A company is an entity akin to a person. It has its own properties, rights, and liabilities, separate from that of its investors and management.
Still, it isn’t human.
Sure, it may have its own brand and voice, it can mimic human emotions and sympathy but not in a way that’s relatable; and utter motivating words and inspire but not in a way that seems close or easily attainable.
This is the reason why celebrity endorsements exist and why some brands have mascots which are either real people or fictional characters. There’s KFC’s Colonel Sanders (who is also its founder), Mr. Clean, Hotel.com’s Captain Obvious, the talking M&Ms, and more.
Giving a brand a face humanizes and enables it to form a deeper connection with its audience. Celebrities and mascots are not the only ones that can do this. If anything, there are people more suited for this job:
Business Leaders
Leaders are essentially the personification of businesses. Their minds give birth to companies, drive their growth, and dictate their vision, mission, and values.
For this reason, their involvement in the recruitment process can generate the best results and set an employer apart from their competitors in the job market.
Why Your Leaders Are Essential in the Recruitment Process
A leader’s personal brand is usually used to attract prospective clients, partners, and investors. It is an effective way to network and build relationships to grow the business.
However, most companies miss the opportunity to take advantage of it to grow their workforce, or worse, their leaders have no online presence to begin with. According to Forbes, this lack of presence may be a generational thing, as Gen X, known to be less inclined to post or share personal information online, occupies a lot of senior leadership roles today. With the great resignation and reshuffle still at bay, this can be a crucial miss.
Here’s how your leaders’ presence can impact your company’s appeal to job seekers:
- Personal profiles are effective conversation starters.
People want to form meaningful relationships with people, not logos, and they react more to stories that feel personal and closer to their life experiences.
Aside from this, if you’ve been on LinkedIn, you’d know that company pages in the platform are passive. This means that business profiles are not given the same functionality as personal profiles, to proactively connect and start personal conversations with targeted prospects.
Through your executives’ profiles, you can make the first move, spread awareness, and proactively generate and nurture leads. Think of it much like personal branding on LinkedIn.
- Leaders can provide deeper insight on the organization’s vision, mission, and culture.
Most applicants will wonder how they will fit in with a company’s goals and work environment. It is important to set expectations on this aspect early on in the recruitment process, as this can be detrimental to your employee engagement and retention.
No one can better sell your vision, mission, and culture than your executives. Just by sharing their day-to-day experiences and thoughts, they are able to personify the corporate fluff that’s written on your company profiles.
Research suggests that 79% of workers will quit due to a lack of appreciation. This staggering number shows the rising employer standards of employees. They know their worth and won’t give you a second glance if your employer brand is down the drain.
There are a lot of ways to establish and improve how the job market perceives you, and what’s a better way to gain traction than a good first impression?
The involvement of a leader in the recruitment process can make candidates feel valued, even before joining your company.
Facing the CEO, for example, in an interview can be intimidating but also fulfilling, because they’ll instantly know how vital the position they are applying for is to the company.
According to the McQuaig Global Talent Recruitment Survey, only 25% of the HR professionals surveyed believe their leaders were “very effective,” with the rest thinking they were “somewhat effective” (61%) and “ineffective” (14%).
An analysis of the data further reveals that a majority of businesses whose HR professionals rated their leaders as “very effective,” have a different approach to talent acquisition than those who rated their leaders as adequate or worse.
- Providing hiring managers with interview training
Of the group with strong leadership, 66% were confident with their hiring managers’ interview skills and 53% said that they were giving them interview training. On the other hand, only 13% of the group with ineffective leaders were doing the same thing.
- The channels they use to source candidates
Those with strong leaders are more likely to use social networking sites (81%) to find talents. Moreover, this channel placed third in terms of generating the highest quality of candidates, replacing agencies which ranked third in the overall results.
This is fitting since social media is an effective tool for leveraging your leadership brand.
Employees leave people, not companies, and the same can be said for why talents join and jump ship. Aside from the right compensation and benefits, candidates are more inclined to accept an offer from an organization whose leader has a strong leadership brand in the community, and whose values reflect theirs.
We’d like to get to know the person behind your brand. Reach out to us and let’s start the conversation today!