Almost every founder has the same mentality: talent can make or break your business. From finding the best talent to maintaining a strong culture, founders regularly wax poetic about how much they care about their people and their culture.We all know that people and culture matter. The real question is what are you doing about it?

Founders and leadership teams talk culture and people but rarely have an actual strategy in place. They’ve got values, cool perks, and equity packages to offer. But ask what the strategy is, and they fall silent.

Let me be clear: caring about employees isn’t a talent strategy. Imagine if you rolled out new product features just because you thought they’d make your users happy. Engineers everywhere know there has to be a roadmap. You don’t add new features to make users happy if they’re not part of a plan to grow your user base or you know they’ll be outdated in six months. Product development conversations are tied to revenue, growth and vision.

So why don’t startup leaders think about talent in the same way? Founders and investors don’t know how. But when they do, it changes everything.

Enter Dan Berger, CEO of Social Tables. Unlike most founders, Dan has both work experience in HR and has sought out mentors with HR experience. He uses terms like “hiring yield” and “employer of choice” regularly in conversation. More importantly, he doesn’t just care about his employees and culture. He can answer the question, “What are you doing about it?”

Social Tables is putting rigor into their hiring process. They’re starting to track employee satisfaction and aligning business goals directly with individual employee performance. They’re building out a competency model for their sales team so they can hire, coach and develop around specific success drivers.

Sound too corporate? Too formal? Too focused for a startup that should be spending time on product and growth. Try again and ...

Read the rest of this post over on Tech Cocktail.

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This post originally appeared on TechCocktail written by Susan LaMotte, the founder of exaqueo. A workforce consultancy, exaqueo helps startups and high-growth companies build their cultures, employer brands and talent strategies. Contact us to learn more about how we can help you build a workforce that’s aligned with your company culture and develop an employer brand that will allow your business to grow in the right way.