Lorna Cobbett’s Post

You’ve opted to share your bank account through open banking, would you do the same with your reputation? People and those you hire are one of the most vital parts of any business. Understanding their profile from a CV and an interview is challenging enough and often aren’t enough of an indicator to help hire people based on their merits and positive past performance beyond experience and references. But what happens when you find out that their past behaviour isn’t a good look and you’ve now got a problematic hire with a reputational management crisis at hand? (The last thing you want is to be featuring on an FT article for the wrong reasons). This is where Lorna Cobbett from Blue John comes in. After spending many years across investment banking, partner and MD in PR; Lorna realised one of the most important factors of hires was not what they’d previously done in their career, but how they were going to show up in their new job. Blue John is here to look at reputation management across a company and they're starting with hiring. We spoke about: - Traditional hiring processes are so dead. Enough said. - Reputation in heavy regulated segments like Investment Banking. The last thing you want is a senior manager or C-suite end up on the cover of FT - and not for the right reasons. Assessing employees can be achieved with what Lorna has dubbed a ‘Traitmark®’- a skill, personal attribute or symbolic archetype, anything that reveals how an individual shows up in the world and what others can consistently rely on them for. - How do you get employees to consent to being open about their reputation? By allowing employers to be open about theirs too. One of the downfalls of Glassdoor is it’s a place for disgruntled ex-employees to leave their absolute worst, rarely a true reflection of what it’s actually like to work for them. Open reputation only works if all parties involved are willing to be transparent. - Raising money from your network. Lorna learnt from her years of building that being a founder starts years before the day you decide to register your company. The minute you build relationships and spend time investing into relationships, the better your chances of using those relationships to get further when you need it most. An enjoyable first al fresco breakfast of the summer hearing more about Blue John’s journey to date and their plans ahead! ------- Thank you as ever to Vestd and Onside Accounting for supporting my series! If you're a founder keen to meet, I'd love to have breakfast with you in London. 1:1 waitlists are in my featured section. Naturally, I can't meet with everyone, but I'll always try to make time to speak!