Leading change: Executive recruiting in the charity sector | with Clark Bowers

Sam.

Hello, welcome to the short. This is episode 64. I'm Johnny Campbell, the your host for today and also CEO and co founder of Social Talent. Well, we're broadcasting today live on 25th of August over LinkedIn and YouTube. If you're live, you're very welcome. We would love to have your contributions, your chats, your comment comments and your questions. If you're listening to us on podcast, you're also very welcome. And today's show is going to be hopefully one that will be perhaps new to many of you, but still provide insight regardless of what background you have in talent, HR or recruiting. We're going to be talking about leading change, executive recruiting in the charity sector. That might not be the sector you work in, but if you're in the U.S. it's the third largest sector in the economy. You may not be aware of that. And the issues of the charity sector are probably reflected in many other sectors as well in different ways. And our guest here today is going to be somebody who will hopefully give you some great insight not only to his sector and his situations with his employer, but also perhaps give you insight in terms of how you can solve some of the problems and challenges you have in your organization today. Don't forget, you can check out all of our upcoming shows and our previous shows if you wish, on socialtalent.com the shortlist where you'll find a list of our previous shows. Watch the videos, get links to the podcast, all those wonderful things. But let's come back to today's topic. So leaders make a huge difference in any organization. We know this. Good leader, bad leader. They set the tone. They should have the ability to rally employees, become a linchpin for success. But in the charity sector, there's often much more at stake, perhaps not just profit. You know, where you might have a commercial company, you have lies potentially at stake, real issues around families all around the world. It's really imperative that leaders of NGOs can both deliver on results and inspire action, which makes hiring them a trickier and complex or more complex proposition than typically the private or public sectors. So we're delighted to be speaking today with Clark Bowers. And Clark is the Director of Talent Acquisition at World Vision. And with over 20 years of recruiting experience in this arena, he's going to be sharing with us today how he transformed talent acquisition in the organization by implementing a top grading methodology to secure dynamic leadership positions for roles across the world. And also discussing the effects Covid the Pandemic has had on World Vision. His team And a little bit about perhaps the impact that we learned over the years that having better recruiters through use of social talent and other sources has on the organization and people at large. Clark, you're very welcome. Where are you joining us from today?

Well, I'm working out my home office which is just outside of Boise, Idaho in the northwestern part of the U.S.

Well, I'm coming in from Dublin, so we are across the Atlantic Ocean. And then a bit for today's conversation. Thanks for taking the time out.

Clark.

A lot of our audience may not be familiar with World Vision or they might know the name, but really can't quite recall exactly what the organization does. Could you perhaps just bring us up to speed, tell us a little bit about World Vision, the work the organization does, and then maybe tell us about recruiting and your team there as well.

Okay, sure. Well, World Vision, I work for World Vision International, which is part of what we call the World Vision Partnership. And we're made up of over 70 offices worldwide. And we have fundraising offices or support offices that provide funds to the organization. Our international office is not a hierarchical high headquarters. We are more of a service oriented. We carry out the work of the field, the work in the field on behalf of our support offices. And we have seven regional offices worldwide, each with about 10 to maybe 15 countries that they oversee our work. And total staff, if you include both support offices and our field offices is around 35,000 people. And we have in nearly 100 countries where we have operations ongoing. And my team works to recruit field leaders and we focus on, we use the hey grading system, so grade 15 and up. And one thing that we've recently added is we also have an in house executive search function. So we do executive search at the request of both our senior field offices for senior leadership positions in our field offices. And when when asked, we also do executive search for our support offices too at the C suite level.

And Timmy Clark, what kind of work does World Vision get involved in? I know we had Michelle from icrc, the International Committee Red Cross recently, and he described the work they do. Perhaps you can tell us a bit about the types of where in the world that World Vision helps and what kind of individuals and what situations.

Okay.

Yeah.

We are a humanitarian aid, emergency relief and development organization, an ingo. And the type of work that we do varies from different parts of the world. But in general, most of our key cornerstones are emergency response. We're considered a leader in that sector and we hope that we do a good job in that. And then we also have a focus on long term community development, usually in the area of livelihoods, community health, water and sanitation. We're one of the largest deliverers of clean water in the world. We also have a pretty strong advocacy arm where we reach out and try to influence government leaders at all levels worldwide. And we have an overarching strategy over the next 10 years called our Promise, where we're really focusing on reaching the world's most vulnerable children and their families and communities. So we're making kind of a shift in terms of focus and funding strategy, all of that. We started implementing it this is year five, but we're going to be carrying this out through the end of the decade.

