Re-Thinking Retention with Langan CHRO Donovan Mattole

Donovan shares how he deliberately hires business leaders into HR, why TA and retention must operate as a single strategy, and how he's making the case to Millennial and Gen Z employees that staying at one company for a full career can be the best financial decision they make. If you lead a team or manage talent at any level, this episode is full of frameworks you can apply immediately.

Key takeaways

• Hire business leaders into HR: Top field leaders and MBAs with no HR background can elevate an HRBP team faster than traditional hiring. Business credibility is teachable on the HR side; leadership instincts are harder to develop from scratch.
• TA and retention are one strategy: Filling the top of the funnel while losing people out the back is a losing game. Breaking down silos between TA, L&D, and rewards is what closes the gap.
• Teamship over hierarchy: Donovan replaced a siloed COE structure with peer accountability across the full HR team. The result is a function that operates as one unit rather than five separate groups reporting up.
• The long-career argument is back: Employee ownership, long-term incentives, and genuine development investment can make staying at one company the smarter financial move, even for employees who have been told job-hopping pays more.
• HR lives in the gray: A real-world parental leave disclosure scenario illustrates how the best HR decisions require legal knowledge, business judgment, and employee empathy all at once. Black and white answers rarely exist.
• Never lose the human in HR: Donovan's advice for aspiring CHROs is simple: learn the business, but never let that come at the cost of kindness, empathy, and being a genuine employee advocate.

Links

Donovan on LinkedIn

LHH Recruitment Solutions 

A Beautiful Working World

A Soundbeam Studios Production