"Don't be afraid of talent and young people. They and their development is the biggest asset a company can have." Michaela Miklasová |Head of Influencom
My generation holds conferences about them. It establishes non-profits for mutual understanding. They dread the moment when they get interviewed. And even more so, the moment they have to work with them at the company. Because simply their time is coming and soon they will be the most common group in the job market. Generation Z.
But there are also companies and people who are taking advantage of this trend. They're reaching for the best talent of the generation. They are purposefully building a business model that supports the acquisition, development and retention of talent.
I'm definitely not generation Z. But having experienced something similar in my career, I have a certain sentiment towards these companies. That's why I invited Michaela Miklasova, Head of Influencom (that's the one from GenZ), and Radek Miškovský, CEO of CreatiCom, to come on camera and tell me how they do it. It was a truly recommendable listening experience. I asked ...
🔸 Who or what is talent?
🔸 How to recognize and select talent?
🔸 What are the main steps in the talent search?
🔸 How to retain talent in your company?
🔸 What is the return on talent search?
If you're having trouble recruiting talent in your company, this episode is an interesting peek behind the scenes. Don't miss it.
HOW TO FIND, DEVELOP AND RETAIN TALENT IN YOUR COMPANY (INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT)
Introduction of guests
Martin Hurych
Hello. I'm Martin Hurych and this is another Ignition. If you like Zazih, whatever you used from it, wherever you sent us, I would ask you to give a subscription or a like or send us to a friend. That way you won't miss another episode and you'll help me get through the social media algorithms so I can invite even more great guests like today's. I have two today, Radek Miskovsky and Misha Miklasova. Radek is the head of the agency CreatiCom and Míša is the head of the spin-off Influencom. Today we're going to talk about how this relatively young group of people are nurturing their talents.
Radek Miskovsky
Hi, Martin.
Martin Hurych
Hi, hello.
Michaela Miklasová
Hello, thank you for the invitation.
Who or what is talent?
Martin Hurych
Who or what is talent?
Radek Miskovsky
That's a pointed question right off the bat. It can be defined from many angles. To me, it's a person who wants to, wants to work on themselves, wants to push themselves and has some kind of internal drive. To me, that's a person that I absolutely love working with, and that's the definition of talent for me.
Martin Hurych
Can I be the talent?
Radek Miskovsky
You can, I think you're working on yourself a lot, pushing yourself and you can be a talent too.
How to understand the young generation?
Martin Hurych
I see in a lot of companies that talent = young people. Young person for a lot of people of my generation today due to some changes in lifestyle and other preferences = potential problem. So how do you do it in your business?
Radek Miskovsky
I myself also find that there is not a certain understanding in a lot of ways, in the work, in the expectations, in some kind of common attitude, in some kind of communication, in some values, why we come to work. We work in the Ústí region and I had no choice but to build a culture that I would love to go to and that attracts a lot of talent in that region. In the beginning I worked a lot and CreatiCom worked with university students, partly with high school students, but today people are coming to us from corporations. Because we give that freedom, we give room for growth, we work with those strengths. For CreatiCom, it was a huge leap when we had people joining us who had 20 years of experience, but we gave them the space to focus on their strengths and work on them, rather than getting laid at 8 and leaving at 4. It's often the case in those companies that if you happen to have an idea or you want to take it somewhere, you know you're supposed to shut up, sit down and clock those hours, which for a lot of people is a potential killer.
What were the paths of Míša and Radek to their current positions?
Martin Hurych
To see where you're coming from and what companies or what you're in charge of, how did you get to where you are?
Michaela Miklasová
I started marketing at Rádi in CreatiCom 4 years ago. After that I went to the corporate world for a while, to Lidl for an internship, where I went from an intern to the headquarters, to the HR department and then I created a personal brand for the Czech CEO of Lidl. Then I got a big offer from Lidl, but corporate is not something where I want to grow now. I wanted to create something of my own, and that's where Radek's offer came to create together with them and my colleagues at Influencom, where we focus on influencer marketing. So I've been in marketing for over 4 years, we've been creating Influencom for almost a year now and it's something of mine that I see a purpose in and I want to continue to develop.
