The truth about top talent

The term top-talent means something different for every business and every role, and that's where things start to get tricky - most people never clearly define what top talent means to them.

I've never met a client who wants to hire someone who sucks at their job, so of course, everybody wants to hire someone who's great at what they do.

But great is contextual and the reasons someone might be great usually aren't what you think they are.

The next challenge is that if you want to attract someone great, you have to be offering them something they want, and this is almost never 'a job'.

Great people are looking for opportunities to shine, to play to their strengths, to achieve something, make progress, be part of a team doing work they believe is worth doing.

These people also want to be treated with respect, and to be valued for their contribution both financially and in other ways.

They want to to do work worth doing, to be part of turning vision into reality, to have a sense of progress, in other words, to feel like they're going on a journey. They don't just want 'a job'.

When you zoom out and see all this, it suddenly makes sense why 'employment' aka the standard approach to creating jobs and hiring people isn't attracting 'top talent'.