Welcome to the Collective Impact Talent Summer Series
A multi-week series through which we’ll share lessons learned, suggestions, tips and useful content related to hiring and retaining top talent.
Over the last three years, America Achieves helped shape Biden Administration, Congressional, and local policy development and implementation of place-based inclusive economic innovation and talent development – including the $1B Build Back Better Regional Challenge (BBBRC), the $500M Good Jobs Challenge (GJC), and the $10B Regional Technology and Innovation Hub (Tech Hubs) program. We have supported BBBRC and GJC regional applicants, and are currently supporting Tech Hubs applicants, in applying for and implementing these federal programs. In doing so, we have recognized – through conversations and the lived experience of applicants, grantees and federal program directors – that regional coalitions and their work are only as good as their teams and people they hire and retain.
Given that recruiting, hiring and retaining diverse top talent is a key lever for coalitions to achieve maximum success, we developed the philanthropically funded Collective Impact Talent Initiative. Launched in February 2023, the initiative provides capacity-building services and resources to help fill talent needs for regional coalitions deploying large-scale federal funding as they began executing their economic growth and good jobs initiatives. In partnership with America Achieves’ Senior Advisor Kathleen Warner, and with three retained nationally renowned talent support organizations – Bolster, Edgility Consulting and the team of LER Consultants and Advisors and the DGW Consulting Group – the Collective Impact Talent Initiative offered expert guidance, thought leadership and overall support to place-based coalitions across the country with respect to sourcing, recruiting, hiring and retaining diverse, next generation talent.
We are sharing our reflections in hopes that they will prove valuable to those focused on building out inclusive, entrepreneurial, high-impact teams to execute on transformative initiatives to create good jobs and inclusive economic growth. We also hope they are useful for policymakers and program designers who are considering and seeking to implement best practices for the sustainable impact of large-scale federal funds.
A few key takeaways:
Context Matters. Every place-based team begins from a different starting point, regardless of the grant size. For example, some place-based coalitions are led by universities that have entire departments and long-standing approaches to recruitment and hiring. Others are led by small economic development or community development teams where every team member wears five different hats in a given day and systems and processes are established on an as-needed basis. Still, others take a hybrid approach to recruiting and hiring, involving an evolving set of coalition members and partners in the decisions. Meeting each team where they are in their form and evolution as an organization - and in the development of their talent recruitment and retention practices - is critical to ensuring that capacity building support will be relevant and actionable.
Building The Right Team Takes More Than Filling a Single Job. The old adage about teaching a person to fish rings particularly true here. The most effective capacity-building talent strategies are those that will develop a coalition’s ability to create and use consistent, repeatable processes for sourcing, recruiting, hiring and retaining diverse, top talent on their own. Developing internal expertise, strategies and systems for meeting their talent needs, rather than either utilizing ad hoc methods or increasing reliance on third parties, is more effective, efficient and equitable for long-term sustained success.
Prioritizing Competitive Compensation is Critical. To achieve equitable and ambitious outcomes and to attract high-caliber, entrepreneurial, diverse talent, regional coalitions must offer not only high-impact, interesting work, but also provide attractive compensation packages. Compensation should be thought of holistically, to include not only transparent, competitive salaries, but also a stable term of employment and a suite of appealing benefits, such as medical/dental, tuition reimbursement, bonuses (both for accepting an offer and for performance over time), relocation offerings, housing support, paid family and sick leave and other family support, sabbaticals, professional development opportunities and flexible working conditions, such as fully remote or hybrid.
To offer competitive compensation packages, regional coalitions should prioritize, incentivize and budget accordingly for the recruitment and hiring of diverse, high-caliber talent by putting the right set of head count and dollars toward that talent. This may require pushing salary limits, “right-sizing” compensation standards and moving from in-person to hybrid working models to be more competitive regionally and nationally. These practices will ensure place-based coalitions can be nimble and entrepreneurial and will help to level the playing field across urban/rural and large/smaller organizations.
Coalition leaders will need the support of their partners to make these budget allocations. For example, an urban coalition with a number of key roles to fill had been seeing little interest by qualified candidates. With our guidance, the lead organization increased salaries, which was made possible when its partners made additional funds available and through reducing headcount and salaries in other areas. The region also emphasized the hybrid nature of the role and made clear the majority of the work was to be done remotely. Almost immediately, the region saw an increase in qualified applicants and were able to fill their open roles in short order. In other instances, better resourced coalitions with flexibility to increase salaries found their top candidates declining offers given the requirement to move full-time to the region. We also saw instances of rural regional coalitions led by smaller non-profits setting a director level compensation at $70,000, close to half of what urban academic and other larger institutions were able to offer. While not able to compete on a salary level, and with little to no additional financial capacity across its partners, those coalitions, in consultation with us, revised their requirements to allow for greater remote and hybrid work schedules, thus expanding their reach for qualified candidates and filling their candidate pool more quickly.
The Need for Speed. The goal of these large-scale federally funded initiatives is to create economic transformation, especially for communities that have been historically overlooked or excluded, with a key lever being recruiting and retaining top, diverse talent almost immediately upon grant award. Failure to attract or hire such talent quickly will make success much harder for many high-potential coalitions including small to mid-sized cities and remote rural communities – and it needs to be addressed. Further, when grantees aren’t staffed up quickly, they easily get overwhelmed by the challenges of implementation, losing focus and trust of their coalition’s–side-steps which can become all consuming. Federally funded grantees need to have their teams built and ready to sprint towards implementation as soon as grants are awarded. Providing targeted capacity building support like guidance on mapping talent needs, job descriptions, compensation levels, interview processes and scoring matrices, along with equitable onboarding and culture best practices during the application development stage or in an implementation-readiness stage can help applicants and grantees build out robust diverse teams beginning on Day One.
In our multi-week Talent Summer Series, we’ll provide useful content, grounded in our takeaways listed above, for place-based coalitions as they continue to build their teams and strengthen their culture. Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter to see the latest.
We’ll kick-off the Series with thoughtful guidance and actionable tips from our partners, including on such topics as: How to Launch a Successful Talent Search, The Hiring Team: What to Consider, How to Develop and Align, Competency-Based Hiring, and Equity Leadership as a Competency.
We look forward to your engagement and feedback. Please feel free to send comments to catalyze@americaachieves.org.
Allison Bajracharya is the Chief Strategy & Communities Officer of America Achieves.
