Vishen Lakhiani explains how to attract mission-aligned employees by leading with your company's why instead of generic job postings. He uses Mindvalley's manifesto as an example and describes an interview exercise where candidates allocate 10 coins across happiness, growth, meaning, and abundance to reveal what they actually value.
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No matter where you're starting, you can start sucky, you can start small. You can still apply these ideas. When I had that crappy little office back in a warehouse in a ghetto part of kl, I still knew in my mind this was going to be the world's greatest workplace. And that's the key thing. You got to create that vision of what you want to create. And if the real world doesn't match that, it doesn't matter. Because we live in two worlds. We live in the real world, but we also live in the world of imagination. We live in the world of ideas, of visions, of beliefs, what's going on in our head. And that vision was real inside here before it was manifest. Real in the real world. And whatever ideas you get here, whatever new thoughts or visions for how you want to build your workplace, my request to you is make it real inside. You don't have to share it with people, but make it real inside. And know that if I can do that. And that didn't happen fast, it took about a decade, but it was still a massive leap. You can do that too. All of us have inside us the same powers to create, to shape reality, to tap into unseen powers to make those visions come true. So hold on to that vision, no matter how sucky, no matter how small, no matter how black and white your workplace. Maybe now. Okay, so let's get to the seven keys. Are you guys ready for this? Step one is creating attraction. Now this is where we're going to go into workshop mode. So I want you to have your pen and your papers ready. So the first step is know that job ads are stupid. Job ads are written because of this rule that people need a 9 to 5. Right? People. Job ads target ordinary people who are stuck in an ordinary way of life. So this is a typical job ad that I pulled up from Craigslist. Salon manager part time Los Angeles San Francisco Valley growing company looking for part time salon manager to help in our unique upscale availability to work flexible day schedules Monday through Friday. Please visit our website Salon Republic for additional information about our company. Now, if you go to the website, it's just the job ad. Don't do that. I want to show you a new way of writing your job ad. Okay, so typical job ads suck because people, in the words of Simon Sinjac, don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. In the world, if you simply advertise your job, you become vanilla. You Become plain. But if you talk about why you do what you do, if you appeal to the why, you somehow arouse something in people. People now start paying more attention. For whatever reason, human beings are hardwired to connect not based on the what, but on the why. When somebody knows why you designed the company to do what you do, why you're writing the book you're writing, why you are building that service or that product or that app you're building, you connect with them in a different way. So this is what I want to suggest your job website should look like. Firstly, you can check this out in your time if you go to careers.mindvalley.com but I'm going to deconstruct it for you. So firstly, notice when you come to the website, the first thing we talk about is the why. And it says, shape the future of humanity by working on the future of education. Shape the future of humanity by working on the future of education. Now, the next thing is what we say. Interested in a job? Let's go through a couple of steps. Step one, does our mission excite you? And then we explain why Education, according to Mandela, is the most powerful weapon in which you can use to change the world. If the mission doesn't excite them, we ask them to bail. We only want to work with people who care about reforming education. So you want to understand what is your why. And in a moment, we're going to do an exercise to help you identify your why. Now, the second technique is that after you state your why, you state your manifesto. And your manifesto is what you, as the business owner or the manager, believe should be different about work. So way back in 2005, this is what our website looked like and we had a manifesto. And this is really how we started attracting the first people. I wrote this manifesto when it was just me and my dog, Ozzie, right? And it said, 10 reasons to join Mindvalley. Freedom, great people. I didn't mention that the only other great person there was a dog, right? Ozzy was People. I didn't want to hurt his feelings. So it was technically true. Freedom, great people, culture and perks, training and education. We wrote a manifesto. Now, this manifesto may seem regular today, but back then in 2005, this was revolutionary. It was different. And so we started getting people applying. Today we have a different manifesto. And you can see this again if you go to a career website, careers.mindvalley.com for example, the first item in our manifesto says, we are not an American company, nor a Malaysian company, but An Earth company immediately that speaks to certain individuals. We talk about how we innovate rapidly to stay on the leading edge of exponential change. Developers, programmers, they want to hear that. They don't want to work on boring maintenance work. They want to innovate. We talk about why we believe happiness is the single most powerful tool for productivity. And then we have a picture of our team at a fancy dress party. Certain type of people that value happiness in the workplace, those are the people we want. Because, as you'll see later, people with high levels of positive energy actually improve workspace productivity. We talk about we stand up for what we believe in. And we have a sample app that we released to encourage people to stand up for refugees. Right? We actually created advertising to support these values. We stand up for what we believe in. So by designing this manifesto, we're immediately speaking to the exact type of Persona we want in the company. And remember, we started this back when we looked like that because we knew no one was going to join us because of a fancy office. But we still got people to join us. Our first applicant came from Atlanta, Georgia. Second came from Singapore. The third came from Finland. All of these people traveled halfway around the world to join and work from that office office because the manifesto spoke to them. So again, it's not about your office space. It's not about the sexiness of your product. It's about what's inside you. And this is what I want you to understand. You see, there's an underlying reason people take jobs, and we often underestimate that. I've interviewed maybe three, 4,000 people, and I notice that what people are really looking for in a job is not a salary check. It's not a 9 to 5, especially millennials. These, in order, are the four things they're looking for. They want to grow. They want to be happy, to wake up every day, know that, you know, they're going to be stepping into a workplace where they have friendships, they want to have meaning in their lives. They want to know that their lives matter for something. And the fourth thing is they want abundance. They want to know that they'll be able to afford the things that they want. And I found that in that order, that those were the people who I was attracting. And so every time I interview someone, and you can adopt the same methodology, I take out this image on my iPad and I tell them, I'm going to give you 10 coins. Now, I want you to do this exercise with me in your head. You have 10 coins. Think carefully. Where would you place these 10 coins in terms of happiness, abundance, growth and meaning. Now, some people might put 3 on happiness, some might put all 10 on meaning. But usually people scatter them out. Where would you put yours? Thank you for watching that video. I'd love to know your thoughts, so leave a comment.
