How Great Leadership Improves the Recruiting Process

Earlier I mentioned starting a job on March 12, 1996 that I thought would get me through college and I referenced how much that organization invested into the process of hiring 40 of the close to one thousand candidates who applied. What I didn’t share was how much of that investment came during the first two weeks we were on the payroll. The company certainly had a lot of time and money tied up before we ever set foot on the property; several rounds of off-site interviews, competency testing at the local tech school, drug screens (not drug testing because testing drugs was a bit more taboo back then), and background checks. That all carried a hefty price tag, even back in the 90’s, but not nearly as much as the organization invested by having all 40 of us go through two full weeks of orientation! 

At that point, the starting wage for hourly positions at that facility was $9.48 per hour before factoring in any of the benefits - which were one of the best in the Shenandoah Valley at the time. They paid each of us almost $1,000 to sit in training rooms for two solid weeks, some of which was covering the processes and procedures we’d soon be expected to follow to the letter but there was just as much face time with the local management team.

I won’t pretend like I remember the majority of the material that was shared over the course of those two weeks, and my point here isn’t to make a case for whether or not the much time was even necessary. What I do remember like it was yesterday was the impression the plant manager made with us from day one and how he walked the talk for the next few years until he retired. The things that stood out the most to me were his focus on the importance of safety, him making sure we knew he was always approachable, and his emphasis on paying little attention to the rumor mill. With regards to rumors, he assured us we’d hear at least one every day and said we should start one of our own if we didn’t…

While he was joking about us starting rumors, he was incredibly serious about safety and how approachable he was! I saw him on the shop floor interacting with the off shift crew I was part of more in my first month than I had seen the construction foreman at the job I came from in the entire year I worked there - and that foreman was only responsible for the six or eight of us on that one crew…

Fast forward to late 2013 and most of 2014. I was doing almost all of the hiring for that facility I started with in March of 1996. At that point, the amount of time we were given to get all the new hire paperwork completed, cover all the rules and regs, and to provide the new employees with an introduction to our safety and quality processes was limited to just four hours, those new team members spent the rest of their first day engaged in something similar to what they were hired for. I’m still not making a case for whether the amount of time for the orientation process was good or bad but I will challenge you to consider which version of orientation in that same facility provided the new folks coming onboard with more exposure to the local leadership team… Since I’m far too impatient to give you much time to guess, I’ll just lay it out for you! During my final 18 months with the company, the time I mentioned where I hired around 225 people, I don’t remember a single instance where the plant manager ever even said hello to one group of new employees. To that end, the only managers who were involved in the orientation process regularly were the safety manager and the quality manager, both of whom I consider close friends still today - which is likely tied to the fact that they actually gave a crap about the people we were bringing into the organization…

Here’s one more question I’d like you to consider: If you worked in that facility under both of those management teams, which would you be more likely to recommend to your friends or family as a place to consider when they were looking for employment?

In March ‘22, Forbes.com published an article by Karla Reffold called Three Reasons Why Your Leaders Are Essential in the Recruiting Process that shared :

“Improvements in the recruitment process often focus on candidate experience, an important thing to keep in mind. Further improvements might focus on interview training for hiring managers, ensuring they focus on a welcoming and fair process. Yet leaders are noticeably missing from the attraction stage of that process. In a world where the need for talent has never been more pressing, your best leaders might be the missing piece to the puzzle.”

While the example I shared here was from one of our area’s largest manufacturing facilities, I can honestly say that, with a select few exceptions, I’ve seen little difference in the level of involvement management/ownership has in small businesses. We are indeed in a world where every organization has a pressing need for talent! With that being the case, I’m convinced that this absence of leadership in the recruiting and onboarding processes is sending a loud message to every potential candidate that’s driving the recruiting costs even higher, and killing our profitability!

With that being the case, let’s take a look at the three reasons Reffold alluded to and dig into what this lack of visibility with leaders can do to a culture!

Where Everybody Knows Your Name...

If you’ve ever seen the 80s TV show Cheers you’re probably hearing the theme sound in your mind right now, wrapping up with the line “where everyone knows your name…” Whether it’s a friendly neighborhood basement bar in Boston, your favorite local restaurant in your own hometown, or the place you earn your living, don’t we feel at least a little more appreciated when the people we’re interacting with know our names? This certainly isn’t something new… In his 1937 book How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie shared that “a person’s name is to that person, the sweetest, most important sound in any language.”

With that in mind, think back to the examples I shared before contrasting the involvement of the management teams in just the recruiting process when I started at that local manufacturing facility in the mid 90s and just before I left in 2014. I won’t bother asking you to consider which would have made you feel more welcome or appreciated; that would be an incredibly stupid question… I also won’t ask which environment you believe yielded the most (and best) candidate referrals from existing employees - but if you’re not completely sure, you can certainly reach out to me directly and I’ll be happy to clear that up in short order! What I will challenge you to think about is how that distinct difference in involvement in just the recruiting process set the tone for how every supervisor reporting to those two (very different) management teams interacted with the newest members of the team as well as everyone who had been there for years…

When an owner of a company or an executive shows, through their own behaviors rather than just the words they say, that each employee and customer is important to them, doesn’t it just stand to reason that showing this same kind of value would cascade down to every other level of an organization? Whether that’s saying hello each morning, making time in their day to hear a concern, or just being able to call everyone by name, it sends a message that the individual is just as important as any transaction they’re involved in.

Now how about the inverse? If the door to my office is always closed, I’m not willing to take questions in meetings, and after more than a year in the organization I still only know the names of a select handful of employees, how much value have I shown to anyone there? And if I’ve made it that obvious that I don’t value the folks who have been there for years, is it likely that I’ll show any value to the ones coming in new?

Those are pretty straightforward questions and the answers aren’t terribly hard to figure out… The part that surprised me the most though was how quickly a few high level managers taking that approach changed an entire culture, and how fast that change impacted the recruiting process (and overall quality of candidates) for a company that had a longstanding reputation for being one of the employers of choice in the region!

For more than twenty years, I’ve heard John Maxwell emphasize that “Everything rises and falls on leadership!” While I’m very intentional about who I will and will not refer to as a leader, that doesn’t change the fact that each of us who are in supervisory or management roles still have leadership responsibility - whether we accept it as such or not… How we do, or do not, handle that responsibility makes an immediate impact on the culture of our team as well as a candidate’s desire to become part of that team, and that’s where the cost of recruiting can become a significant profitability killer in our organization. To build a culture where we capture that lost profit, our actions need to speak louder than our words…

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 three reasons Karla Reffold listed in her article… She spelled out the impact leaders who were involved in the recruiting process 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…

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!