Hiring may be easier when unemployment rates hover near double digits, but super talented candidates with years of experience will hardly ever hurt for a job.
When Microsoft (MSFT) recently was looking to snag 300 senior managers from the competition, the company tried a different approach than the usual.
"We want people with entrepreneurial spirits who also want to innovate in the way they do their jobs," says John McCloskey, director, worldwide strategy and sales. "Money alone is not what's going to convince them to come to Microsoft."
To attract the kind of people it needed, the tech behemoth offered a new program that flipped the idea of mentoring on its head. The 300 new senior employees have been paired up with people at similar experience levels to serve as mentors to the Microsoft veterans.
This strategy is just one of many peer mentoring schemes that large corporations have been using to keep employees motivated in an economic environment where the path to the top is often believed to require hopping from firm to firm, says Brian Kropp, managing director at the Corporate Executive Board.
Since 2008, the middle-management level at large companies has been gutted, according to a study from the CEB. On average, managers now have 50% more direct reports and 20% less time to spend with these reports, Kropp says. When polled about what they would do if they had extra money to spend, these organizations said they would not invest in rebuilding their management ranks.
This dearth of managers creates several risks. Employee retention and engagement often drop because there is no clear career path when 10 colleagues are competing for the same supervisor's role. Institutional knowledge also becomes more ephemeral, Kropp says.
To solve this problem, he says, many companies are developing programs that have peers in different divisions or locations mentor each other to provide fresh ideas about career paths, help employees develop new skills, and keep them engaged with their colleagues and the company in general.
These connections stand to help companies improve their relationship with their employees, Kropp says. Some companies are even doing reverse-generational mentoring, having younger, tech- and social media-savvy employees mentor their older colleagues.
Twenty-five percent of large U.S. companies have peer-mentoring programs. Before the financial crisis of 2007, Kropp says, only 4-5% of similarly sized organizations had such programs.
Microsoft has experienced numerous benefits, both quantifiable and intangible, McCloskey says. Everyone involved in the peer-mentoring program has contact with major customers, and the success of the program can be measured in part by the significant increase in the size of the deals the company has completed in the last year, he says.
And the company has been able to make particularly good use of the skills of these new hires. Their knowledge can expand exponentially as they share it with their peers, who can then share it with their direct reports.
