# Workplace Surgery: attracting young talent - **Episode:** [128](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/128.md) (2024-09-17) - **Type:** workplace-surgery - **Tags:** young-talent, design, recruitment - **Time:** 47:24–50:46 (start 2844s) - **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/128?t=2844](https://truthliesandwork.com/128?t=2844) --- [47:24] Al Elliott: Yeah. And I'm gonna have a look, give you a little bit of tough love, OP, here. You run a design studio. Your job is to design things that make people happy. So it sounds to me like you are a little bit sore that you've just lost 2 really good people to a big firm. Put that to one side. Start— stop crying about it. And again, I told you it's tough love. Stop crying for a second and go, how can I design an experience where people are going to absolutely love it here. This is what you do for a living. You are so creative. You're a designer. You can create something amazing. Think about what Leanne just said there. See, I'm that excited, just smashed my microphone. Think about what Leanne just said there. Think about more intentionally going forward, what are you going to— how are you going to fix it, rather than being a bit bitter that someone who you spent 2 years training has now disappeared off to a another agency and you feel like you have to start again. As Leanne said, is it Virgin who says that train them so they can leave, treat them so they'll stay? Is that right, Lee? [48:23] Leanne Elliott: Yeah, exactly [48:25] Al Elliott: Tough love over. We're back to nice people now. I'm sure you'll work it out. Just listen to what Leanne said there. It's really, really good advice. And I said, go, go back and you've got lots and lots and lots of resources in our back catalog. Almost every single episode is— in fact, every single episode is about creating amazing workplaces. But a lot of them are about what you can offer to your employees to make them want to stay. And just think slightly outside the box. There is that— there are so many reasons. If you think about differentiation in terms of design, in terms of sales, in terms of marketing, you know, there are people who use— not maybe not Tom's Shoes anymore, that's a bit, you know, not quite as in vogue. But when Tom's Shoes first came out, they took over a huge portion of the market because they were giving one pair of shoes to someone in need as they sold a pair of shoes. Zappos weren't, Clarks weren't. That's fine. People still shopped at Clarks and Zappos, but their market— Tom's market was a very specific type of people, and they cornered it. If you can get that right and you can corner that market of your candidates, you're going to win because they won't want to go and work for a big design firm because it's soulless [49:25] Leanne Elliott: And for more inspiration, go back to last Thursday's episode as well, our interview with, uh, Paul Barnes and Amanda Wilcox from MAPS. They have Majority Gen Z, and there they've had struggles with retention over the years, and now they're in a place where they're enjoying really high levels of engagement and retention. So, some good ideas there, and they invest heavily in professional and career development there as well. So, some really good inspiration from that. And as I said, Ed Williams as well. But yeah, there's loads you can do, but I think it's, it's, um, you're gonna have to work for it. I'm afraid that's just the way it is. With them. And the market is shifting. We are going into a downturn, so you might find your retention just naturally ticks up anyway. But we don't want that. We want it, we want it to tick up because we know exactly why and what we're doing is ticking up our employee engagement [50:11] Al Elliott: You want people to want to come to work for you, not, not want to leave [50:16] Leanne Elliott: Yeah, especially as an SME. That's your— that's what's in your superpower as an SME. You can be more agile, you can change things more frequently, you can be more creative. There's not much policy, as much bureaucracy. You can, you can again play with it. I just think we all need to play a bit. We take— I know, I know these are big serious problems, but the solutions don't have to be big and serious. They can be experimental. They can be, let's try, let's talk about it, let's collaborate. That in itself is going to start to build that trust, that authenticity that you talked about earlier, Al, which the, the Gen Zs love too