Your employer brand is a fragile entity. A company’s reputation is dependent on a multi-faceted and fluid suite of industry influences. But the perception of an organization by potential hires and current employees is a top-down critique: ‘What kind of a boss are you?’ Management styles and behaviour will not only impact the performance and productivity of your workforce but will also affect your long-term candidate sourcing and retention success rate.
Any potential hire(s) will do their own due diligence and ‘background checks.’ And It doesn’t matter how attractive your job offer looks on paper – or how strategic your HR team candidate sourcing credentials may be in finding passive talent – if your management style is negatively impacting the happiness barometer of your workforce, you are going to struggle to find the best hires. (And if you do manage to hire them, you will struggle to keep them. It’s a simple case of cause and effect).
To attract top talent, you have to start at the top; at the C-suite level. Your company’s industry standing will generally be judged on its leadership style and management philosophy. This will determine a workplace culture that will either tempt highly skilled candidates or put them off.
A leadership style is less about personality traits and more about skillsets, self-awareness and the bigger picture. A boss will either proactively engage and consider the personalities, strengths and weaknesses of each employee in order to get the best out of them, or react deconstructively and bullishly break down morale and team spirit.
Two ‘extreme’ management styles that are likely to negatively affect your employer brand:
The list of management styles is multifarious. And although not an exact science, a simplistic breakdown will get the point across of how different approaches to organizational leadership can play a powerful role in your candidate sourcing success strategy and directly impact your employer brand.
#1 The Authoritarian boss
This is the old-school ‘I am the boss’ caricature. These leaders are confident, individual decision-makers with the expectation that others must just follow. They typically do not like to be questioned or challenged. (Subtle power-hungry forces and psychological nuances of ‘ego’ play a big role here).
There may be times of crisis where this approach is effective, but on a day-to-day basis, an autocratic ruler will stifle creativity, productivity, commitment and company loyalty. Organizations with an authoritarian boss also tend to experience a higher employee turnover which negatively impacts future candidate-sourcing options.
#2 The Indifferent boss
On the other end of the spectrum, a laissez-faire approach may increase your social circle, but won’t make you many friends in the workplace. This ‘hands-off’ leadership approach can present itself positively as mentorship but functionally has negative implications when applied to managing a team.
Many employees feel neglected by this style and interpret it, over time, as not caring. Most employees – no matter their portfolio or operational work tier – need the safety zone parameters of some guidance, direction and validation. When the lines between legitimate empowerment and being left out in the cold get blurred, workplace morale and productivity suffer.
Two ‘enabling’ management styles that are likely to positively affect your employer brand:
Creating an environment where employees can thrive and produce their best is a precarious balancing act between a combination of adaptive leadership approaches. Lean into these and candidate sourcing will become a breeze as top talent will be knocking on your door. A carefully constructed environment of trust and a sense of employee ‘autonomy’ will inspire a dynamic collective passion.
#1 The Invested boss
This type of leader is rare. They do not have a fragile ego but seek to implement and nurture a consultative ‘open door’ approach which values employee feedback and takes employee concerns seriously. Although they may retain final decision-making power, there is an initial ‘democratic-style’ process that is followed and their decisions are respected because each member of the team feels acknowledged and heard.
The direct results are higher employer engagement, stronger collaborative problem-solving teams and lower employee turnover. These bosses are not just looking for ‘robot’ followers; they genuinely appreciate the input of each team member. (The authoritarian boss can learn a lot from this type of leader).
#2 The change-maker boss
Transformational leadership builds and supports an innovative environment; pushing skilled employees out of their comfort zones to reach goals that will not only benefit the company but will also grow the individual’s skill set and job satisfaction. A change-maker boss shows signs of an ‘invested’ manager giving guidance and encouraging collaboration.
The visible outcomes of this innovative workplace are increased adaptability and creative problem-solving among employees which positively contribute to a company‘s reputation in competitive industries. (Your hiring pipeline – especially in the tech and pharma industries – will feature the CVs of top passive talent waiting to work for your organization).
The ‘missing link’ to optimising your candidate sourcing process:
A successful candidate sourcing strategy comes down to a few key critical contributors: management styles, reducing hiring friction, mitigating recruiter burnout, and leveraging the resources, data insights and human-led expertise of a specialist talent acquisition partner.
In the current talent acquisition landscape, companies can no longer rely on the traditional way of sourcing candidates. A longer-term view and broader field of vision are necessary to enable recruiters to remain focused on engaging with the right candidates at the right time. This is the unique value-add of a reputable talent acquisition agency which has its finger on the pulse of adaptive talent pipelining and talent curation.