Every experienced recruiter knows that finding the best talent for your organization is no mean feat. It’s a skill that is at once art and science, with a bit of good luck thrown into the mix. However, when you succeed in bringing the best people on board, the effect on the entire company can be tremendous.
Indeed, hiring the best talent isn’t just about spotting the ideal candidate for a given job role. Rather, talented employees can have a ripple effect that may well transform your entire organizational culture. Read on to learn more about how top-tier recruiting can pay dividends throughout your company, from fostering a culture of collaboration and mentorship to promoting diversity and inclusion to facilitating cybersecurity.
Fostering Collaboration and Mentorship
One of the hallmarks of highly successful employees is that they rarely keep their talents to themselves. Rather, when employees possess a particularly unique or strong skillset, you have an invaluable opportunity to leverage them through collaboration and mentorship.
Indeed, research has shown that mentorship programs can have a deeply beneficial impact on overall workplace culture and organizational performance. Mentorship programs don’t just expand the skills and knowledge of the individual, but they also help to support retention overall.
This, above all, seems to be tied to the workers’ sense of engagement with the company, their sense of having a promising future with a company that promises career growth. Similarly, for your new recruit, the opportunity to mentor junior colleagues can be powerfully attractive, both as a means to refine and showcase their skills and as a stepping stone to a higher position within the organization, a position of greater leadership responsibility.
In other words, when you bring on an employee with a vast or specialized skill set, you’re bringing on an asset that will help to infuse a culture of support, growth, and development institution-wide.
Promoting Diversity and Inclusion
Hiring a new employee isn’t just about finding the person with the appropriate training and experience to fulfill their professional obligation. Every team member shapes the workplace environment in some way.
Factors such as age, gender identity, education, and even family status can have a profound impact on your workplace culture. For example, choosing to hire an employee who is returning to the workforce after time spent as a stay-at-home mother will bring to your workplace a host of experiences and aptitudes that might otherwise be lacking if you were to recruit a fresh-faced college graduate without a spouse or children.
A working mother, for instance, may be better equipped to empathize with or understand the pressures that her colleagues who are also navigating a career and caregiving face. Such empathy and understanding are fundamental to the cultivation of a truly diverse and inclusive workplace.
Facilitating Cybersecurity
No matter what your industry, cybersecurity is a preeminent issue for any business. Protecting your organization from cybercrime involves more than installing the appropriate security software or instituting annual cybersecurity training for your employees, however.
Rather, cybersecurity is about cultivating a culture of care and conscientiousness. This is where recruiting comes in. Top-level recruiting should involve more than a simple checklist of job functions and should instead consider the candidate as a whole person, their aptitudes, and character traits that extend beyond the ability to perform their jobs effectively.
That means that HR recruiters should always operate with an eye toward this all-important matter of cybersecurity, no matter what the specific job role may be. This is due to the unavoidable fact that even one misstep, one lapse from one employee, can jeopardize the company, its employees, its clients, and its partners.
Because of this reality, recruiters must work to develop a keen sense of who the candidate is. Speaking with former employers and colleagues, for example, can help you gain insight into the candidate’s personality.
With such insight, you can better ascertain not only whether the candidate will succeed in their new position but whether they will contribute to or detract from the culture of cybersecurity that is so essential in business today.
The Takeaway
A recruiter’s job is not easy. When you engage in top-level recruiting, you’re charged with the formidable task of translating a few meetings and an array of application documents into an accurate assessment of the person before you. From that assessment, you must skillfully determine whether this candidate will benefit your company, your team, and your customers for the long term. Choose unwisely, and you may expose your company to financial losses, reputational damage, or worse. On the other hand, if you choose well, you can set off a ripple effect that benefits the entire organization. When you truly find the best talent for your company, you may well be opening the door to a new culture of mentorship and collaboration, an environment of diversity and inclusion, and a culture of cybersecurity.
Katie Brenneman is a Guest Contributor at HR Daily Advisor.
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