Martin Hurych
How did you get into CreatiCom?
Radek Miskovsky
I'll take it a little historically. I was an entrepreneur from the age of 18, I did my college studies in Prague remotely, I had people mostly from the practice in class with me, and then I went north to finish my engineering degree. I had some entanglements with Germany in a positive sense because it's only 40 minutes to Germany, so I saw an opportunity to study just up north and have a piece of that as well. But that's where I had the real George's vision. I was at a private school for my undergraduate degree and there was a goal to advance that person in some way in that knowledge. Here, that goal was also there, but often not grasped by those professors. At that North, they didn't develop the self-confidence, the possibilities and the strengths of those students; on the contrary, I think it was also partly a great pressure on the self-confidence of those students at times. For me, it was a terrible realization when in a year and a half everybody in my class was going to be an engineer and they knew nothing about practice, they had no experience at all. That was a huge driver for me, seeing 120 people stare for 2 hours at something that wasn't completely engaging. It was energy that wanted to be out there or creating something, moving somewhere, and they just killed those 240 hours.
That's why I thought I had to change it. At that time, I was still working at the Innovation Centre of the Ústí nad Labem Region and the first signs of CreatiCom were created under the Ústí nad Labem Region, but it wasn't entirely appropriate. I had some limitations there, I lacked certain competences, so after some 3 years I decided to create it on my own. So CreatiCom was created mainly out of the need to take those interesting people from the university, maybe 10, 20%, who wanted to move on, who were better than me at a thousand things, but nobody told them they could and helped them open a few doors. That's what I did at CreatiCom, I took that energy, I channeled it, I had their back a little bit from the business perspective and from the experience perspective and that's how CreatiCom started.
At the moment CreatiCom is no longer working only with students, on the contrary, we have grown so much that it is difficult for the team to implement the complete juniors. We're still trying to do that, but I'm also trying to create some alternative, whether it's a talent incubator, so that we have some preparation before they come to the major leagues, which I would still like to call CreatiCom.
What is the added value in the talent search?
Martin Hurych
One thing caught my eye. It sounded almost like charity for a while. I built a company to rescue talent. I guess that's not how it works in the end, because you're a very nice, fast-growing business. Where do you see the value in taking care of that talent?
Radek Miskovsky
I had a business mindset from the beginning because I had a lot of mentors at the Innovation Center and even those mentors said that even if you have a nonprofit, a nonprofit can't be based on someone giving you money. Because at any time that spigot can turn off and you can quit. Nonprofits can make money, they can be very profitable, and then they can do much greater good with that energy. We're an LLC, we're commercial, but the value that I create behind that, for me personally, is the biggest value-add, but I don't want to say that I'm some totally just focused on that charity. Obviously I want the business to be profitable, to push ourselves, to generate profit. The moment you direct very good people very well, there's a huge hunger for them in that market and when I add a pinch of expert experience that I can buy in, it works. People who want to learn, to move up, become specialists very quickly and even those specialists joined us because they wanted to work in this enthusiastic team, growing team, with these contracts that were bigger and bigger. So the work that we're doing is getting better and better quality over time. That was the hidden business model that I knew from the first moment that it could work.
How to retain talent in your company?
Martin Hurych
I'm going to share here what I saw when I came out of college. Back in the late 90's, there was a belief in my business that I wouldn't take a student because I would teach them here, I would drill them here, and then they would take it away with my clients. He doesn't have all the mortgages, the families, it'll be cheaper and I'll go to the drum. So when I was coming out, it was relatively difficult to get interesting work. Fortunately, the option was to go work for a family firm, and the other option was that a big corporate firm came in from the outside and purposely sought out these people and nurtured them for themselves. That's what I saw and I see now. How do you combat that as a business owner? How do you keep the talent that you develop from the beginning in the company? Because I suppose that's why you then started attracting more senior people.
