A Good Name is Better Than...

As we’ve worked through some recruitment and retention strategies, we’ve really dug into the importance of creating an atmosphere the best people rarely choose to leave and we’ve looked at how that has a direct impact on getting them engaged in the recruitment process. When we do that over a long enough period of time, momentum begins to kick in! By that time, someone on the outside looking in could easily believe the entire cycle simply fell into place…

In reality though, being intentional about investing the proper time, energy, and resources into developing our existing team members and building up the new ones that come onboard, all while showing genuine appreciation for what each individual contributes, can be incredibly hard! While I could certainly argue that doing this requires significantly less cumulative effort and yields vastly better results than continuously filling a revolving door with candidates, each single action is always more difficult than not taking the action to begin with…

Eventually though, each of those intentional investments into building a great culture within the organization will get some attention outside the organization as well. And it’s amazing to see how a company’s reputation impacts the way great candidates respond!

In the mid 90s, I submitted an application to work at a local manufacturing facility. I knew next to nothing about what I would do there but I did know a bunch of folks who had been there longer than I had been alive and I knew the company rarely had open positions. I worked there several years before the time I had been alive was finally equal to the average seniority in the facility! For a long time, employee referrals played a large role in the candidate pipeline. There had always been stretches of significant overtime required. The place ALWAYS got extremely hot through the summer months. And you could count on a healthy dose or rumors on any given day. But for the first 16 years I worked in that facility, the majority of the management team worked at leading effectively; most of them expressed appreciation and genuinely cared about the team members working for them. When several new managers took over though, things changed quickly. Relationships didn’t seem to matter; if appreciation was there, no one felt it; and the pipeline of employee referrals nearly dried up.

Benjamin Franklin said, “It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it.” That facility had a 35 year history of being a good place to earn a living when I was hired. That reputation remained largely intact for the next decade and a half. But it took less than six months for all that to change internally, and it wasn’t long after that until I started hearing it from people around the community any time I wore a shirt or coat with the company logo.

Proverbs 22:1 says “A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches.” When it comes to recruitment and retention strategies, I believe that an organization will spend great riches to find and keep employees if those in leadership roles aren’t willing to build a culture that yields a good name. All too often, recruitment and retention is viewed as the sole responsibility of the human resource department. I call BS! Each person with leadership responsibility within the organization carries some of that weight, whether they realize it or not. We built our lesson on How Top Leaders Set the Tone for Recruitment & Retention to shine a light on just that! Then we build on that in each of the three lessons of our Recruitment, Retention, & Culture course… If you’re not familiar with either, I recommend checking to see if the next time we offer that complimentary webinar fits your schedule...