Shanghai Tech Writer

NI believes in recruiting and retaining the “best and brightest.” The amount of time, energy, resource, money, and effort that the company invests in hiring the best (and keeping them!) are among the many reasons behind the company’s success. The company has been voted among Fortune’s Best 100 Companies to Work For as well as BusinessWeek’s 50 Best Places to Launch a Career.

Mark Finger, the VP of human resource at NI, states:

NI believes that in its 100-year plan, the greatest and most sustainable long-term competitive advantage [at NI] is the culture and employees who have the greatest impact on stakeholders. Fundamentally, NI must always have a people advantage. National Instruments has defined their people advantage into three concepts - hire the best and brightest, create a great work environment and culture, and provide superior employee development.

Deloitte Consulting LLP recently published an article, Competing For Talent, that addresses one of the most critical issues that technology and telecommunication companies face in recruiting. How do you recruit the best and keep them? According to the article, the talents are the people that:

. . . drive a disproportionate share of their company’s business performance and generate greater-than-average value. . . and possess highly developed skills and deep knowledge – not just about the work itself, but also about how to make things happen within the company.

Hiring the right talents is critical to a company’s success but keeping them is the biggest challenge. Hiring could be a relatively easy task if companies follow the traditional approach of offering lucrative salary compensation, benefits, perks, and fancy retirement plans. However, the problem arises after the initial successful recruitment. How can companies keep their talents and prevent them from being snatched by competitors and headhunters?

The figure below, taken from the Deloitte article, clearly shows that companies are concerned about retaining their key talents.

In an earlier post, I wrote about overachievers and who they are in the workplace. There is no doubt that overachievers—if managed, compensated, inspired, and utilized properly—are among the most sought-after talents that companies want to hire and keep! If overachievers and talents have or share the same characteristics and traits, then there need to be bigger incentives to keep them happy and working at the same company. Monetary compensation is no longer the attractive bait that it used to be.

According to the Deloitte article, the new approach to hiring and keeping talents is to offer flexibility in how they work and provide personalized career development plans. Employers have to recognize that their talents are hardworking people who just want/need to be in control over “when, where, and how they work.” Also, smart people (the real talents) want/need to work to their advantage while working for their employers. In other words, they “pursue personalized career plans that let’s them develop their own marketable skills so they don’t have to rely on one company to provide them with lifetime employment.”

Several months ago, I wrote about Our People Platform at NI and why NI is such a great place to work. In later posts, I will write about how NI manages their overachievers/talents and the secret* behind NI’s success in recruiting and retaining the “best and brightest.”

(* secret as in recipe, not as in confidential company information)

On a further note, I’ve been working at NI for only a few months and am writing this from my own experience and observation. Perhaps, I will interview a few people who have worked longer than I have and hear what they have to say. In any case, I am expressing my own two cents and am not being paid for this other than my monthly salary as a technical writer.

Maybe I should start working for the marketing department.

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