Are you overlooking these three key roles?

Human resource strategists normally place top talent in positions that matter most to the business. Among these so-called “leverage roles” are indispensable senior leaders, connectors in the middle, and high-potential future leaders. Individuals occupying these positions are well-regarded and highly valued in the company.

But according to Lynn Cowart, Cile Johnson and Beverly Caye, who all work in finding, retaining and developing top talent, there are three other less obvious roles where A players in any organization may also be assigned.  These roles drive the business’ competitive advantage.

They identify these in “The 3 Essential Jobs That Most Retention Programs Ignore,” an article published this month at the Harvard Business Review.

These overlooked roles are the essential experts, customer experience creators and critical contractors.

Essential experts possess crucial knowledge and take on jobs in R&D, technology, and other areas vital to a firm’s strategic direction, product development, and process efficiency.

They typically don’t want to manage others; they only want to manage themselves. That makes retaining them very different from retaining someone who wants to scale the corporate hierarchy

Key to retaining them, aside from good compensation, is giving them work that they consider meaningful and that aligns with their values. Being lifelong learners, they also have to have the opportunity to develop their capabilities and be regarded as leaders in their field.

Customer experience creators transform visitors into customers and customers into returning customers.

Keep these gems in your company through competitive compensation and, more importantly, organizational reputation.  They need to feel good about their product or service.

Finally, critical contractors, who are technically not employees of the company, are contingent workers who are nonetheless vital to R&D, marketing and other key processes. They are high-priced free agents with extremely valuable, and rare, expertise that a company doesn’t possess.

To keep them, they must be paid well, given room for development, and be attracted to your firm’s reputation.

“They want to work with winners,” the authors said.

While these jobs are not necessarily on top of the organizational chart – if they are even there at all – it is easy to overlook the importance of putting top talent in them.


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