Clark, I want to come back and touch on some of the issues perhaps that Covid has had in particular on whether it's fundraising and hiring on the business. But I want to first come back to our core topic, which is executive recruiting. The charity sector. And executive recruiting has been in the headlines a lot recently. We've seen a lot of pressure on senior executives in the last year. So before we go further, I want to dive into a couple of articles with you that we've seen recently in the news. So Clark, first article I wanted to try and tease out with you came from third sector and it was an article that was titled is the Charity Sector Facing a Leadership Exodus? By Rebecca Cooney. We'll put the link in the show notes and also live to anyone listening live at the moment. And this was kind of I'll quickly summarize it for those who obviously may not have read this, but it talks about how there seems to be, according to the authors, an increase in turnover at senior level in kind of C level roles and other executive roles in the not for profit NGO type sectors, an exodus of leaders. And the article hypothesizes as to why this trend might be happening. Is this something you're seeing in the market generally around senior executive roles, that in this sector that there has been perhaps increased movement in the last 12 months?

Well, in terms of our own organization, we haven't seen any uptick in attrition, you know, people leaving senior levels inside the organization. I do think, you know, finding really strong candidates at the senior level within the relief and development sector has been difficult, you know, since I've been in it, which is quite a long time ago. So that hasn't changed dramatically, but maybe just fewer candidates at maybe top senior levels. It might be shrinking a bit. Some organizations have not replenished their leadership and probably done enough in the Area of just building up talent and preparing them for just a better job, succession planning.

I know I don't want to generalisms are dangerous here, Clark, but is there a pattern as to the type of senior leader that typically, you know, you would recruit into the sector? Maybe not just specifically world vision that you see coming in, is it individuals who are largely already experienced in the sector, people coming from the private sector, what motivates them? What is your learning been over the last 20 years?

Well, most recently for our organization, it depends on the type of office that it is. And we have offices that are carrying out field work and we're looking for folks with a strong background and experience in the NGO world. And so there is kind of a career progression, fairly natural career progression for people to be at the what we call national director or country director level. And then one thing that we've done, this is part of that strategy of our promise I was talking about is since our organization's been around for 70 years and in some of the countries that we began operations in back in the 50s, some of those countries now are doing quite pretty well from a financial standpoint. So we have identified a dozen countries and given them the responsibility to move to being self funding and we call the transitioning field office or TFO and moving to self funding. So that creates like a different type of national director that we're then recruiting for. We're looking for someone there typically from the private sector who does have a good background in marketing in that particular country, knows the culture, knows like maybe consumer patterns, that type of thing. So that's been a change, kind of a new wrinkle just to our portfolio. And so far it's been done. We give offices typically like about five years to make that transition and it seems to be working quite well. That frees us up to put funding in areas where, well, just areas where we just need more resource poorer areas of the world.

When I read the article that third sector part posted, I kind of reading between the lines, I got the impression that the author was suggesting that the senior leadership in the type of organizations that at least the author was familiar with, were moving into the nonprofit area as a final career move before perhaps retirement. There was a suggestion of that certainly I think in the, in the article that doesn't seem to be the case in terms of the type of senior executives you're hiring. You know, you know, that wouldn't, that would be jarring to your description of hiring people who understand consumer marketing really well. And that background from the private sector, you're not looking for people who are looking to do their last gig before retirement as a specific cohort. Would that be fair?

I wouldn't say that's like typical. If the person has the right skill set, the right personality, they're a great cultural fit and this may be their last rodeo. That's. Yeah, that we'll certainly consider them for the position, but we wouldn't want anyone to think that moving to the nonprofit sector, your job's going to be much easier. I think they're going to find it more demanding than what they may have faced in the private sector.

Probably brings me to article two that I want to discuss with this case came up in Forbes. Clark There was an article by Savitri Wilson called scaling your nonprofits. Impact starts with your people. I imagine this is one close to your heart when surveyed quite recently. I think this article is from last month. When asked what the kind of top issue is or challenge faced by your organization, 72% of respondents said recruiting and retaining talent is a problem, which actually was higher than fundraising as a challenge, which I would have. I'm surprised by. You know, I would have thought, oh, maybe it's fundraising in the pandemic. Maybe. I know a lot of charities that I would have been aware of, perhaps in my home country, couldn't run events, couldn't do things. Has this been your experience through the last 18 months, Clark, and the organization's experience, both the importance of hiring and recruiting at the top and the impact of COVID on fundraising?

