Attracting Top Talent

Thanks to our UX Research Team’s recent conversations about UX Research impact, I can’t help but take stock of what we have grown. We established UX Research as a dedicated practice at Verizon Connect. We created a Research Operations function to help structure and optimize our work and communications. We have grown our team, gained investment from the business, and even started inspiring our executive leaders to bring more of our customers’ voices into our work.?

And yet, there’s so much more to be done!

We still don’t have a team big enough to cover everything that we need to and plan to do. And we want to continue evolving by learning more together, and from each other. We often find ourselves thinking that we need more “us”es to take on all the seedlings of strategic research direction that we’ve planted in our brains. Sure, we are experimenting with delegation to junior team members, expanding our scope of work, and collaborating creatively across our cross-functional teams. But as we think about our company growing, I can’t help but wonder what teammates we’ll get to meet next in our journey!

I’m always thinking about setting us up for success. We’ve luckily been extremely successful in our team building practices so far. Maybe it’s time for us to revisit the recipe of our secret sauce!

What Exactly Is Top Talent?

I know I’m not the only leader who’s thinking about hiring top talent. Just do a cursory search on the matter, and you’ll get 166 million results! (I literally did this and got that number!) Check out Ryan Renteria’s article: New Leaders, Here’s How to Hire a Top Talent. In it, Renteria does two things. The first is something that I as a researcher will always seek and appreciate – he actually operationally defines “top talent”!

The second thing that Renteria does is sequentially spell out the connections between highly successful hiring practices → strong team performance and growth → a larger and more influential sphere of practice. These 3 particular points highly resonated with me as a manager:

1. You can trust top talent to take on tasks that need to be done, but that you don’t necessarily need to lead.
2. This gives you room to focus on bigger picture, strategic thinking about how to optimize your team’s work so that your team can have a strong, positive impact on business goals.
3. You can then identify those impacts and showcase them to senior executives, thus establishing you and your team as valuable and strong leaders.

This helps explain why hiring managers are rethinking job descriptions and considering soft skills when vetting candidates for positions. Writer Morgan Smith and LinkedIn career expert Andrew McCaskill identify that soft skills not only help teams accomplish the actions and goals that Renteria identifies, but they also make teams adaptable to doing work in remote, hybrid, or otherwise different environments.?

And this is particularly applicable to teams at Verizon Connect ! We champion customers who run businesses across a wide variety of industries, geographies, and contexts. It makes sense for us to build and empower a diverse team to capture and understand the diversity of our customers’ lives in order to embed that foundational knowledge into our product development lifecycle.

How Do We Hire Top Talent?

One aspect that makes hiring top talent difficult is that we middle managers, especially newer managers, don’t often have lots of experience in hiring or managing specifically. Lack of experience in hiring, people management, or resource management is often cited as a gap by job seekers. And even though these individuals may be eager to have opportunities to learn more about these skill sets, there might not be specific training on how to bring new teammates into the organization. The aforementioned articles by Smith and Renteria certainly provide fantastic frameworks on how to run successful interviews, but onboarding and change management are less frequently discussed as specific skills to develop.

Also, it seems that across the board, we just don’t consistently have built-in time to focus on developing managerial skill sets. We middle managers often take on individual contributor work to help fill resource gaps, and even when we do get to influence strategy, our progress is often impacted by uncontrollable and external factors, thus leading to record levels of burnout.?

Thankfully, I get the honor of seeing first-hand how Verizon is uniquely investing in supporting our managers and empowering the search for top talent!?

Our Verizon Connect Experience Team has found so many creative ways to get the word out there! We share each others’ job postings on LinkedIn and other social media, and we think of ways to communicate our opportunities past the usual descriptions and checklists that we’ve become accustomed to seeing. Take for instance the brilliant Billy Fitzgerald ???????????? 's recruitment video! I can’t say enough amazing things about Billy, and in just one example of the millions of ways he goes the extra mile, he created a video to talk through the role he was hiring for, the skills and experience needed for the job, and the kind of place Verizon Connect is to work, in order to help set expectations and try to find the best fit for both us, and for potential candidates!

Chad Smith , our incredible HR Business Partner, knows that I really enjoy these opportunities and initiatives. He recently suggested that I work with a special group within Verizon called Verizon Talent Works! This amazing 70-strong group is focused on highlighting hiring challenges, facilitating discussion, and suggesting and implementing creative solutions to find and invite diverse, inspiring top talent to join our V Team!? I want to shout out Mark Custodio , Karissa Stanley , Eva Kolta , Lisa Stanford , and our entire team to say thank you for the discussions so far. It has been so inspiring to see how we can leverage our entire V Team to find amazing new teammates who can help us achieve new heights!

There’s no better example than our UX Research team! Over the next few weeks, you’ll get to know Iris Barrera, UXC and Ariel Cole . Both of these extraordinary people came to us from the Consumer side of our business, and as such, have lent a key customer perspective to our B2B work. You’ll also get to know Kelcey Little , who (like many of us on the UX Research team!) comes from an academic, clinical research background. Her story is a great example of how well academic research skills translate into the business sector. And all three of these amazing people are prime examples of top talent that we’re incredible lucky to have on our team!

Join me throughout July to hear these success stories and see how these top talents have helped our team soar! Share your own thoughts about the processes you’ve gone through, as well as questions or comments that you might have about the team building process! And, as always, catch us every week for our #TeamTuesdays!