Do you remember the Blue Shirts?

This army of well-trained, huge-smiling, sales staff at Best Buy built the company to what it is today.

Yes, they’ve been Amazon-ed a bit, but still they survive. The Blue Shirts are why. When everything else (huge product assortment, low prices, easy returns) are commoditized, only service will save you.

And Best Buy’s sales staff serve. Bigtime.

But how does Best Buy energize that 100,000-person army?

Enter Jennifer Rock & Michael Voss. These two executives built the legendary employee communications function at Best Buy from the ground-up. They created the messaging & energy that electrified the Blue Shirts.

After a decade of this work, Jennifer & Michael left to share their secrets. (You can get a glimpse in their new novel Operation Clusterpuck.)

And you can listen to my 20-minute interview, where they reveal the secrets of outstanding employee communications.

If you don’t know the name Abakar Saidov, you soon will.

Because he may have cracked the code on how to build a relationship with the candidates you want to hire.

For years, I’ve said that “just in time hiring” stinks.

By the time you realize you need to hire someone, and then start, you’re already too late.

You need to dig your well before your thirsty. In hiring, that means you need to build relationships with candidates ahead of time.

That’s where Abakar comes in. He’s CEO and Co-Founder of London-based Beamery. He’s on a mission to transform recruitment by empowering companies to treat candidates like customers.

In fact, he’s helped invent CRM Candidate Relationship Management. It’s like Salesforce.com for Recruitment.

Abakar now has over 100 employees & $40 Million in venture funding from Index Ventures, Workday Ventures, EQT Partners, and M12. He’s on a roll.

In this 20 minute conversation, Abakar shares the keys to hooking the candidates you really want. Before you even need them.

There’s potentially no harder hiring task these days than landing Rockstar software developers.

So, I wanted to find an expert at it. Someone who has a dramatically different approach.

I found him.

Based in London, Hung Lee is CEO of Workshape, the matching service for tech talent. It’s software that helps you recruit software engineers by focusing on specific areas of interest. Which results in a high-signal, zero-noise talent marketplace

Hung is also creator & curator of Recruiting Brainfood, the best curated recruiting content delivered to your inbox, once a week.

In this 20 minute conversation, Hung reveals how to go about finding & hiring the best software engineers.

Let’s get real.

For your business to succeed, you need a team of happy & productive employees.

Which means you need to keep your best people. Otherwise, you’ll always be scrambling to get new ones onto your leaky ship.

But how can you keep your best people when we’re at 3.7% unemployment? And when 90,000 headhunters like me are calling them every day?

Here’s the irony:

To keep them, you need to help them advance their career. That’s right… You have to do everything in your power to prepare them to leave you.

You need to help them advance their career. Develop new skills. Build their confidence. Master new skills.

But yikes. If you do that, they might leave you.

Maybe.

Or they may be so grateful …and learning so much… that they can’t afford to leave you. Even when the phone rings.

These 2 goals conflict - growing them & keeping them. So, I found an expert Marti Konstant of Konstant Change, to help us make sense of it all. For 10 years, she’s been developing the concept of ‘Agile Careers.’ She knows more about it than anyone I’ve met.

In this 20-minute conversation, she reveals what’s most important to your best people. And how to ensure they never leave you.

In 1991, Mark Kaufman started as a physical therapist. 28 years later, he’s built Athletico into the dominant force in physical therapy.

Based in Chicago, Athletico now has 400 Midwestern locations with 4,500 employees.

And importantly, Mark had the forethought in 2011 to have a third-party start measuring outcomes… something not often done in the field.

Recently, BDT Capital Partners made a significant long-term growth equity investment in the company.

In this 20-minute conversation, Mark reveals how he built the industry-leading company, one foam roller at a time.

Rachel Ohlsson is a Rockstar who recruits Rockstars.

Easier said than done.

As Manager of Talent for Chicago-based Oak Street Health, the fast-growing group of primary care centers for adults on Medicare in medically-underserved communities, Rachel’s learned one of the keys:

The ‘WOW!’ interview.