Well, I think that the cornerstone for our team is that we're looking for great leadership at all levels because we feel that there's a saying that great leadership is a talent magnet. And I really believe that also great leaders usually have folks that come and join them or seek out to join them, too. So that's really what's key for us in placing folks at all levels of leadership throughout the organization. If you do that, it solves a lot of your attrition issues and problems, is what we found. There is like a newer generation of worker that doesn't stick around as long as folks from my generation. And, you know, whether that will continue to be a trend, we'll just have to see. But, you know, we do understand that. But I do think it comes back to that, just that whole idea of who do you have in your key leadership roles and the vision that they cast and making sure that people stay connected to the vision and mission of the organization and keeping that kind of forefront and center in their Minds, I think if we get that, we're in pretty good shape overall.

In the last 18 months, a lot of individuals working for perhaps really well paying jobs in established corporates, when they got into the kind of real heartache of the pandemic, perhaps they realized that whilst they had a good salary, they worked for a high profile tech company. Perhaps the purpose was missing in their professional lives. Has the organization seen an uptick, perhaps in interest from folks who are looking for more purpose in their lives? Has that been a benefit, perhaps in your hiring?

Yeah, I think it has. I mean, I think that with COVID and people are reexamining like what's, what's my purpose in life? What am I here for? What do I want to do with what I have left of my life? And I think it just ties into, I want to do work that really provides, you know, just value for others and, you know, and, and makes me feel good about what I'm investing all of this time and energy into. And so that works well for us. I think people that have come to us, you know, from the for profit sector, they, they often take a cut and pay. That's just the reality of it. But I've met very few that would, would trade, would go back. They love what they do and they do find that purpose and, and just immense satisfaction, you know, of what they're able to contribute and, and especially at the field level and leadership, you, you can dramatically see like the, the change that you can bring about.

I remember it's many years now, Clark, but when the dreadful earthquake happened in Haiti. I know there was another dreadful earthquake recently. I remember you telling me about how, you know, your recruiting team were able to utilize their, their enhanced recruiting skills to get people on the ground faster. And you know, often recruiters are just driven by time to hire and they're driven by quality hire and these metrics and they feel great about it. But for your team, being able to recruit somebody better or faster has a real massive impact in potentially a disaster zone, such as, you know, somewhere where it's been hit by an immense earthquake. Tell me a little bit about that kind of impact that Europe team in particular can have in terms of making people available in those situations.

Yeah, well, one initiative that we started fairly recently is developing an emergency relief roster so that we have the time to identify and vet candidates fully. And basically they're on speculation. Like you go through our process, you get certified, then when a crisis happens and we need to augment our existing staff, you'd be the first people that we contact and kind of fast track them to field assignments. It's still in kind of an embryonic stage, but it's working well and I think it will really be a huge help. One thing that our training with social talent has really helped us identify passive candidates. Folks in the emergency response part of the NGO world are in high demand. Just unfortunately there's a lot of bad things happening around the world. This is probably the most competitive area for talent that we have. And without the tools that we have, through sourcing passive candidates, it really, really be a struggle. It's a challenge. But the training that our team has received, like through social talent, has been tremendous and able to find and identify folks. Fortunately, we have, I think, good brand recognition, name recognition. So, you know, we do get people that are interested. It's just a question of, you know, do they have the right skill set, do they fit our culture, that type thing. But it's, it's coming along quite well. But we really owe a lot of that to the sourcing that we've been able to do.

Thank you for bringing that up. I know there's many aspects that make it successful for the team. And we have a question here from Tomas Banke, who's watching on YouTube asking about, just inquiring about your recruiting activity for the business, our marketing activity. And this might make recruiting easier. I think, correct me, I'm wrong, Tomas, it's. How aligned are you to the brand position? And you mentioned it already and you know, does that, that, that kind of call it the, the corporate brand enhance and help you on the recruiting side?

