Being Involved From the Start...

I doubt it would be very difficult to choose which management team you would have preferred working for, the one where everybody knows your name or the one where NOBODY seemed to care if you had a name, especially if all the other factors involved were about the same… Quite frankly, I’ve seen a ton of folks accept substantially lower pay in more difficult working conditions to become a part of a team where the leaders of the organization made a consistent effort to show that they valued the individuals working for them.

With that in mind, let’s consider the items Karla Reffold listed in Three Reasons Why Your Leaders Are Essential in the Recruiting Process… She spelled out the impact leaders being involved could have on the overall mission of the organization as well as the values, and how this yielded a positive return on investment - capturing at least some of the profitability that’s so often killed when leaders choose not to be present through the recruiting process, for whatever reason…

Another article I found called Here’s Why Leadership Should Be Involved In The Hiring Process For Every Early Employee by Glen Alison, COO for a company called Honey, shared “I believe every company should make sure that someone from their leadership team plays a direct role in hiring.” Alison went on to emphasize that “Leadership is uniquely qualified to screen for those less tangible skills required of working at startups.” I’ll take it a step further and suggest that leadership’s involvement is just as important for long established companies…

One of the key points Cindy and I make when sharing a lesson we wrote a while back called Building Buy-In Around a Clear Mission & Vision is that leaders CANNOT share the mission or vision with their team once and move on. Leaders also don’t have the luxury of delegating the message to other supervisors or managers on their team to share on their behalf. If leaders have any level of involvement in the recruiting and/or onboarding process, they have the opportunity to begin sharing the mission and vision with new or even potential team members from the beginning!

When leaders make the choice to show up early in the recruiting process and they maintain a positive presence with all of their team members on a routine basis moving forward, you can expect to see a significant increase in the number of candidates your current employees are willing to refer to the organization. While that can make a huge dent in the profitability that’s killed in a typical recruiting process, there are a few specific things a leader can do that requires more than just showing up so we’ll work through those soon!