Human Capital
Human capital and recruitment often go hand in hand.
Typically it’s assumed you cannot grow your human capital without recruitment, but human capital doesn’t just come from new hires. You can actually successfully recruit without enhancing the human capital of your business at all.
So what does that mean?
Any business can do recruitment. They can advertise a role, or you can work with recruiters, flick through some CVs, and fill a position pretty easily. You tick a box based on skills and experience and hire someone likely to do that job the best based just on this.
When recruiting human capital, this means looking beyond the CV and seeing not just what that person will bring to the role, but what they will bring to the business. People who will fit not just a job specification but embody your values, fit your culture, and truly be part of a team.
As a service-based business, human capital is hugely important.
Your business is your people. They are the most important business asset you have and their worth doesn’t just come from the job skills they have, it comes from who they are as a person and how they operate in your business.
Agencies make money through people, which means every day I trust my team to work with and for our clients to the very best of their ability. Now trust is something that a lot of business owners struggle with, but being able to trust your staff starts with hiring and attracting the right people.
Hiring
When it comes to interviewing people, my approach is a little different from the norm. I very rarely ask much about professional experience. My main focus is on the person. I'm interested in what they're interested in. I'm interested in what they do outside of work. I'm interested in how they spend their time. That helps me understand whether someone's going to fit, and whether they embody our values and ethics, which is honestly more important to me than anything. Of course, skills are important, but I think the interview should be for the things you can’t learn from a CV.
Attracting the right people
Enhancing your human capital isn’t something that you can just achieve overnight. Culture is a key starting point when it comes to any kind of recruitment, but even more so when enhancing your human capital is the aim. The goal should be to develop a culture that, when put in the public domain, attracts the right people who will not only do the job but fit with the culture that you've built.
To build a decent culture you have to influence it and in some sense design it. But you have to be doing it for the right reasons and to put it bluntly, giving a damn about the right things which in our business means the people.
Culture is not built over fancy cocktails and open bar tabs; it’s built through transparency, honesty, and quite simply treating everyone like adults.
Let’s take work socials for example; like every agency, we used to finish work early on a Friday and all go to the pub, and when we were a smaller team, this worked great, but as we grew we quickly learned that actually what a lot of people would way rather do, is have that early finish for what they want to do, not what the business is asking them to do. But figuring out things like that is only possible if you have those transparent, honest lines of communication where people can genuinely give feedback.
Too many people think a great culture just equals everyone in the business being friends, but how is that ever possible in a large diverse team? When it comes to business culture, the North Star for me is when people want to spend time with each other outside of work off their own backs. If people in your business are forming genuine friendships, you are doing something right in my opinion.
Transparency and trust
If you trust your team, you should be honest and transparent with them about as much as you can. So sharing business goals and identifying the shared roadmap for achieving them. We share way more information with our teams than most companies would even dream of.
For us, this is a transparency dashboard, easily accessible by the entire team which includes our turnover, targets, and business growth alongside a reminder of our company values. We also hold a monthly presentation to discuss figures in detail and give our teams a chance to ask questions.
But here’s the bit people often forget…
We also teach our teams about financials and what business figures actually mean, how we calculate our forecasts and why they are important. You can’t expect your team to work with you towards your goals if they don’t understand them.
Clear barometers of success are really important for a business and the people in it. I’ve seen a lot of businesses that try and drill people so hard that it's never quite good enough. Success is never really achieved because the bar just keeps being raised, rather than achievements being celebrated.
For every single employee performance review, we get 360-degree feedback because the opinion of your peers is just as important as that of your manager. We ensure goals are set for individuals, and these aren’t just business goals they’re personal goals too.
Innovation and experimentation come from trust. The tools we’ve built have been born from ideas our team has had to solve a problem they’ve identified. By trusting their opinion and giving them the open space to put forward their ideas we’ve created things that we use every day and make things a hell of a lot easier for our team and clients.
This also stretches to experimentation. As a service-based business, our first priority is doing the best job for our clients we can. If someone has an idea or wants to experiment with a new tool or a different way of doing something, they can. And if it goes wrong, that’s okay, in fact, we track our failure rate and make sure we are constantly learning from our mistakes.
Training and personal development
If you want to increase your human capital you don’t have to bring new people into the business. The best way is to start with the people you have. Focus on training. Focus on personal development. And give freedom to find the tools that make that easier for them.
In any leadership position, you quickly realise that everyone learns in different ways, so siloing your team into a single route for learning will never work.
Personal development can’t just be about upskilling either, it also has to come from feedback and mistakes.
Most of the time, the people who know you best are the ones you’re working with day-to-day. So when it comes to reviews, we gather 360-degree feedback and share it - the good and the bad. Your team are there to learn from you as much as they are to do the job, and part of your job as a leader is to help them grow. If you only tell them what’s good, they can’t grow. It’s as simple as that.
Firing
Even with a perfect recruitment process, you are never going to get it right 100% of the time. So what we've actually learned in the last couple of years is to fire people quicker. You never truly know whether someone is going to be the right fit until they are actually a part of the business and doing the job. But holding onto the wrong person for too long is something we are getting better at not doing. Compromising on a single person who is not right for the business can come at the expense of your entire culture, and in my experience whatever else they are bringing to the role will never outweigh that.
Building and enhancing human capital goes far beyond the act of recruitment. It requires a thoughtful and deliberate approach to fostering a culture where trust, transparency, and personal development are at the forefront. The people within your business are more than just their skills and experiences; they are the lifeblood of your company’s success. By prioritizing the right cultural fit, providing opportunities for growth, and being willing to make tough decisions when necessary, you can cultivate a team that meets business goals and thrives together as a cohesive unit. After all, when your people grow, your business grows.