Yeah, it definitely does. Our. We have an employment. Employment brand specialist, branding specialist on our team and part of their role is just to make sure that our message syncs with what our, our main message is through our marketing and also from an advocacy standpoint too. So it does help. We use buffer for all of our recruiters, send out periodic messages that tie back to the work that we're doing around the world. So it just continuously kind of feeds interest to the followers we have on LinkedIn and other social media. And so that's all helps. But yeah, we do try to sync that up as well as we can.

At the top of the show. I mentioned one approach that in particular that another approach that you brought in for executive hiring and that's top grading. Can you tell our audience a little bit about top grading? First of all, the methodology for those who may not be familiar with it, and then a little bit about maybe perhaps why you chose this and the impact it's had on the business.

Okay, sure. Well, top grading is a methodology. And I would say that we use top grading principles, you know, as part of our. Particularly in our leadership recruitment. When I was working for our World Vision US office, I was doing some executive recruiting and other recruiting for Washington D.C. where we have a couple hundred staff based. And World Vision International had opened up a position for a national director, recruiter or CEO of our field offices. And my boss at the time actually referred me to the person who became my boss and said, hey, you might want to talk to Clark. This might be a job that would be a good fit for him. So we talked about it, and I told my new boss that if I took the role, I wanted to use these top grading principles as part of the selection process because I found it to work really well. Top grading was created by a gentleman named Dr. Brad Smart. And the. The first material of his that I came in contact with was a book called the Smart Interviewer. And that was when I started my first role with World Vision, back when the earth was cooling, I think that was 1993. And World Vision US, they hired me as a recruiter and I expected that they had some kind of an interviewing format. And they said, no, we don't. And my job was to hire people for the field. Our field offices really relied a lot on my judgment, because this is back in the day when it was difficult to get a fax through. I remember trying to call maybe five or six calls to get through to Niger to talk to our national director there. And you might get a connection, you might not. And they would get these people and they would speak to them on the phone. But in most cases, they didn't meet them or see them until the day they landed in their country. So they were relying quite a bit on my judgment, which was a little intimidating. So as I read this book called the Smart Interviewer, which was in the library, I just, I really like the principles of and what is, what can be called top grading. But the idea is that when you're looking for people in leadership roles, first you do a very thorough interview, but you look for patterns of behavior. And Dr. Smart's philosophy is that leadership. Leadership is something that can be enhanced, but to some degree, you either have it or you don't. And it usually starts kind of manifesting itself when you get to be in your teens. And then so you look for evidence. First of all, has this person been a leader in different ways in their life? And when they joined an organization, did they gravitate towards leadership positions? And you look for excellence, too. And excellence is a pattern of behavior from how well you did in college in terms of grades, you know, how you've performed on the job. And so you look for just. And how you make decisions too. And then the other thing is that what you're looking for is just, is this person shown evidence of being a high performer, of going above and beyond kind of expectations? And then one principle of top grading that they say over and over again is it's called torque, which means the threat of reference check. And so at the very beginning of any interview that you do with a candidate, you pepper in and you put it in your written questions too, that what will references say? And you make it very clear that, you know, we're going to verify everything that you're telling us. And you know, we trust what people are saying, but. But we are going to verify and see. And so we ask that in terms of references, we want to speak to direct supervisors and we want to go back a number of years. And sometimes people will say, oh, I didn't get along with one of my supervisors, you know, and it's like, well, hey, I've experienced that in my life too, okay? And if it's just one out of six jobs, okay, that happens. But if they keep saying, oh, I didn't get along too well with that person, or. And then the other thing too is that sometimes it's very telling when you say, can we speak to your direct supervisor? And maybe it's seven or eight years ago and they've just lost all contact with that person. You know, it's a bit of an orange flag, if not a red flag, because so much of leadership are the networks that you build. And so if a person's showing that I don't keep any connection, I have no network of former employers, things like that, that's a little troubling. So it'd be something that we'd want to explore further if we're going to move the candidate forward in the selection process.

I read that the. Statistically anyway, the rate of, call it poor hiring, pre implementing, pre implementation of top grading generally versus post is dramatic. Have you seen anything similar since you brought it into World Vision?

