Discovering Chemistry, Phase 1
I have a theory:
Top talent is happy talent. Happy talent loves where they work, because they love who they work beside.
For the last four years, I have been working in employment branding - whether that be talent attraction, recruitment marketing, workplace documenting or any of the other ways we refer to the top of the recruitment funnel, that’s where I’ve been spending my days. The path that led me to this role was quite haphazard, as I was never a recruiter, just simply a proud employee who loved where I worked, who I worked with and we were struggling to build our team.
With a great deal of passion and persistence, I’ve explored all the facets of employment branding: from the careers website UX through social strategy, candidate experience and all the messaging at the earliest touch-points, including the production of over 50 day-in-the-life documentaries of roles stretching from customer service to SVP. And over and over again I would sit back at the end of the day and ask myself, “Why do I love to work here? What is it?” My final answer was always the same -- it's the people I work with.
The relationships we have with the people who surround us: our peers, direct reports, our managers and our leaders are a critical part in shaping our performance and overall happiness. I performed my best because of the people I worked alongside of -- plain and simple. And safe to say, I believe they stepped up for me from time to time. Did that equate to results for our company? Heck yea it did.
To take it one step further, those relationships and the mutual respect my teammates and I harbored for one another was strengthened by the diversity throughout our workplace.
It’s important for me to emphasize that I have no patience or interest in a homogenous organization where everyone looks, sounds and thinks similarly. Quite the contrary -- the fact that everyone was different from me made my company a great place to work; we learned from each other, appreciated one another, and that awareness was not only a personal preference, but it reverberated in our company’s values. Time and time again, the successful results we delivered were proof that diverse teams achieve greatness. So now - I’m on a new journey. I’m curious about these relationships we find ourselves within - how we get there, how we operate within them, and what can be done to match up the most complimentary team members. After five years of studying Organizational Dynamics at Penn, I know there are multiple ways we can test to determine compatibility. While I always find it interesting, and love learning about myself in the process, these tests can be costly to organizations and often times are not implemented correctly. Since taking the entrepreneurial leap of faith in December of 2016, I began my work on Candidate Chemistry™, a tool to disrupt the job interview and employee onboarding experiences. This is not an assessment tool — it is a power-neutralizing, connection-cultivating experience that seeks to support teams built on connection - not judgement.
Curious? There’s so much more to come.
