Are you prepared to lost your best employees? Didn’t think so.
The dynamics of the workplace are changing, making it more important than ever for you to bring on the right leaders for your organization.
Today, there’s more demand for talented leaders with less supply. Millennials will make up 75% of the workforce by 2025, and both millennials and baby boomers have different priorities and preferences as it pertains to their leadership styles.
What can you do about it?
Here are five solid leadership recruitment strategies to attract the right leaders to your organization:
Leadership Recruitment Strategy #1: Build An Authentic Company Culture
The best and brightest leaders understand that the boundaries of work and life is a hoax. They understand that their work will dominate their workday, their nights and their weekends. That’s why today’s leaders want to work for an organization that matches their values and gives them a sense of meaning.
What is an authentic company culture? According to Ben Horowitz, a culture must:
- Distinguish you from a competitor
- Ensure that critical operating values persist such as serving customers or meaningful products are made
- Help you identify leaders and employees that fit with your mission
What can you do today to ensure the authenticity of your company culture?
- Get your leadership team together and have a discussion about who you are as a company. What is your mission? What are your values? How do you practice what you preach? What are the traits of the employees who succeed (and fail) at your company? Why are you different?
- With the knowledge that company wide behaviors drive your culture (and your results), implement cultural design points that emphasize these values throughout your company. However you want to remind people what you stand for is up to you. What’s important is that you communicate what you’re about so people are on the same page.
- Be patient. Culture isn’t something you can implement immediately with the help of a consultant. It takes more time and more effort than setting up a ping pong table in the corner. Measure the actions your company takes over time and if you begin to see that these actions are consistent with your values, then you’ll know your culture is headed in the right direction.
Companies with authentic cultures attract authentic leaders.
Leadership Recruitment Strategy #2: Create a workspace where leaders want to spend their time
Creating an energetic office space is often an overlooked leadership recruitment strategy. But, creating a place where people want to work – and where leaders want to lead – is a great way to attract, retain and engage the people who make up your organization.
In fact, office environment is said to make up 25% of job satisfaction. So what can you do to tap into that 25%?
- Offer flexible workplaces
- Choose active furniture
- Create de-formalized collaboration spaces
- Seamlessly integrate technology
- Show off your brand
Leadership Recruitment Strategy #3: Prioritize Well-Being
Workplace wellness isn’t enough for today’s leaders. If you want to differentiate a leadership opportunity from your competition, you need to prioritize well-being at the workplace.
What does that mean, and how do you do it? There are 7 core areas of focus for well-being:
- Air – optimizing indoor air quality
- Water – accessible, high quality water
- Nourishment – health food choices
- Light – minimizing disruption to the body’s circadian rhythm
- Fitness – Encourage physical activity
- Comfort – Distraction-free, soothing, productive environment
- Mind – Support mental and emotional health
By prioritizing well-being, you’ll be showing leaders that you care for your employees – and that you expect the same from them.
Leadership Recruitment Strategy #4: Go Beyond The Resume
Take a step back and think about your ideal hire. What ideas excite and engage them? Where do they gather their information? Where do they hang out? By creating a persona beyond the resume, you’ll be able to access the hearts and minds of your potential hires.
Once you’ve identified what stimulates your ideal hire, it’s time to join the conversation in the arenas that are associated with these stimuli. Today, leaders can be accessed in a variety of ways – beyond job boards and beyond LinkedIn InMails.
Think about sites like Reddit, Quora or Medium. Think about creating an infographic about your workplace and distributing it in the areas where your leadership candidates hang out online. The possibilities are endless once you figure out how to talk to and reach your ideal candidate.
Leadership Recruitment Strategy #5: Don’t Stop Recruiting After The Hire Is Made
Studies peg the failure rate of executives coming into new companies at anywhere from 30% to 40% after 18 months. The costs of this failure rate are enormous — wasted and duplicated recruiting fees, missed business objectives, unproductive employees, and distracted colleagues. It’s a significant but mostly invisible drain on corporate productivity.
On-boarding leaders once they join the company can significantly reduce the failure rates. Providing a long term program with multiple sources of support can provide a nice ROI and most importantly, keep the leader that you’ve worked so hard to recruit. A good on-boarding plan should run anywhere from 18 months to 3 years and begin during recruitment.
What leadership recruitment strategies do you use to attract leaders to your organization? Contact us and we’ll add your tips to the list.
TruPath is an executive search firm that finds mid to senior level executives in mission critical roles at your organization. Contact us if you’re looking for a leader to join your team.