As we embark on the digital age of recruiting we must, more than ever, ensure we are delivering on the key elements of talent attraction that serve to optimize hiring manager satisfaction, while also providing a best-in-class experience for the candidate. Having careers in both agency (3rd party) recruiting and the corporate world (scale operations, early career, executive recruitment, sourcing and leadership) for 15+ years, I have found successful recruiting organizations have the following three elements ingrained in each of their recruiters to serve at a high level on a consistent basis.
Category: Careers
The Secret to Amplifying Your Impact
On my LinkedIn page, I posted an update inspired by the book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, by Angela Duckworth. Motivated by the response I received, I wanted to explore this topic further in my first blog post!
No matter what job title is listed on my email signature, I’m an engineer by training and at heart. You can imagine my surprise, as I was reading Grit, when I came across these equations I’d like to share with you:
Achievement = Skill * Effort (Eq1)
Skill = Talent * Effort (Eq2)
Combine both equations, and you arrive at a formula that is the subject of today’s post:
Achievement = Talent * (Effort)^2 (Eq3)
Duckworth adeptly refers to this as “Effort counts twice.”
Finding new opportunities with Nashua Community College (NCC)
Part of the job of a talent attraction professional is uncovering ways to find talent with the right skill set to meet an organization’s needs. But what if the roles you’re trying to fill are in a niche market or the industry you’re searching is struggling to find, motivate and train skilled workers? Recently we ran into this very issue among our RF/M manufacturing and production workforce at our Hudson, NH Advanced Microelectronics Center (AMC). We had many qualified employees, but we needed more and that external talent pipeline had waned.
Enter the Microelectronics Bootcamp at Nashua Community College (NCC).
Culture and Values: More than Wall Décor
If I knew 10 years ago, the power of an engaged workforce and a living, breathing culture and set of values to influence the success of an organization, I’d have prioritized them above all else back then.
In recent years, I have worked with my leadership team and employees across the board, to define Mercury’s culture and core values and subsequently, to bring them to life, make them more than just wall decor. We’ve simplified them, and in return made them more achievable and more meaningful. We have woven them into the fabric of our business through our commitment to lifelong learning, employee engagement and baking them into our strategic operating plan. But we could not stop there. We’ve also made them measurable by aligning them to our personal contributions in our quarterly performance evaluations and by asking employees to rate the organization against them in a recent culture survey.
The Next Generation of RF Engineers
Along with the warm weather and long days, summer means a new group of co-ops. Here at Mercury Systems, where innovation drives each subsequent generation of new products, we depend on our high-performing engineering teams, and one critical element behind developing these teams is our co-op program.
When it comes to RF, there is so much theory to learn in school that there is often less opportunity to apply that theory to specific RF/microwave design challenges. Spending a summer working through actual designs and troubleshooting in the lab kicks off the process of developing the intuition and experience critical to becoming a successful engineer. At Mercury we take that one step further by putting co-ops to work on real projects where their contributions make a measurable impact on the final product.