Radek Miskovsky
It's certainly a challenging discipline and there are millions of influences. I have to say that probably the most important thing is to ask the person why they're doing it, where they want to go and respond to that. Everybody has a completely different drive and the research is that 93% want security above all else and to have an environment that they are happy to come back to and move in. But then there are the drivers and the people who want something more, and that's where I took inspiration from Deloitte where they have partner programs. I've even seen a lot of podcasts about how it's not scale the agency as it scales up to some value and then somehow the business stops. Because it's very difficult to manage those people, and as the turnover goes up, the profitability goes down, so it doesn't pay to then scale it up to higher numbers. So I had the idea from the very beginning to have those partnership programs in there, to appeal to that responsibility, that they are responsible for the growth of their division. At the same time, I also took inspiration from my mom's boss, who shared some of the profits, which is why my mom stayed there for 20, 30 years. That's kind of how I came up with a system where people have their own divisions, their own responsibilities, but they also share in the profits.
Even our mentor, who sold a very successful agency, was surprised that I wanted to build them an all-risk agency. The moment the uncertainty is there, the cash flow isn't there, I'll give them all the background and the moment the business is up and running, I'll give them a significant share of the profits and let them know it's their agency. He said himself that he would like to work in such an agency. He meant it in a negative way, but I figured that if it's coming from a guy who has built a really interesting agency that I've looked up to for a long time, and still do, then it's actually not a bad idea. It's not easy to take a bite out of those profits, to have it calculated in such a way that at some stage I'm responsible for it all, the demands on cash flow, on all the contracts, on all the possible risks, go behind me. But that's why I started doing it, to create that safe environment for them and then kick them out and give them a taste of a bit of responsibility. They want it themselves because they want that part of their own business. We can compare it to franchises, but it's from scratch. It's about the fact that, for example, with Influencom, there was no Influencom. It was an idea that we took somewhere together, and then we saw that Misha and Terka are a duo that are incredibly pulling it forward.
What does Míša enjoy about CreatiCom?
Martin Hurych
I would like to look at it from the other side of the barricade, because Misha is obviously a product of this system. The sequence was I'm going to go to CreatiCom, then I'm going to check out the corporation a little bit, and then I'm going to go back to CreatiCom. What is it that motivated you as a talent to come back or what is it that keeps you there? Why not have Influencom on its own?
Michaela Miklasová
It's definitely the environment that keeps me there. I have the support in Radek and Michal and Honza Kadlec, they are my mentors and that's something I needed. I'm still 24, I'm still in that personal growth and it's important for me to have those key points there that I can come to and get advice from. I would also mention the flexibility of having a semi-home office, we have a very hybrid work system, which I think we as Generation Z generally look for. So those are definitely the two points that made me want to come back to CreatiCom and build something with them. Maybe I'll confirm what Radek said, that I still had my hands tied in corporate. I'm such a stickler and it's still not exactly welcome in corporate these days, so I needed to have my hands a little bit freer and I knew that I would have that at CreatiCom.
What is the return on nurturing talent?
Martin Hurych
Do you have it figured out that if I take a talent and start developing it, it will pay me back in a few months, weeks, years, decades, more than if I take a ready-made professional off the street? Because you're saying we're growing, people are with me, there's this big wave going against that that says there's going to be a bunch of these satellites that are just going to cluster on individual projects. So how do you calculate that economically that it's paying off?
Radek Miskovsky
As you mentioned that there will be a few satellites that are grouped together on some projects, that was actually the basic idea behind CreatiCom, to mix mentors and freelancers with talent. I have to say, I've had it figured out from day one, so it's paying off for me. If I pick a really smart person who is a really fast learner and has an hourly rate as a trainee that is still higher than the average in the Usti region, then it gradually pays off. There's a lot of aspects where we have to sit down because then it's a partner for a big part of our lives, maybe we solve more problems together than in a marriage, maybe we even see each other more than in a marriage. That's not the case for me and I get crucified for that sometimes, that I should be working 12 hours a day, but I have young children and I'm not going to accept that, I want to be with them.
