Inside the War for Talent and Putting People First at Havas

Editor's note: This piece is part of our Columnist Network series, which explores the tactical thoughts and actions from Adweek's community of high-level experts. Today, Havas Creative's Stephanie Nerlich discusses how she is part of a people-first businesses, and wants to find leaders who want to do the best work their careers. Below, in her own words, she discusses how she plans to win by gaining and retaining talent. The challenge My number one priority right now is ensuring we have access to the best talent—that our benches are filled with people who see Havas as a fresh new opportunity, and that our best and brightest feel supported and appreciated with room to learn and grow. Since becoming CEO in July 2020, talent—both who we have and who we need—has been a key focus of mine. With diversity and inclusion at the core of that focus, I realized early we had two immediate needs: first, to completely rethink our recruitment process; and second, to build a healthy culture, ensuring that the life cycle of each employee is an exceptional one. Our ambition quickly became to build the best, most modern recruiting capability in the industry. Evolving our recruitment approach is a strategic growth driver, and meaningful candidate-centric recruiting with a focus on diversity is critical to the future success of our creative network. The process We hired a chief people officer to help rebuild this process and attract the best and brightest diverse talent to the organization through innovative, people-centered programs and processes that ensure the network’s people culture is strong and engaged with above-average retention rates. I’m proud that we’ve hired three women of color for C-suite level roles in the last three months, but I’ve been recently spending time with clients, our leaders and our team members to hear where we have gaps and where we can do better. I’m also spending lots of time talking to potential recruits—and I’m inspired by what I’m seeing. People are energized both by the empathy they have found for others in this trying year and by the disruption that has forced new outlets for creativity. Our people-centered activities—such as hiring, training, professional development and performance management—need to make a meaningful difference through a thoughtful plan. As we think that plan through, I’m having regular sessions with our leaders to check in on the progress they are making with the hiring of BIPOC in their agencies—and we work together to set goals for improvement. We’re working on innovative approaches to how we onboard new employees. And sometimes painfully, we’re spending time looking inward to understand why an employee leaves our organization so that we can learn from it and improve at every step. We’re also creating new training and development programs to ensure our people can learn and grow. Hiring diverse talent is one part of the formula for change and improvement. We must then create an inclusive culture where people are motivated to do the best work of their lives. To regularly check ourselves and make sure that’s happening, we initiate a global employee survey called Havasay, which is largely focused on culture, belonging and where we can do better. We just received our latest feedback, so I have been spending lots of time digging into the results. The takeaway At Havas, we say that we need to “do more and do better.” This part of the job will never be done; the war never won. But if we focus on building new systems to recruit top talent, training to retain top talent and creating the right environments for top talent to thrive, we will win the most important battles—one by one. I believe that everything else will come together if we put people first.

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Inside the War for Talent and Putting People First at Havas

Columnist Stephanie Nerlich on innovative approaches and painful lessons

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Stephanie Nerlich