Nearly half of human resources managers have job openings that remain unfilled longer than they would like, mostly due to a lack of qualified applicants. When that happens, they will do anything to get someone on board. Management hopes that setting up a game room and hosting the occasional happy hour celebration will attract top-quality talent to the organization. While those culture perks may be fun for employees in the beginning, most workers want benefits that truly matter (and they should fight for those).

The battle for talent has reached unprecedented levels among companies struggling to hire star candidates. Sure, there are incredible people out there, but the vast number of open positions means they get to be picky about the jobs they accept.

In a recent Harvard Business Review article, researcher Eva de Mol identified a critical element of startup success: that experience alone won’t make a team successful. And data from Adecco USA confirms that experience isn’t everything, as 62 percent of hiring teams report reducing the experience needed for new hires. In her research, de Mol found that soft skills like shared passion and a cohesive vision are far more important traits to encourage in a startup team.

Audience mapping is a means of creating a mix of visual, auditory, conscious and subconscious cues to manipulate the direction of the keynote presentation. It allows planners and their speakers to create a blueprint for better facilitating the meeting attendees' experience throughout the speech.

Establish benefits that will actually matter to your employees, then share them with potential applicants you’re recruiting to help turn them into new hires. It’s tough enough to find good people: About half of human resource managers have job openings that are staying open longer than usual or that they can’t fill because of a lack of qualified applicants.

According to Benjamin Franklin, the only certainties are death and taxes. But with all due respect to the Founding Father, he forgot to mention something just as common, at least for entrepreneurs: fear.

When he first became a business leader, admits Krister Ungerboeck, CEO of Courageous Growth, in St. Louis, Mo., he was a bit of a jerk. “I assumed that the CEO should be the smartest person in the room,” Ungerboeck told me recently via email.

It’s likely that you’ve worked for a subpar supervisor at one point or another. Was it hard to leave that company, even if the paycheck there was stellar? Probably not. But now that you’re in the human resources or leadership seat, you owe it to your organization to make sure your best people don’t feel like you once did. After all, your company can’t afford to have them quit — or, perhaps worse, stop caring about their work.

Think about the best leader you’ve ever had at any point in your life. It might be your current boss; it could be a volunteer coordinator from college. It might even be your high school football coach. He or she embraced the characteristics of a capable and inspiring leader, no matter his or her profession.

As a manager, you’re expected to deal effectively with underperformers — either by letting them go or helping them improve. Easier said than done, right? However, with the proper mix of patience, guidance, and tact, you can manage your direct reports to success and avoid the spread of toxic underperformance to other workers.