Hiring, retaining and developing talent is a key leadership skill. Without great talent it’s impossible to have a great team. And without a great team, it’s impossible to build a great organization.
Hiring, retaining and developing talent is also time consuming, both in amount of time daily and weekly and length of time, over months.
How much time?
The HBR classic The First 90 Days (summarized here) has a diagram that explains that a new hire can actually take 3 months to start delivering value and another 3 months to start to see a breakeven return on your investment.
The space under the line to the lower left is “value consumed” as a hire learns about the organization and the job. There’s no net contribution to be expected until three months in (90 days) — that’s one of the main reasons that new hires should read The First 90 Days, and use it to develop a plan to manage expectations of their employers — which are always high!
You, as a Leader, are understandably itchy to hire employees that can “hit the ground running” on day one…but that’s rarely a realistic expectation.