• by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, October 12, 2006

The boom is back for the online advertising industry. Many of us have lived through the bust, so we know quite well that good times are much better than bad. For well-positioned companies, good times mean growing markets, growing customer bases, growing revenues, growing margins, and growing profits. Of course, for most companies, it logically follows that all of that growth brings with it a concurrent need to increase staff. We are growing fast and we all need more and more talented people to fuel future growth.

In my 15 years in this business, I've had the good fortune to hire hundreds of great people. It has been, by far, one of the most rewarding parts of running start-ups. This industry is booming not just because the Internet enables extraordinary and powerful new ways to achieve advertising and marketing, but because the promise of what the Internet can do for advertising has attracted tens of thousands of extraordinarily talented and gifted people to create that future, to fulfill the long-awaited promise of fully addressable and measurable interactive digital advertising. In short, people have made this industry what it is today, not technology.

One thing I've learned over the years is that while compensation and benefits are very important, they do not rule the day when it comes to attracting and retaining great talent. In my experience, the best people take jobs or leave jobs for more substantive and core reasons than just money. For example:

Fun, interesting and challenging work. No one wants to work at a boring and pointless job. People want to make a difference. They want to solve problems. Challenging employees to solve problems in areas that they care about, and giving them the tools to be successful, is the most fundamental and rewarding value that a company can provide. Any company or manager that doesn't understand this concept will always have a tough time.

Great people attract great people. Founders and CEOs can have an impact on attracting and retaining great talent, but it's the folks on the front lines that really make the biggest difference. Great people want to work with people like themselves, people who they can identify with and feel a connection to. It is a virtuous circle: The more good people you get, the more that will follow and stay. The more bad people you get, the fewer good people will come onboard or stay.

People would rather do good than bad. Most people want to work in jobs where they feel good about what they are doing. They want to wear the white hat, not the black hat. They want to be liked and respected, not despised. Unfortunately, all too many companies out there worry more about squeezing an extra dollar out of a customer or a deal than what is right and fair. They tend to worry only about legal or contractual constraints, not moral or commonsensical ones. They forget that most people who work for them want to go home at the end of the day feeling good about themselves, not just feeling well taken care of in the pocketbook.

Give people a vision and a plan. Certainly, no one knows what the future will bring, but we all want a vision of the future to believe in and work toward, even if it changes over time. Traditional media and advertising companies have lost much more talent to online start-ups because they failed to develop and articulate a credible vision and plan for the future than they did because of endemic industry issues like fragmentation or loss of audience. Who wants to follow someone who doesn't know where they are going?

Equip and train. There is nothing worse than being given a job and not being given the tools or training to be successful. This is always a challenge in start-ups, where time, money and resources tend to be scarce and deadlines are just the opposite. You always need to be thinking about how to train your folks to do their jobs better, even if circumstances don't permit you the luxury of waiting three months for your new person to get fully up to speed. At least, if you are both cognizant of the fact that you are asking them do something that may be beyond their current ability and experience, you will each go in with the right expectations for the likelihood of full success.

Hire slow, fire fast. While I've not always been the best at practicing what I preach on this one, I've always found that it's better to go slow when it comes to hiring and go fast when it comes to firing. Why? It is better to let a great person get away than to bring in someone who doesn't or can't fit into your company or job. One wrong person in an organization can cause a lot of damage--both for the company as well as the person. Putting the wrong person in the wrong job or wrong company does a disservice to them, and it does a disservice to everybody else that they work with. Great people work best when they have a cooperative and non-distracting environment where everyone pulls his/her own weight. Having been through both boom times and bust, and having had to lay off hundred of folks during the post-Bubble years, I try to counsel hiring managers to think long and hard about how difficult it would be to fire someone before hiring them.

These rules are by no means foolproof when it comes to attracting and retaining great people in your company---sometimes circumstances out of your control get in the way--but hopefully represent good common sense when it comes to creating and managing expectation with existing and potential employees.