The ‘battle for talent’ is one of the biggest challenges facing any business. Regardless of the size of your business, building a team capable of delivering on your mission doesn’t happen by accident. It requires constant attention and maintenance.

This challenge has always been at the forefront of our thinking at ClearScore. Although today we are a global team of 200 people, with 12 million users, we recognised from the outset that our people are our greatest asset. We can only realise our mission to help everyone achieve greater financial wellbeing – and build something that truly matters – by hiring and nurturing people who share our values and want to perform at their best.

It’s fair to say that the past year has put that work firmly to the test – as it has for every organisation. However, as everyone recovers from the pandemic in 2021, the focus on talent is more important than ever. No organisation can afford to lose sight of the value of building a great place to work.

What can organisations do to set themselves up for success in the battle for talent in 2021?

 

It starts with principles

Building a great place to work is founded on having a clear set of principles for the business. Principles drive behaviour, which in turn drives the culture of your organisation. Without principles there is no culture – and it is culture that is really the key to attracting and retaining the talent your business needs.

Many organisations talk about changing the world or disrupting an industry. Many businesses offer an environment that’s high-growth and fast-paced. But, for the most part, these are not the principles that impact your team day-to-day – they aren’t really what keeps your talented people engaged and motivated.

Instead, principles need to be far more tangible – they need to be a genuine measure for everyone’s actions and behaviour. At ClearScore we have spent a lot of time defining our guiding principles. In our case we prioritise authenticity, transparent leadership and a genuine striving for staff to perform at their peak. That translates into more specific values focused on delivering what we say we will, focusing on outcomes, staying curious and taking pride in what we do so that what we deliver is always of the highest quality.

For other organisations there is almost certainly a completely different mix of principles that are meaningful. But the crucial point is that whatever your principles are, they need to be used at every stage of the employee lifecycle – to be the bedrock of how you hire, how you train and how you promote. They need to be constantly reinforced and demonstrated by the choices the business makes and how it responds to circumstances. 

As long as principles remain something that only happens on paper, they will not be a valuable tool in attracting the talent your business requires. But when your principles are lived and breathed everything flows from there.

 

Putting your principles to work

What does this look like in practice? The key, of course, is translating these principles into a shared sense of purpose, common values, and a strong culture that guides day-to-day behaviours. 

Culture is the lynchpin of an organisation – generating goodwill in your team, a sense of genuine enjoyment of working somewhere and the motivation to make a contribution to the mission. That has certainly been the case at ClearScore. Our culture is a massive part of our success: we work hard, relish change and treat each other with respect. 

So, once you have defined principles, the next priority is looking at your hiring processes. Simply by virtue of having a set of guiding principles it means that some people will not be right for your organisation, despite their talent. 

As such, it is vital to have an interview process that involves a range of assessments that focus not just on the ability and behaviours associated with the skills for each role, but also the alignment to your principles. There needs to be a consistent procedure at each stage to ensure fair selection with a range of team members involved. This not only ensures that multiple viewpoints are considered, it also showcases a cross section of the team to prospective employees.

 

Building something that matters

The next priority is how you apply your principles internally. What measures have you put in place that will enable people to grow and develop in line with your principles? What guidance do you give to managers?

At ClearScore, we have three core pillars that help guide how we put our principles into action: our people matter; our users matter; our work matters. These pillars guide what we do every day – and there is a set of structures and initiatives that flow from there.

For example, when it comes to our people – to us that means prioritising work-life balance, flexible working, parental support, and mental wellbeing. For example, during lockdown we launched a new parental support scheme providing a weekly allowance for parents to spend on anything that would help them cope, new tech, subscriptions, extra childcare or just a takeaway.

Our focus on our people also leads us to concentrate on personal development plans for everyone on our team – we started this year with a virtual offsite for everyone to think about their development goals for 2021 and create their own plans. Couple that with a structure growth framework and each person as a clear pathway to reach their full potential.

At the same time, our focus on users and on delivering meaningful work leads us to a different set of priorities. In the past year that has meant a major project to conduct in-depth customer persona research to help us understand our users better. It has also led to new product launches like our Protect service to help people protect their personal information online.

Again, the exact mix of initiatives and actions will vary for each organisation depending on the principles they have set down. At ClearScore, our proposition stems from a place of disruption and movement, so we focus on giving new talent the opportunity to change the way things are done – and giving them the support to do that in a way that works for them.

 

Bringing it all together

As we move through 2021, organisations looking to hire smart, passionate people need to ensure they are giving people the things they need — both professionally and personally. Ultimately, helping your people to reach their potential means they are more likely to deliver results that make a difference.

This simply isn’t possible if you don’t have firm foundational principles to guide your decisions. But when you able to bring your principles to life, and stick to them, that breeds trust in the organisation, in your colleagues and in the work. And when you do that, you have a team that feels comfortable bringing their whole selves to work, that wants to stay and attracts others to join.