University of Minnesota - UMN Executive Leadership Insights
Talent Magnet
Book

Talent Magnet

How to Attract and Keep the Best People

Mark Miller
Berrett-Koehler, 2018
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Editorial Rating

7

Qualities

  • Applicable
  • Concrete Examples
  • Inspiring

Recommendation

Competition for talent is now so intense that the best potential employees can be highly selective. Because top talent can pick and choose, personnel issues have become more complex and companies are facing a shortage of top-quality recruits. Mark Miller’s business fable, intertwined with a subplot about a group of job-hunting teens, illustrates how a fictitious firm recruits the best prospects. The fable’s factual basis came from Miller’s firm’s research, including hundreds of interviews. The characters and the dialogue are a little wooden, but they’re meant to be archetypes, and Miller deploys them to provide useful lessons about what motivates top prospects.

Summary

The competitive employment marketplace makes it difficult for companies to secure the best people.

CEO Blake Brown was worried. During an alarming meeting, human resources director Charles Jones and his team had informed Brown that he had to dial back his future plans for the company. The HR department couldn’t hire enough high-quality employees to handle the increased workload. As Jones explained it, the firm was losing a fierce battle for great staffers. Its talent pipeline was clogged. In response, Brown commissioned a work team to find out what the best job prospects want from the companies that try to recruit them. 

Meanwhile, Brown’s son Clint, a high school student, decided to get a job. He hoped to earn $8,000 to help pay for a well in a poor African village he’d visited on a school trip with his friends Tyler, Olivia and Alex. A young girl in the village had recently died after drinking contaminated water. Clint learned about the tragedy in a letter from her brother, his friend Baako. Clint resolved that a lack of good water wouldn’t kill anyone...

About the Author

Chick-fil-A executive Mark Miller also wrote the bestsellers Leaders Made Here and Chess Not Checkers.

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