Well, when I was hired in to do the national director recruiting, I believe that our bad hire rate at the national director level was about 20 to 25%. So pretty significant. We have a lot of vacancies, which is never good. People get nervous if there's no leader, you know, in the office, donors get nervous too, and our senior staff get quite nervous. So there was a lot of pressure to get jobs filled and get them filled with people that, you know, would stick around. So we implemented the methodology that we created using the top grain principles and we saw that bad hire rate go down to like less than 2%. So that was like just one dramatic shift right there. And then there was a lot of positive feedback from senior leadership around the around the World Vision Partnership that they saw like a pretty significant increase in the quality of the folks that were coming into the role too. We had great national directors. I don't want to like make people think, but we were able just to enhance that and really identify like top performers, both internally and external candidates and also improve diversity because that was one of the things I was asked to do in the role also.

I'm going to come back to that quick comment just from 1:1 of our live audience members, Matthew Sagar, apologies of mispronouncing your surname, Matthew, Matthew, saying he worked in Northern Ghana in the mid-90s and they relied on the telex, never mind a fax machine. And now he works for Western Union where he discovered that the firm invented the telex. So quite the circle of life. So some shared experience from some of our listeners on those challenges. So talk to me about so Top Grading as initiative. How much work is involved in changing the methodology like that? Like, just if anyone's listening, thinking, oh, I'd love to reduce it from 25 to 2, that'd be amazing. What's involved? How long does it take? What have been some of the learnings you've had from bringing that into the business?

Well, I think it depends on how far you want to go if you want to use all of the tools that they have available. It can vary, I guess would be my short answer. But typically a Top grading interview is called a SIDS interview, a chronological in depth survey. So you go a little deeper in the candidate's career history and you're talking through and again, you're looking for patterns. Everything is based on patterns. Because you can then kind of predict, yes, this person should be a great fit for this role that you have because their previous experience correlates well to what you're gonna be asking them to do. They have a consistent pattern of high achievement based on what their references say, also based on issues of that they were promoted, that type of thing. One thing that top grading focuses on which I found to be really helpful are transitions like, why did you leave that company? Because, you know, sometimes it's like you're doing great. Why would you leave this organization to go here? And you know, people have their story. And again, you would go back to that thread of reference. Check is, you know, does their story pan out when we do, when we call their references their former supervisors. But it's really interesting to hear like, and one example would be the person who never has really applied for a job. People come to them and say, I'd like you to be on my team. And if you hear that over and over again, you know that you've probably, you know, you've got, you found someone pretty good. And. And then the other would be that. How did you hear about that job? Oh, well, my former supervisor, two jobs previously had, had just started as the CEO or as the whatever the chro or whatever it might be. And they called me and said, we need you here. That again, if you hear that, and especially if you hear it a couple of times again, you feel like, okay, this is someone that we can really work with. And then you look for leadership both inside and outside of the workplace. If you see that that person's been deemed a leader by peers, they're in some kind of professional guild or society and they've been promoted as president or vice president or something, you know, we're a faith based organization. So if they have a church and they've been appointed a leadership role at a church that they've attended, those are great. That's really good evidence that yes, this person is seen as a leader in many different settings.

Would you recommend it primarily or even only as an approach for assessing leaders, or do you think it has application for other roles?

Well, I think it's what they call is like high performers which tend to be leaders, maybe not always. And so they have it divided into A players, B players, or C players. Now it's fantastic for leadership roles, but it really works at any level in the organization because if you're going to hire even like you're going to hire some telemarketers, you want the best of that bunch that you have to pick from and because eventually and hopefully if they move up through the organization, they will move into leadership roles down the line.

You mentioned earlier how great leaders tend to attract more great people. They drive great retention. I'd agree with all of that stuff. A lot of companies in the last 12 to 18 months in particular have been talking about challenges of retention. They've been talking about the challenge of retaining talent. Talents are moving on at a higher level. Than ever for a whole bunch of reasons. How leaders have struggled. We've had talks on this show, we ran events on this. How leaders have struggled to manage more remote teams and that's again led to attrition. How organizations have to take a bigger responsibility for the development enablement of their staff. How they need to identify better opportunities for internal mobility. How many of these issues are issues for world vision? And I say issues is probably the wrong word. You know, areas of focus perhaps like that have come more to the fore. Like if I pick topics like internal mobility, if I pick issues such as, you know, managing remote teams, succession planning has world vision just by virtue of the way it was previously structured. Just being good at dealing with those. I know you've worked, as you said, remotely for 20 years. So how affected is your organization by the same issues that seem to be affecting every other organization right now?

