CYBRARY PODCASTS
Ep. 19 Ken Gilmour and Solene | Retaining Sought After Talent
In this episode of the Cybrary Podcast, we sit down with Ken Gilmour, the CEO of Knogin, Solene, the marketing director of Knogin, and Katie Wandtke, the Head of People for Cybrary. We discussed how to engage and retain highly sought after talent in the tech field. I really enjoyed this episode and learning about how other companies and people view different benefits and perks differently.
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This podcast discusses a great topic about finding and evaluating talented and culturally-fit individuals. Representatives from Cybrary and Knogin share some insights on their work culture and work practices to keep their employees happy with what they do at the place where they work. Finding a culturally-fit individual for a company is not an easy task, especially with the fact that it is very time consuming to go through the screening process and potentially, training process. Therefore, it is important for companies to know what they can do to retain the aspiring sought after talented individuals that they may have at their company.
Depending on the job role, there will be different baselines, pre-requirements, or non-negotiables to consider when evaluating an individual’s CV. On the technical aspect, of course, a company wants an individual who is talented and with the right qualifications or has the right skillset to perform the job at hand who has a reasonable amount of experience, exposure, or involvement in a community. Networking is also a great factor for recruiters to notice individuals by means of referrals or recommendations from familiar friends or acquaintances.
Though an individual may have the right skillset, some companies like Cybrary and Knogin also seek out culturally-fit individuals for their companies, because it is believed that with the right individual with the right attitude who will be brought into an open and diverse culture, will enable their willingness to learn and develop further on the skills in a field that they may still be new to at the beginning.
Both Cybrary and Knogin share how in their work culture they show appreciation of their team’s commitment and achievement to the company; provide work benefits such as free lunches or working from home certain days of the week to save time and avoid traffic; have fun get-togethers, events, and activities among teams to enable employees to get to know one another outside of the usual work process and in a comfortable space, which also builds strong and open relationships within the company; and giving individuals the opportunity to explore other talents or skills they may have, which may even allow them to become cross-functional within an organization, such as a graphic designer also being a cybersecurity expert.