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Job Satisfaction as a Recruiting Tool

By Kathy Barton, May 3, 2007

Last week we held our Performance-based Hiring Tour event in Chicago to a full house. It was a great event and, as always, I learned something new from the participants. Ed, the owner of a recruiting firm, shared a May 1 Harvard Business School article called Inner Work Life: Understanding the Subtext of Business Performance. The authors, Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer, describe the article as "the first comprehensive look at what employees are thinking and feeling as they go about their work, why it matters, and how managers can use this information to improve job performance."

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The article is interesting in that it looks specifically at what type of management behavior motivates employees. All of us have worked at companies that pushed manager feedback, sponsored company picnics, or gave out company shirts when morale got low. While there is nothing wrong with this, the article makes it clear that this is meaningless without the most important managerial behavior - setting clear goals. While this is not a new concept, what's interesting about the article is that it used daily diary entries from over 200 knowledge workers to track a direct correlation between clearly defined individual goals and greater creativity, productivity, commitment and teamwork. The study determined that "people are more creative when they are motivated primarily by the interest, enjoyment, satisfaction, and challenge of the work itself--not by external pressures or rewards."

In fact, the single greatest contributor to employee motivation and job satisfaction was the ability to accomplish something in the job. From the article: "When we compared our study participants' best days (when they were most happy, had the most positive perceptions of the workplace, and were most intrinsically motivated) with their worst days, we found that the single most important differentiator was a sense of being able to make progress in their work. Achieving a goal, accomplishing a task, or solving a problem often evoked great pleasure and sometimes elation. Even making good progress toward such goals could elicit the same reactions."

As recruiters and hiring managers, it is critical to understand what motivates a candidate to take a job. In Performance-based Hiring, we talk about the 30% solution - offering candidates an opportunity that is 30% better than their current job. That 30% is composed of job stretch, long term career opportunity, and compensation. You position this with candidates by asking the person if he'd seriously consider a new job if the job stretch was 10-15% (meaning it was a bigger job with more impact), and the job growth was 5-10% (meaning it had significant long term upside), and if the compensation was fair. Most people will agree to at least explore a situation under these terms. Not only does the 30% solution get you out of having to use money alone as your closing strategy, it helps you differentiate yourself from the competition. Anyone can offer money, and your competition may have more money to offer than you do. However, what you offer in terms of job stretch and long term career opportunity is something that is much harder to duplicate.

The concept of greater job satisfaction can easily be added to the 30% solution. Just using a performance profile is a positive differentiator. Since a performance profile focuses on what a candidate would DO in the job, rather than the attributes the candidate HAS, you can talk about how your company has a commitment to providing its employees with clear goals. Discuss with them the specific things that the candidate would need to do to be successful in the job. Then tie these goals to company strategy and how it benefits the company's clients and you've just "branded" the job, giving it even greater value.

The 30% solution also helps you tap into a candidate's desire for greater challenge and satisfaction from the job. When you discuss job stretch (a bigger team, a larger project, a new area) make sure you also discuss the ways in which the company will support the candidate in being successful in the new job. Are you going to provide them with additional management training? Give them new project management tools? Give them a laptop, an assistant, a company car, a company mentor? Discuss these things specifically in terms of how they will contribute to the candidate's success in the role; then, tie it back to the performance profile and the things the candidate will need to accomplish in the role. Amabile and Kramer state that if a company can "create conditions that enable people to get their work done, you'll create positive emotions, enhance motivation, and boost performance to unprecedented levels." Presenting a candidate with some information on how your company helps the candidate get their job done can be very compelling.

So where do free sodas, bringing in pizza, summer schedules and employee recognition programs fit in with all this? After all, we all remember the late 1990's when companies competed to offer perks from morning bagels to on-site massage therapists. If you offer these types of programs, by all means, highlight them. When employees accomplish something, they want to be recognized for it. While the study showed that recognition without real accomplishment could arouse cynicism, they also found that good performance without any recognition was de-motivating. A company that can talk about how they help their employees accomplish their goals - and also how they reward those accomplishments - can use the prospect of greater job satisfaction as a recruiting tool and a competitive differentiator.