I think if you have a person, an unwritten book, who fits into that community, is comfortable and learns your habits, it's a lot easier than marrying a person with 20 years of experience. He's been taught in a system and then transforming him to, say, home office on Fridays is hard. That's where I see the added value of those young people, not to mention the fact that the young people are going to be creating that world in 10, 15 years anyway. So if someone is afraid of that and thinks they are the smartest and will hold their own, they are missing the train a bit. In that sense, I think it's also a necessity for companies to focus on this, to put aside their discomfort a little bit. To me, it's all about getting the job done well by the deadline, which is key, and when the person does it, I don't really care. But it's challenging, it's a lot about communication like in a marriage, only here I'm looking for several partners. You have to set boundaries, mutual respect, trust and communicate a lot. I have to say that without the face to face tool that we have every 7 weeks in our house, I don't think Misha would be sitting here anymore, because we wouldn't know that she was offered a golden cage, a kilo and a cart in Lidl.
How to recognize and select talent?
Martin Hurych
You're obviously good at it. I'm hearing from a client right now that they are completely screwed because they have to scoop what has two arms, two ears and all their front teeth. So how do you know in the crowd of people you're recruiting for the firm that they're the right talent?
Radek Miskovsky
I have a certain gift for it, that's probably where I add the most value. My mom's private school, I took one look at the administration like that and said that's not the administration, they need to get someone better.Within a month and a half I was able to help her find that person to lean on, otherwise she would have had to be there for the next 5, 10 years and do it herself, she wouldn't have been able to become a grandmother. You have to have a pipeline in that regard, which is another thing that came completely by accident from David Kolar, and I thank him very much for that. We all make a pipeline of business with statistics, with funnels, with everything. On the other hand, then our company is often just run by those people and the quality of even those products often depends on those people in the end. So for me, it's really important to create a pipeline and work on it from an HR point of view as well. The moment I have 10 people and I choose the best one, I really have the best one, if I have one or two people to interview and I take the best one, it's quite possible that I'll miss the mark. That's one of the things that I need to do for me, to actively seek out talent and have enough people in the pipeline that we don't tell ourselves that average is good.
What convinced Míša to join CreatiCom?
Martin Hurych
To give the floor to Misha, I would go back to the very beginning, the first entry into CreatiCom. What was it that convinced you to give CreatiCom a try, what is the magic of Radek? Because at that moment I didn't know how great it was inside, maybe I listened to something from you guys up north. What really motivates a young person to join a company like that?
Michaela Miklasová
I think I'm kind of the basics. I've been a very ambitious, goal-oriented person since I was very young, I've always wanted to be first everywhere and win everything. I got that from my grandparents, from my grandfather, who is my role model in life, he's also a very successful man, so he guided me towards that and I was always destined to go in that direction as well. So even at 19, at 20 I knew I wanted to go into marketing, I didn't know if marketing was going to be my field for the rest of my life, but now I know it definitely is. I first met CreatiCom at UJEP where there was a marketing course run by people from CreatiCom and through a friend I got my first interview. But now I'm actually getting to the point where I don't even remember our first interview. It's been 4 years, so I can't remember at all.
Radek Miskovsky
I remember you staying with us for maybe 4 months and then we met and had more fun. At the beginning, I can't tell if the person is just hitting on me for a month or two.
paint, but then maybe his performance, enthusiasm and commitment will change. So with the juniors, you really have to wait 3 months, 6 months to see if the guy shows up or not.
Michaela Miklasová
I will also mention that I had a buddy at the beginning of CreatiCom, which I think is a great way to get more into the company, to get a feel for it. It's also kind of that buddy that I can confide in, and I'm glad that now I have a couple of people under me that I'm a buddy to in that way. So definitely in the beginning it was more the collaboration with the buddy and then with Ráda, but I admit I don't remember the very first interview. It's been 4 years now and there are more and more memories.
What does the induction programme look like?
