Effective leaders know that people are their best asset and can take business to new heights. But how can leaders attract (and retain) top talent in their organizations? What are the key ingredients for successful hiring?

A quick overview on A, B and C-players.

Here's a simple way to think about it; if you want to recruit talent for your organization, you want to find star performers (A-players), or steady performers (B-players) -- because both strive to accomplish results and advance their careers.

A-players tends to be the highly motivated "risk takers" with the highest potential to create good outcomes. They attract other A-players to the team and more frequently job hop to better opportunities. B-players are steady performers who often stay with an employer longer. And C-players often don't perform well enough to satisfy their employer and eventually get cut from the team.

How can you attract star performers with ease?

If you want to find A-players, (or even B-players), and aren't happy with the results of recruitment today, you may think you have a recruitment problem.

In fact what you have is a "culture" problem. Because in today's highly competitive hiring market, it's not enough to have an attractive role with an innovative company, a visionary Founder or even competitive compensation. I appreciate that you may only have some of these attributes at your company, but my point is you may be missing the key ingredients needed to attract talent.

Company culture and leadership is key to winning talent.

Business leaders, researchers, educators and consultants all recognize the important relationship between company culture and business performance.

The data speaks for itself:

• Companies with strong culture benefit from 4x lift in revenue growth (Source: Forbes)
• 82% of global respondents to a Deloitte survey believe that culture is a competitive advantage. (Source: Deloitte)
• 13 companies that have appeared on Fortune’s annual 100 Best Companies to Work For list every year benefit from 2x higher financial performance on the S&P 500. (Source: CFO)

As an organization evolves the core values need to be clear and communicated often.

At the heart of company culture are "core values". In simple terms, core values are the basic elements and practices of how a company goes about work every day in everything it does. Some organizations, especially during times of change, are vocal about their values by having them on their website, on social media and presented to the team members at all hands meetings. The assumption here is that values matter, are guided by leadership behavior, and team members are expected to model (and learn) this behavior.

If you have immature company culture, and are missing a mission statement with clear (and true) core values, this can be like kryptonite for your business trajectory. Because an organization's core values and leadership behavior are two dimensions that have great influence on both hiring and business performance. This is why company culture is a business issue and accountability for the CEO and executive team. HR should be in a supporting role to measure the impact of culture and implement process and infrastructure.

If you're feeling overwhelmed, you are not alone. It could be a good time to get help with the important work to evolve your organization by developing your company culture.

Here's to your success!

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