Attracting New Ideas and New Talent

This week's guest post is contributed by Mark Silverberg, president of Technoform North America.

Given the state of the U.S. economy and high rate of unemployment, I was shocked to learn that there are currently over 25,000 job openings in Cleveland, Ohio. How could this be? What are the effects of unfilled jobs on businesses and communities? What common lessons apply to the development of both sectors?

Last week I attended the kick-off summit of the Global Cleveland initiative. This project seeks to attract 100,000 newcomers to Cleveland by 2020 by making our city a place of opportunity for people of all ethnic and international backgrounds. Given the fact that the Cleveland metropolitan area has lost 50% of its residents in the past 10 years, it’s clear that the city needs a new population growth model.

A lack of qualified talent hinders businesses of all sizes in all industries throughout our nation. The economic impact of the unfilled jobs amounts to trillions of dollars of lost revenue.

It became clear to me during the Global Cleveland summit that many of the same tools can be used to attract, connect with, and retain new talent for both municipalities and businesses such as ours. Here are some key points:

• Creating welcoming communities is crucial to the success of your efforts. What would this look like in your company? For ideas you can ask your new team members to identify what worked to attract and retain them, and what’s missing? How culturally diverse are your welcoming efforts? Many plants I visit have majority Hispanic, Hmong, or Haitian workforces. We need to be aware that there are different levels on which prospective employees connect to a new employer or community, and that success is not an accident but a result of creative, sustained effort.
• Fostering strong networks within our companies can create a web of connections that bind people together. This can have tangible results in retaining employees and creating stable work teams.
• Leveraging relationships in ethnic and other affinity groups can be an effective way to attract and retain newcomers. Do you have workers from certain backgrounds that could help you reach out to their communities to help you attract new talent? Are all of your newcomers aware of the community programs that exist to can help them with integration challenges?
  

The colleges and universities in Cleveland, like many other cities, attract a diverse pool of domestic and international students. Targeted programs to give these students opportunities during their education have many benefits i.e. the students experience a North American work environment and our companies get fresh ideas and new cultural influence within our teams. Integration of these students into your workforce while they are in school often leads to a relationship that will endure after graduation. Our company consistently practices this principle by having interns work in our business, and moving them between countries whenever possible.

New ideas can come from interns and international students, and employees from different industries and backgrounds. At the Global Cleveland conference the HR Director of Forest City Management (FCM), a real estate developer with major holdings, cited the example of a college intern from Asia who completed a project on sustainable building as part of her college studies. She then led a project to evaluate implementation of sustainable building within FCM, and now heads this department at their company.

Strong, vital company cultures are more diverse than in years past. This diversity can strengthen team decision-making abilities and cohesiveness. In our company, openness to different cultures is a core tenet of our Vision, Principles and Philosophies. (Our tooling division in Germany is led by a woman from Afghanistan, one of our Bautec divisions in Germany is lead by an Italian woman, etc). Diversity is key to our long-term success.

Where is the job growth in the future? In Cleveland, it is in the education and medical sectors. The Cleveland Clinic, the largest employer in Ohio, is successfully employing many of these strategies, however the region must do its part to fuel the Clinic’s continued expansion. Our construction industry competes for highly skilled jobs with all industries, especially growth industries. Companies and communities alike wrestle with issues of how to aggressively increase economic vitality.

I believe companies and cities/regions that integrate creation of healthy, diverse cultures with economic vitality can create sustainable advantages in the long run. It’s people that make companies great, not bricks and mortar.

Interested in contributing a guest post? Email the editor at mheadley@glass.com, subject: USGNN Blog.