Martin Hurych
Does that mean you have some kind of onboarding or induction program where you test whether talent is really talent or a facade?
Radek Miskovsky
In the beginning, CreatiCom itself was an incubator for talent, where we had smaller jobs and the junior was on smaller jobs where he could make mistakes. It's human to make mistakes, you just need to learn from it, but at the same time, he usually had someone there to watch his back before we turned the job in. On those smaller jobs, the clients even reckoned that they probably didn't have the best experts in the world working on it. But as we've moved up considerably now and that expertise, quality and deadlines are expected, I currently have a Talent GO! project on the table that should be an incubator just for talent. I personally teach high school, I teach college sometimes, and that's one of the things about being around those people. Because if you're not there, you're not assessing them and more or less every year I get 20 to 40 students in those grades and now for the first time I have seniors going out. Now I'm going to be there for the fourth year, that field was established in that high school as well, and I'm setting up this incubator for those people and not just for those people, which should be about mentoring, about education, but at the same time, again, having its own economy and working for smaller jobs. I think of it as a preparation, that the moment I see in six months or three months that this person is very capable, wants to move somewhere, then he can go to the first league to CreatiCom, where we will give him even more space. Let's see if it's not completely defocus, I already tried it 2 years ago but I found that the energy I had to put in at the stage we were at was too much and it was very challenging. Now we've got the capacity and I've also defined my own manager for that project and it's going to be more like a non-profit, but it's still going to be profitable.
How many people in the company are dedicated to recruiting and training talent?
Martin Hurych
You kind of stole my question, because identifying talent, a pipeline, a program, then further developing and growing the business, that's a permanent partnership, that must be terribly time consuming. Do you have any idea how many extra people you have in the company to make it work like that? How many people are dedicated to just this development program and identifying talent in the company?
Radek Miskovsky
I think we don't have anyone at the moment because at the moment it's even hard to get the full junior to join us because it's holding those people back. If we find out in 3 months that there's some invisible glitch, it's holding up those contracts, those people, and there's such tension. The moment a skilled person comes in, we see it or we even have some referrals, a lot of companies have a buddy system and some kind of guide and that person often catches on within a month on the easier tasks. They gradually work it out over 3 months, half a year, but again the economics are completely different, so the profitability is already there from the beginning.
What I'm talking about now is a completely separate department, a separate person, even a different company that focuses on the education and that's where we tune the pricing. I think those people might even pay for some of it, for the fact that we can throw it at a specialist and still guarantee you some contracts if necessary, that you can make money on it. So there's a lot of those pricing models or options. The person who's providing that is a corporate person, 45 years old, very experienced and capable woman, but again, in this business, I can see that she needs maybe some direction, a little bit of a nudge, and I can see that she's going to be incredible. She's way ahead of me in a lot of things, but there are some things she needs help with, like, getting started.
Has CreatiCom become a victim of its own success?
Martin Hurych
It almost looks like CreatiCom has fallen victim to its successful recruitment model. You said that CreatiCom started with juniors and today, thanks to the fact that you also brought them up, there's no room for juniors anymore because you've moved somewhere else. That's actually, ironically, a victim of your own success.
Radek Miskovsky
It's true, and I was just figuring out how to continue my mission. I'm not saying we don't take juniors, we don't work with them, we do, but we can't take 5, 10 at a time and dedicate ourselves to them anymore. We can, but it has to be a department, as I just shared. I found that at one point in time when it wasn't separate, half the company was dedicated to it and I saw very quickly that my costs were rising and that it was unsustainable.
What are the first steps in the talent search?
Martin Hurych
If someone is listening to us like this and has a desire to at least try it out or change the recruitment process, what do you think the first steps should be to get started? I haven't done any talent scouting until now, now it hit me that I should, so how do I go about it?
