, the revenue. And so as a solopreneur, I know what it's like to be the CXO, if you will. But I also really understand that entrepreneurial journey, because I grew up with two entrepreneurs as parents. My father owned his own business. And so I'm lucky to have the knowledge and the expertise from the big global companies. But now I really take that down and help small businesses to implement processes that are standardized, repeatable and scalable so that they can hire the right people.
Talent acquisition for small businesses is not just about hiring; it's about acquiring the fuel for our organizations that can actually move it forward.Share on X
Okay, so that's very interesting. So tell me a little bit about these processes. How does one go about implementing processes so that their talent acquisition program is systemized and then, you know, ad hoc?
So the first thing that you have to do is, for me, small businesses that really understand their culture and know the kind of person to bring on can leverage the right type of assessments and looking for the right people. So there's lots of applicant tracking systems that are out there for small businesses. And for example, if one of your audience members are like you're at 500,000, you want to get to 3 million, you need to be able to put in the right process for, is it the applicant tracking system, you have to have the right onboarding system, you have to have the right tools for interviewing, your payroll system needs to be set up, and anything from leveraging PEOs to leveraging smaller businesses or even fractional HR or fractional talent officers like me can really help small businesses do that.
So what's a PEO? Help me out here, please, Chelle.
A PEO is a private employer organization, and they do benefits. They offer benefits through brokers. They offer very basic employee relations, consultation. They can help with basic human resources types of processes.
So it's like employee leasing companies, they sometimes called?
Yes, exactly. It's a outsourced leasing company and private companies or small businesses do leverage PEOs or HR fractional or chief talent fractional officers just like me.
Got it. So, you mentioned a couple of things here, which really is interesting. So you talked about interview tools and onboarding as being really critical. So could you elaborate a little bit on this? What kind of interview tools are we talking about here and what's the best practice onboarding look like?
Okay, so interview tools are essential because you have to ask the right questions to hire the right people. And I have taught over 600 hiring leaders globally on how to develop the right interview questions, to ask the right technical questions. There are lots of assessments out there that companies from call centers to restaurants to audiovisual companies can use in order to find the right people.
Interview tools are essential because you have to ask the right questions to hire the right people.Share on X
So the right interview tools really are about the hiring leaders and the group that's bringing on to ask the right questions and to hear what they're looking for so that they can bring on the right talent that is the right technical fit and culture fit. Now once they have hired someone, they have to onboard them, because onboarding is actually huge in retention of those employees. And onboarding includes everything from assuring that the new employee has a computer on their first day, understands the expectations and the goals of the position, has a buddy to align with to welcome them into the organization.
And as all of us know, we are now doing a lot of things hybrid or remote. So what does a small business remote onboarding look like? It's not just on-the-job training and say, oh, welcome, here's the t-shirt. Although the t-shirt is important because it's part of the culture. But it's really the belonging cues and the culture cues that are set, not just from the onboarding, but from the tone of the first contact of when the organization or the small business reaches out to the potential employee.
Wow, so can you give me an example of, or each of a belonging cue and a culture cue?
Yes, a belonging cue is, and I get this from the book Culture Code by Daniel Coyle. It really talks about what are the norms in your culture? And in Zappos, for example, or for the San Antonio Spurs, Popovich is the coach of the Spurs. And even they're the most winning team in NBA. And when they win, they all win together. When they lose, they lose together. It's like a family.
And then, and also the CEO of Zappos calls them collisions. He wants people to collide with each other that, So what are those cues? How are you, or how are your clients or the audience colliding with you? How are they interacting with you? How should the new employee interact with you? And what is that, what do those interactions look like from a culture perspective? So that's what I mean.
So it's basically what are the modes of communication and engagement inside the company and people have to understand on their first day what it looks like and how the culture works basically?
It's more than just having a vision and values. The hope is that from a talent acquisition perspective that the small businesses have really assessed by asking questions like, tell me about which one of our values best aligns with your values. And help us understand how you have developed a vision for your business. So it's aligning all of those things, but it's really more of what's acceptable from the communications and modes of communication, and then just acceptable within the nonverbal cues, if you will. So it's really setting up the culture from the beginning so that retention is high.
Yes, there is another book, and I won't remember the author, but the title is Moments. And what it talks about is that people don't remember all the experience, but they remember the emotionally charged moments. And I think the author gives the example of going to Disney World or Disneyland and, you know, dragging the kids around and queuing up in these lines for hours and eating the, you know, the lousy hot dog. But as long as the kids meet Mickey Mouse and as long as they go on this, I don't know, space cruise or whatever and they get the great experience there, then what's gonna stay with the family is going to be the peak experiences rather than these average experiences or maybe slightly negative experiences.