Rockstar candidates who aren’t impressed by the way you interview them aren’t likely to say Yes.

In this 20-minute conversation, Rachel reveals everything she knows about the WOW! interview and how to incorporate it into your hiring process.

Grab a pen for this one.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Can you build a durable company & a successful relationship at the same time? 

Some days, it seems like an unlikely balancing act.

One of the nation’s leading venture capitalists, and my dear friend Brad Feld, knows that you can.

And in this bonus V-Day episode of Strong Suit Podcast, Brad shows us the way.

 Brad has been an early stage investor & entrepreneur for 30 years. Prior to co-founding Boulder-based Foundry Group, he co-founded Mobius Venture Capital. Brad is also a co-founder of Techstars.

Brad’s a writer and speaker on the topics of VC investing & entrepreneurship. He’s written some outstanding books as including “Venture Deals” and “Startup Boards”

If that wasn’t enough, he’s also an art collector & long-distance runner. He’s completed 25 marathons as part of his mission to finish a marathon in each of the 50 states.

In this 20-min episode, Brad shares the secrets of being in love while loving your business. It CAN be done.

One of the most unique roles you may think about adding to your company is the COO Chief Operating Officer.

Often known as the “right hand” or “number two” or “second in command”

The relationship between CEO & COO is vital, and nobody has studied it as intimately as Cameron Herold. He even created the COO Alliance.

Cameron is a top business consultant, best-selling author, and speaker. Named by Forbes Magazine as “The CEO Whisperer,” Cameron has touched thousands of businesses directly. By age 35, he had built two $100M companies. And by 42, he had grown 1-800-GOT-JUNK? from $2M to $106M in revenue in just 6 years.

Cameron has since gone on to help hundreds of companies grow, and exponentially increase revenue. He has earned his reputation by showing his clients how to double their profit in just three years - the process outlined in his bestselling book “Double Double.”

In this 20-minute conversation, Cameron reveals what you need in a COO, where to find one, when to add one, and how to make it a screaming success.

James Ellis has become one of the gurus of recruiting properly.

Between the two of us, we’ve seen 40 years of recruiting mistakes. And pulled out most of our hair in the process. (What remains is grey.)

Based in Chicago, James is host of The TalentCast… the only other recruiting podcast I listen to.

He’s clear, edgy (but not just to be annoying), practical, and has pushed my thinking. Essentially, we’ve concluded, that to hire the best just do the opposite of what everyone else is doing. That’s how bad most executives are at it.

James rants. I chime in.

And we swear A LOT.

Don’t lose your hair or go grey. Instead invest 20 minutes on this episode.

Jason Lauritsen is one of my all-time favorite experts on employee engagement.

He’s incredibly insightful. Which we need, because employees are more disengaged than ever.

I’ve featured him on my podcast before. And with his new book Unlocking High Performance just released, I’m doing it again.

In this 20-minute conversation, Jason reveals how to use performance management to engage & empower your employees to reach their full potential.

In case you missed it, Google For Jobs launched in 2018 and is quickly shaking up the way your candidates look for jobs.

In fact, 73% of all job seekers start their job search on Google. But, if you’re like most employers, you’re still missing this massive opportunity to engage directly with highly qualified candidates.

Unfortunately, the process for posting jobs to Google For Jobs requires deep coding expertise and access to the page code for every job post.

Until now.

Based in Woburn Massachusetts, Jobiak created the industry’s first AI-based recruitment marketing platform specifically for Google For Jobs.

Jobiak’s platform scans your job posts, identifies the attributes that Google requires, and structures the Google tags—all without touching the underlying code.

Jobiak is the brainchild of Founder & CEO Venkat Janapareddy.

Previously, he founded Gozaik, the social jobs platform which helped employers engage with job seekers on Twitter & Facebook. Monster Worldwide acquired Gozaik.

In this 20-minute conversation, Venkat reveals everything you need to know about Google For Jobs and how to get the most out of this powerful & free resource.