Michaela Miklasová
I may be speaking for Generation Z now, but in any case, we're always more drawn to working with people. We don't want to work for a brand, we don't want to work for someone who we don't really know what kind of people are there, what our colleagues are like. So I would definitely recommend going a little bit with the skin on the market, I always recommend that to corporates as well, to not be afraid to show those people, to go with the skin on the market and really show who's working there, who that person is going to be working with. Then you also need to definitely look at it from the perspective of those young people, those talents, what they could probably get with them, what it should look like for them. The recruitment process should be as simple as possible, so showing up more on LinkedIn, maybe having an event, a recruitment day, that works a lot for corporates. It's definitely good to go to colleges, high schools, provide some internships or go there to give talks and show what the brand is.
Martin Hurych
What if I have a small, medium-sized company somewhere in Lovosice, Litoměřice?
Michaela Miklasová
In Lovosice, Litoměřice is certainly close to the UJEP, so you could go to Ústí to lecture at the university. This area is very specific in terms of socio-demographics, so I definitely recommend high schools, colleges and then there are definitely different fairs of opportunities and so on.
Radek Miskovsky
I think that in the first place you have to make time for it, put in your diary once a week, maybe 2 hours, 3 hours, make time, go among those people, give it that time and create that pipeline. I understand that in some of the technical fields as well, those people are not there, but it's all the more necessary to set aside that time. Back in the days of the Innovation Centre, I did some research on where the Ústí nad Labem region is facing a brain drain in general. Those ambitious smart people don't stay at UJEP, in the North, they go to Prague or abroad. That's why I am working and want to work even more in those secondary schools, so that I already have contact with them, so that I can meet them and get to know them. Then when that person comes from America 10 years from now, then we can reunite, or he stays there and we figure out how to move this CreatiCom to America. I also see it as an opportunity for that development to have that networking, to create in that direction, to have the time to do it and to put a funnel to it just like with the business.
Martin Hurych
Do you have a KPI for how much talent you can get into the incubator or the company?
Radek Miskovsky
I'm so good to myself on this, I don't have my KPIs. I have my main KPIs to make sure the company has the security to be able to give it to those people, and I'm in charge of finance among other things. I'm not one to have KPIs everywhere. It's just that the universe sends it to me sometimes.
Martin Hurych
So do you have a feeling meter?
Radek Miskovsky
It's okay, you say you need a PPC person or a graphic designer and the next day at 8 you look at your email, there's nothing there for half a year and there's a person who wants to do graphic design for you. I've had a lot of those happen to me. I'll come back to the fact that some talent does fly the nest, I don't have the ambition to keep everyone, although we have a really low turnover. A mega smart guy and talent Simon started his own business, I'm rooting for him, he made ePultik, a competitor to Rohlik and it's great. The other co-founder was also with us, he helped us with finances, Robert, smart guys, they got the credit that they know more about LinkedIn than most people in the Czech Republic. Just let them go, on the contrary then maybe one day they will be our customers, maybe not, but we know each other and that network is important, creating that human capital for me is one of the most important things.
Summary
Martin Hurych
If the two of you from this podcast were to stay on the air for 3 to 5 sentences, what would it be?
Michaela Miklasová
For me, I'm sure that companies should not be afraid of talent and young people, on the contrary, they are really one of the most important assets that a company can have. One more piece of wisdom, there is nothing more than the right person in the right place.
Radek Miskovsky
Scaleup says that the right person in the right place does things the right way, which to me is pretty much the definition of a successful company.
Martin Hurych
I thank you both for visiting us here in Zagazhy and I wish you all the best in developing your companies and the companies in your company exactly where you want to develop them. Thank you very much.
Radek Miskovsky
Thank you.
Martin Hurych
You see, before I say goodbye, we would like to say hello to Scaleupboard and David Kolar, these terms have been mentioned here several times. If we've motivated you to give some thought to giving a few new talents at your company a chance, we've done our job well. In that case, I'll repeat my plea from the beginning, give us a subscription at a minimum so we can get through the social media algorithms and show this podcast to as many exactly like you as possible. You can help us do that, you can even direct this podcast to your friend or a friend yourself. All I can do is cross my fingers and wish you success, thanks.
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