Find Out What Motivates Your Team & How To Hire For Gaps

Following on from my previous article, Designing Career Paths with User Personas, you might be wondering how to apply the personas to your team and hiring strategy. It’s obvious that people want different things from their careers, but as an employer, how can you cater to so many different needs?!

Don’t panic — remember, you’re not trying to design for 500+ people, but 4 personas, the Climber, the Stayer, the Balancer, and the Experimenter. In order to figure out which types of people you have in your company, you’ll want to run a Career Persona Assessment. I do feel like I need a BIG disclaimer when suggesting doing an assessment. It seems dangerously close to a personality test, and you might get hung up on whether this does or doesn’t define you and your team.

But, bear with me. No one will fit perfectly into one persona, but for design purposes the Assessment can be an incredibly useful tool. Also, keep in mind that people change over time. What you and your team may value now might look very different in three years. I know for myself, after becoming a mother what I wanted from my career shifted. Working 10–12 hour days was not doable on 6 hours of sleep. I also wanted to have energy left over at the end of the day for my son, not to mention my husband.

Look at the Assessment as a starting point to help you design for more nuances in your career development tools and practices to support different career paths, rather than defining it for them. We are all special snowflakes.

Assessing Your Team

Alright — now we’re at the point of trying to figure out the make-up of your team. I’d recommend doing this Assessment anonymously at the company-wide level first. Then, this can become an optional tool for individuals to use when creating their Growth Plans. It could be particularly helpful for people who struggle to answer “where do you want to be in two years’ time?”

Career Path Assessment

Using a Likert scale, ask people to rank their level of agreement for each statement (e.g on a scale of 1–5, 1 = strongly disagree, 5 = strongly agree).

1. It’s important for me to know what my next career move will be.
2. I want to have impact and influence how things are done.
3. I want to be doing meaningful work that doesn’t consume my life.
4. I need to be regularly challenged and given stretch assignments.
5. I love what I do and want to keep developing my expertise.
6. It’s important to me to stay on top of the latest trends in my field.
7. My time is valuable and limited so I focus my energy on the highest impact things.
8. It’s important for me to unplug from work at the end of the day so I can recharge.
9. People often ask me for help or advice when they have questions about my field.
10. I like to go deep into the details so I understand everything fully.
11. I need to experiment and try new things to keep my edge.
12. I see solving hard problems as an opportunity for growth.

Scoring

Next, input the score for each question into the matrix below and voila! you’ll be able to see which archetypes best describes your and your team.

You may find by doing this that your company is heavily skewed (biased) towards one type. I’ve often seen startups inundated with promotion and salary increase requests from their Climbers. Likewise, at large organisations, Stayers can be so prevalent that risk taking and new ways of approaching problems are limited. While people do change priorities over time, the quickest way to make sure you have the right mix for your business and team is through hiring.

Balance Your Hiring

You might be thinking, “How am I supposed to figure out what someone’s career priorities are in interviews? I can’t ask questions like that!” True, you should never ask any personal questions in an interview — except maybe what they like to do outside of work. But let’s be honest, that’s a pretty lame question.

Given that, the best way to understand someone’s career persona is by listening to how they have approached their career up to this point. I’m a big fan of the Topgrading interview. (If you haven’t heard about it, definitely check out “Who — the A Method for Hiring”).

As part of this interview process, one of your interviews includes walking through a candidate’s CV in chronological order from their oldest job to most recent. This provides an excellent window into how someone approaches their roles, teams, and managers. I’ve put together some key themes that indicate how someone likes to approach their career.

The Climber

What to look for

• Drive — they make things happen and drive projects forward
• Leadership — they show a natural inclination for leadership even if it’s not a formal part of their job
• Promotions — they will have had many throughout their career
• Invited — they often get recruited for their next job and don’t stay at one company for more than 1–2 years

The Stayer

What to look for

• Specialised — they have deep expertise rather than broad
• Teachers — they love to impart their knowledge to others
• Detailed — they have amazing focus and patience to get into the guts of things
• Steady — they tend to have long tenures at companies

The Balancer

What to look for

• Purpose — they have a strong sense of the type of work that matters to them
• Prioritisation — they focus their energy based on what has the most value
• Understanding- they show a lot of compassion for others’ perspectives and limitations
• Boundaries — they are comfortable saying “no” and ask for help

The Experimenter

What to look for

• Curiosity — they like to learn about things that might not be directly related to their field
• Problem-Solving — they fall in love with problems and will go to any depth to figure them out
• Optimism — they have an attitude that anything is possible if you put your mind to it
• Humility — they are open about their failures and see it as a learning opportunity

Once you get used to listening for key words and phrases in interviews, it won’t be long before you become confident in assigning candidates to the personas and identifying what each wants from their career. I’m not saying this should be your main assessment criteria. However, using this as a lens can help make sure that what you need someone to prioritise in the role matches what they want to get out of it. It’s a win-win!

Have you given the Career Path Assessment a try? I’d love to hear what you think.