As more people in New Zealand (and in other countries) make the choice to become tertiary qualified, there is evidence of an interesting trend occurring, whereby despite newly qualified high achieving graduates having acquired some of the most up-to-date knowledge in their respective fields, some employers are avoiding employing these people seemingly out of anxiety/ fear that the graduate may have a knowledge base which is deeper and/ or broader than their own.
This is an attitude that isn’t peculiar to just graduates either. The same avoidance tendency is being seen by some recruitment professionals in respect of well seasoned high achieving experienced people also.
Employers who display this tendency are missing-out on injecting their businesses with considerably talented people, which is at the detriment of their business, and a decision which is causing talented individuals to either transition out of the industry that they were trained to be proficient in and/ or relocate to an alternative region/ country in search of employer mindsets that are more embracing of talented people.
The more commercially mature and savvy business owners/ managers who understand the considerable value that a talented person can inject into a business, instead have an attitude of “we’ll recruit the best people we can afford”. These business owners/ managers embrace and nurture talented people – they don’t fear them.
Consequently, these businesses tend to flourish, due to having written well defined career paths and by providing ongoing professional development (training) opportunities for incoming talented people. In return for being embraced and empowered by their employer, these talented people respond by injecting the best of themselves into the business and often stay with the business for a long period of time.
These savvy business owners also understand that if the talented individual proves themselves as a high achieving employee now, then later on the same individual may just be a prime candidate to become a CEO/ GM or shareholder in the company. Which then would enable the owner to successively release themselves more from their day-to-day involvement in their business – to pursue other interests in life more so.
In a similar vein, there are some business owners who after engaging a talented employee, become threatened by the employee’s growing achievements and/ or their strengthening positive working relationship with (for example) a director or other key personnel; which causes the threatened owner to ultimately manipulate the employee out of the business (e.g. under the guise of a “role disestablishment”). Solicitors in New Zealand are now looking more closely at the justifying reasons for a role becoming disestablished.
If these business owners had taken the time to define a proper career path for the individual, empowering them as much as possible for them to enjoy a high level of autonomy as they pursue their clearly laid-out career path, the outcome for both parties could have been very different – and positive – for both parties.
As the CEO of a company a few years back, alongside the directors of that company we employed a superb, outwardly-focused, highly intelligent and hugely experienced person to step into an internal marketing role. This person stood-out a mile from all other candidates – particularly because of her communication prowess. I had no second thoughts about this person being the successful candidate – and her appointment was duly officialised.
However, in appointing her, because I could see just how competent she was from the background that she had presented, I set about writing a definitive career path (spanning a number of years) for her – which would ultimately culminate in her being recognised as the Marketing Manager of the business. This measure was well received by the incumbent, and simultaneously it meant that a solid framework had been put in place to both guide the development of this talented person in the marketing realm and demonstrate to her that the company was committed to retaining her and developing her capabilities into the future.