My Journey to Seera (Part 1)
Thank you for your well wishes after my recent announcement of being appointed CEO at Seera, an awesome Australian software (SaaS) business. On reflection, my journey to Seera feels like it has been in the making, and almost inevitable, for nearly 20 years, so I thought I would share some insights from that journey.
As many of you know I was the founding CEO of Readify back in 2001. As a software services business, delivering elite consulting and development engagements, our focus on securing and developing the very best .Net developer talent was paramount to our success from the outset. Now, in the early days, there simply weren't that many .Net experts around so it was relatively easy to identify them in the local market, validate their knowledge, and engage them about a career with Readify.
However, as Readify, and the market for .Net software engineers grew, securing elite consultants became increasingly difficult and competitive, forcing us to look further afield including overseas. This meant we no longer knew the candidate personally and were relying on more traditional reference based validation. As we all know these are far from bullet proof so we introduced stringent technical tests for all applicants. Whilst this testing certainly narrowed the field to only the most technically proficient candidates, it introduced an imbalance in our capability due to the lesser consideration and testing of soft skills and other leadership capabilities. It also placed a significant burden on our existing leaders who weren't necessarily so passionate about all this "people management" thing.
Soon enough, retention also became an issue so, after surveying our consultants, we identified that offering a generous allocation of up to 20 days of Professional Development per year was an enticing recruitment and retention inclusion. Whilst this made our low staff turnover the envy of the industry, after extending this PD commitment to all staff, coupled with the growth in total staff numbers, our total investment in PD time and on costs eventually exceeded $5 million per annum.
Yet, after all this investment, we were still left with a significant lack of alignment between the technical skills we had hired and developed, and those we required for our continued growth and diversification, including soft skills and leadership capabilities. This was because we simply had no consistent way of describing, measuring, and analysing our enterprise wide skills and capabilities across the entire employee lifecycle. So when I started Transfit I was determined to crack this skills and talent nut.
In part two of this article I share my lessons learned from that pursuit, which should help all CEOs and business leaders fast track the transformation of their own organisational capability. But in the mean time, please leave a comment below if any of this resonate with your talent management experience.