Not even CEO(s) can fake positive energy

Why should CEO(s) start taking recruitment more seriously?

You can’t fake positive energy and a business can only grow when radiating positive energy from the inside out! Positive energy starts with your employees! Their positive energy would pollenize your existing clients, who in turn bring in new clients into a single positive loop!

Having positive energy within your employees requires that you hire the right people and you have the right culture for them to thrive and stay. Hiring the right people requires a solid partnership between HR and management over the recruitment & onboarding function. Working in partnership on recruitment requires a modern software with solid collaboration tools but also one that encourages visibility and therefore fosters accountability.

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Positive energy is the catalyst for word-of-mouth marketing

Positive energy is the catalyst for word of mouth! It’s the only environment within which an effective viral word-of-mouth momentum will take place. The positive energy among employees will most definitely get felt by the existing clients/customers that employees are servicing and interacting with. Unless your employees are dealing with robots, those customers they’re touching will feel that energy and feel that there’s something different here – they would, therefore, feel attracted to working with your people as opposed to those of your competitors. You see, no matter how nice your people are, when put in the wrong environment they will not be able to make your clients feel valued, loved and feel good about themselves. On the other hand, when your employees are happy and radiating positive energy, they will most definitely make your clients feel great about themselves, loved, respected, heard, listened to, appreciated and all these other great feelings that make them gravitate to your business and most definitely find themselves: SPREADING A POSITIVE WORD OF MOUTH.

How do you induce positive energy in employees?

I call it: Having a seat at the table.

I truly believe that the positive energy of employees starts getting felt when employees are committed to the business and to the direction management is taking the business on. So the question now is, how and when do employees feel committed to the direction fo the business. Well, in my opinion, employees start committing to the business when they feel they have a seat at the table.

No one, including CEOs, can fake making employees feel as if, they have a seat at the table.

Those feelings that “my opinion counts”, “management don’t keep things away from me”, “Management made a great effort to share with me and explain to me the direction, goals and the execution strategy”… are absolutely essential to make employees committed.

YOU CAN NOT INDUCE POSITIVE ENERGY IF YOU DON’T work very hard at it – if anything it’s actually a lot worse if you try to fake your intention to share, include, inform, involve, nurture or educate people. You would insult their intelligence and this will most certainly backfire on you, and; you end up in a worse-off situation in terms of the commitment of the team towards the direction, the goals and strategy of the company.

HR and management working together on recruitment

As I said in the intro, hiring the right people requires a recruitment strategy that’s built on a full and honest partnership between HR and management. Such partnership would reconcile the needs, responsibility and goals of both parties and arrive at the best working plan to foster an effective recruitment strategy. For example, HR has some ethical concerns when it comes to hiring such as, equal opportunity and, managers want someone that comes into their department and help them achieve their commercial goals. Only a healthy, open and equal working relationship between the two parties can achieve a win-win solution for both concerns.

Tools required for collaborative recruitment

For HR and management to collaborate on recruitment, the recruitment software (or the Applicant Tracking system) they’re using needs to encourage collaboration, visibility and accountability. The bottom line is, for parties to collaborate on any project, they require an effortless way of knowing who’s doing what, where’s each party at, what step they completed… etc. Here are a few examples: HR needs to know where the requisition approval for one of the job is at – who’s so far signed it and who hasn’t it? The hiring manager needs to know if the ad copy has been signed off and completed by HR – hiring managers need to know where the candidate is at with their onboarding pack?

Flexibility – The recruitment software they use needs to be flexible in order to design the perfect working relationship for the particular organisation. So HR and the managers sit down and put a plan of who’s going to do what, and so they need to be able to implement this working plan in the tool. You can’t expect them to change how they wish to collaborate just because that’s the only way the recruitment software they’re using allow them to work. That’s not sustainable and the working relationship ends up suffering.

Visibility – When you have two or more parties working on the same project, none of the parties would be able to do their job if they don’t at all time know where the other parties are at. A modern and enterprise-grade recruitment software platform should have more than enough visibility for HR and management to effectively work on recruitment.

Accountability – The idea here is to avoid having a blame-game fight in the boardroom – you know accountability is like when the police put up a very clear sign right in your face that says “there is a speed camera ahead” and you stop! So they prevented you from committing the offence as opposed to waiting for you to commit the offence and enjoy sending you the fine. This is the same thing – when each party knows the tools they’re using provides an effortless way for all parties to gain full visibility on who’s done what and who’s completed their end of the bargain, then there will never be a fight in the boardroom – each party does their job well or they get found out.

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