Click here for Part I

Helping entrepreneurs, executives, and organizations grow their businesses by transforming their workplaces from within

Joe Mechlinski is the CEO and co-founder of entreQuest, a business consulting firm based in Baltimore. Since 2001, eQ has driven growth for entrepreneurs and organizations of all sizes, industries, and economic environments. Joe is also the Founder of SHIFT – a localized membership group for entrepreneurs and executives – and the author of Grow Regardless, a New York Times, USA Today, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.com best selling book about organizational change. He has served on the boards of Betamore, Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Greater Chesapeake, Conscious Venture Labs, and others. Joe and eQ have won numerous recognitions and honors, including Baltimore Business Journal’s “Best Places to Work” (for five consecutive years) and The Daily Record’s “Successful by 40” and “Most Admired CEOs” lists.

Q. What makes eQ stand out in the overall recruiting industry?

JOE MECHLINSKI: The recruiting industry is a $140 billion industry, and there are some major players. Before I say that they’re all doing it wrong, I acknowledge that it’s been around for quite some time, and we’ve got a big company here in town and I’m sure they do great work. But when it comes to small- to mid-sized businesses, I feel like they don’t get the care and attention that they need from potentially some of those bigger companies. Our COO Misty Aaronson—who’s been with us for 10 years—when she first joined the firm, we had acquired a small recruiting firm thinking that was the answer, thinking the way recruiting companies do it is going to grow regardless. We quickly found out that it was not. She and I have built this philosophy on treating a candidate almost as if they’re the client. What I mean by that is there’s a low unemployment rate today—it’s less than 6% in some cities—there’s a low participation of workforce out there, in terms of finding highly skilled workers for professional environments, and so a lot of companies still feel like they’re the ones with the gold, as opposed to feeling like they should be a magnet for top talent, like they should go the extra mile, the extra step.

We find ourselves not only helping companies find top talent, but really teaching them how to attract top talent. That’s everything from creating a compelling story of how they make an impact in the world; that’s getting their act together with their relationship with the community. It’s also how they treat their employees—are they using things like “compliance, control, and command”? Or are they really trying unlock people’s purpose and their passion for what they do? We take a different approach because we feel like, again, you can attract great people if you just look at the way in which your company’s impacting the world. I think given that there’s going to be a large amount of millennials in the workforce in the next ten years—I think they say something like 75%—we’ve got to be more competitively strategic with how we go after that kind of talent. That’s what we spend our time doing from a talent acquisition point of view.

Q. How does that outlook impact what you do and what you tell your clients?

A. The question of how many jobs will the average millennial have is, I’ve read, anywhere between 11 and 18, and how long does that mean that they’ll stay? Anywhere between two to three years. This is not like it used to be, you know. I think the average tenure of an employee was probably in the double digits at one point in time in corporate America, and so today what we find are people are more transient, people are—in their minds—less loyal. I think companies are struggling to figure out what to do with that. The analogy I give people is a software company will think about a concept called the “lifetime value” of a client. What we ask companies to think about is “what’s the lifetime value of an employee?” If you’re a software company, you don't pretend people are going to stay forever. You use a two to three-, maybe a four-year horizon, and so we encourage companies to think about it the exact same way.

If you know that the average employee for a certain position—let’s say salespeople as an example—is about two years, just nationally, you’ve got to ask yourself a question: what are you going to do to keep people longer than two years? What if we just set your business model around keeping them for two years? How would that change the way you would recruit? How would that change the way you would train and develop those people? It doesn’t mean treat them less good, it just means think about it a little differently. By the way, when someone leaves your organization, could you have a better referral source for new talent? In fact, one of the guys leading one of our consulting business today was someone who was with us ten years ago. He was with us for five years, he left and, as we say, did a little bit of market research—actually went to a bigger consulting firm—and then, five years later, came back. I don't look at that as how great we are, but I think it’s because we are very thoughtful about the off-boarding process of employees.

Q. What are the other strategic aspects of the “growing regardless” philosophy?

The idea that companies need to attract talent is certainly one part of growing regardless, but the second part is “how do you keep them engaged?” Studies will say that the American workforce is nearly 70% disengaged, meaning they don't understand what’s expected of them, they don't have the tools necessary—Gallop has published this survey for 15 years. And when you start thinking about how we haven’t engaged the workforce, what we would like to say is we’ve engaged them with the brain in their head, but there’s a brain in the heart, and there’s a brain in the gut that we feel companies could engage. What that looks like is “how do you get someone to follow with their heart or their passion?” It doesn’t mean that they don't ever have to pick up a shovel and do hard work, but is there something about what that company has people doing that they’re really excited about, that they’re really engaged for? The brain in the gut is about impact: how can you help them understand what they’re doing has an impact, not only on your customers, but how about on your customers’ lives? How about on the world? How about on a small scale—your community? What you’re finding is, beyond corporate social responsibility, books like Conscious Capitalism—and one of our partners right now is writing a book called Evolved Enterprises: it’s a book about how a company makes money and mission not mutually exclusive. I think it’s going to be a pretty big trend that employers should think about if they want to retain top talent.

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