Well, I think we're to some degree affected by all the things that you mentioned. I mean, it does come up. Internal mobility is something that we're focusing more energy and effort into because of the way that we're structured. We're a confederated model. We don't have one, at least not yet. We don't have one central personnel database. It's sometimes difficult to share information about talent and then there's opportunities come open, but only one person ends up with that promotion, with that new job. That's something we discovered at the national director level. It's a very attractive position within our organization and we may have three or four great internal candidates plus two or three great external candidates vying for it. Only one person gets that role. And I've met people where it's the first time they've never gotten a job that they wanted and you have to deal with suddenly tell them and they might find it really tough to deal with. Oh, I'm not getting it. And it's like, well, no, it's extremely compet. So we're looking for other avenues where folks like that can serve. If they don't get this role, is there another role where they get fully exercise all of their gifts and abilities, that type of thing? I think a lot of that too is how engaged your hiring managers are with their teams. And this is something we're really trying to work on. On my own team and the managers I have, we emphasize you need to have a professional development plan for everyone on your team. So you need to know where they want to go, what they want to achieve, and how are you going to help them get there. We have limited resources and things, but we can be creative and try to help that person meet their career goals. But I think that's a big part of it too. We have challenges inside. But again, I go back to. I think we have a great corporate culture at World Vision, and I think we do have really strong leadership at the very top at World Vision International. And so people do stick around or if they do leave, it's not surprising two or three years later that there's. Well, they used to Skype me, but on Ms. Teams, they ping me and say, hey, Clark, I want to come back. And. And if we have a great job and a good fit, we'll try to get them back in the fold.

One of our previous guests, Bev Kay, has written a whole book on this. She talks about the concept and she delivers training on our platform. On UP is not the only way. And she has her lever acronym with two Rs at the end over the different types of opportunity that are not just upward. Upward is one of them. But there should be other opportunities. And you create these opportunities, as you say, for, for other challenges. And it does require, I think the majority of leaders that I see, unfortunately, Clark, don't have that mindset. They don't have the training and they don't have the ability to have those conversations. They believe that when somebody says, I want more, they need to promote them, give them a pay rise or they're gone. And they're quite protective of their team kind of going, you know, don't let anyone else poach them internally, which causes massive challenges. Whilst the external market has fair game to go attract them, yet they're trying to prevent them from moving internally. Maybe it's something that is just culturally different in your sector where people are more open to kind of go, like, continue the mission for another part of the business or the enterprise.

That's good.

There's lots of missions to be achieved. Rather than the protectionist kind of mindset you see in the corporate world, at least I see a lot in the corporate world, Clark. I don't know if you'd share that opinion. Where managers think that if they just hold onto their staff by trying to shield them against internal colleagues or departments or teams, they can keep them, whereas it never works.

Yeah, I never quite understood that mentality. Like, I have a great team. I mean, I really, really, very, very happy with the folks on my team. But I tell them if there's another opportunity that comes around that's better for you, better for your family, meets your goals, what you're trying to achieve, you know, go for it, you know, and I'll, I'll support you. Yeah, I'll be happy. Right? You know, or speak as a reference. I think that you do that. We're a Christian organization, but I have to say I believe in karma. Like if, you know, what goes around comes around. So if you do that, people do leave. I just had one of my managers leave to become the global talent acquisition director at another ngo. And it was tough because she's great and I was like, no, I mean, you know, I don't want her to leave. But I also realized this is a fantastic opportunity for her and her family. So it's like, you go, you go with our blessing. You know, anything we can do to help you, we'll be glad to help. And she has the same attitude. I've just seen that that just works better. That whole protectionism. It isn't going to work and your top talent are going to resent it. They're going to take off.

I spoke with another leader who just runs Exact Recruiting to keep to the topic of exact recruiting we started with and he's got an exact recruiting team of about 40 folks just doing Exact recruiting in the tech company he's working in. And he was saying that his estimate is that because they're super busy hiring lots of senior execs as the company is expanding like crazy and they're large organization and he said about half of the recs he has, he believes he doesn't need to have that. If the business was better at getting to know other execs, one exec from this department could know the execs in this other part of the business. They, they, they, they do. They hire internally because they have quite a high attrition rate after two years of senior execs and yet they're hiring tons of senior execs over here. And I think this is probably endemic everywhere, although perhaps to different degrees where you don't need to do as much exec hiring. If you were better at raising the visibility of other folks and you had a culture where you encourage people to go explore new missions amongst the business, it sounds like you guys have a good culture around that already. That's probably minimizing the amount of external hires you need to make.

Well, we're trying to improve in that and fortunately we're going to be moving to a shared HRS system which is something we haven't had before. And so it'd be easier to share and identify talent. Our chief people officer For World Vision International, we have a council of all of our HR leaders, we call it People and Culture in our organization. But so like the head of HR for World Vision United States, World Vision Canada, World Vision Australia, some of the major support offices, really, any office is invited, any fundraising office is invited to participate. And then our 7hr or people and Culture regional directors from around the world are also on this council too. And we're really trying to share best practice, share information on talent, that rising talent in the organization. And we do think that there's a tremendous benefit if you're a field practitioner to go and learn how a support office functions, the challenges they face. So if you rise up in the organization, you'll have a really balanced view of the challenges that are faced and how it's going to impact all facets of the organization rather than just maybe like one specific sector. And I think that's healthy for the organization. We're working to do more of that and I'm excited because I think we're on the right track to doing that. To the point a former COO that we had, he said one time, he goes, I think all the talent that we need is right here in the organization. We just haven't identified it well. We're going to make sure that we've exhausted. Do we have internal folks that can take these roles with the knowledge that it does help to have a certain percentage of external folks join with new blood, new thinking, new ideas, that type thing.

I've always said the internal mobility is a driver of employee engagement. It's also a driver of retention. It's a driver of inclusivity and diversity. But it requires two things, typically, the right culture and the right systems. Unfortunately, too many companies just focus on the systems and they don't have the culture. It sounds like you've got the culture and as soon as you have the systems, I think you can't go wrong after that.

I hope so. I hope so. And as I said, I'd have to say just very blessed to have the team that I have, really high performers. And yeah, we're excited about the changes and especially change in our mission, vision and where our leadership wants to take the organization in this coming decade. I think it's all going well and we're the most unified as an organization based on our structure that we've ever been. So it's exciting time to be here. It's great.

Clark, we've come to the end of the show and I must thank you for your time, your insight. It's been fascinating. But I'm going to ask you one last thing. I'm hoping you can leave us with one last tip, one last piece of advice to add to our shortlist to share with our users. Whether it's something that was passed on to you by somebody else in your career or something you've just learned through grit and hard work over the last 20 years, I want to share on what would that tip be?

Okay, well, I'll try to do this quick and this comes from some teaching I've been doing lately. And there's a verse in Ephesians where it talks about we are his workmanship and it's talking about each of us as an individual. And the Greek root of the word is poema, where the word poem comes or work of art. And the idea is that each person is a masterpiece, this valuable, treasured work of art. And I think if you look at people and treat them that way and understand that you'll just be a pretty good leader right from the start if you're in a leadership role. And I think it just helps in that concept of, of every candidate is this unique person and I want to really understand them. I think it's why I like recruiting, why I made it my career, because every person has this fascinating story to tell. So I would just say that idea of just look at each person as this is valuable, very, very valuable work of art.

I love that. I agree with you. Find the unique gem and star in everybody. We all have it in us. You just got to go find it. Clark, really appreciate your time. Thanks for joining us from Idaho this morning. I know you've got a busy day ahead, so I'll leave it to it and hopefully we have you on again. It's been a pleasure and as always a pleasure to know you over the last few years. You did a great job with your team there. I wish you every success.

Well, thank you, Johnny. We love social talent, all the help and assistance you guys have given us. So yeah, thank you for allowing me to join.

Our pleasure. A great cause, great team. Clark, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for joining us and listening to us this week. Hopefully you've learned a lot and gained a lot from today's show. If you like that, come back next week. We've got more coming up next week. We're looking forward to having Steve Mayer, who's vice president of talent acquisition at Procore in the US talking about how do we stem the tide of the great resignation. Don't know what the great resignation is you need to come back next week. That's going to be live on Wednesday, 1st of September. That's at 4pm UK Ireland time. That's 11am in the east coast of the US and 8am on the west Coast. Or you can find it come Wednesday evening, typically Thursday morning on all your favorite podcast channels, Apple, Spotify, wherever you get your good podcasts. Or of course, you can just check it out by coming to socialtown.com forward/the shortlist. We'll see you next week. Thanks for joining us for this show. We've got a great lineup all the way running up till Christmas, so do stick with us. And if you haven't subscribed already, hit that subscribe button. Take care.