Summary
- Let’s assume that your firm has a great culture—it produces excellent work and the culture supports wellness. How do you turn your culture into an effective recruiting tool?
To say that recruiting is a challenge is an understatement. From Manhattan to Montana, firms struggle to find excellent people at every level. It’s not just a question of money. It’s a seller’s market, or at least it has been until recent fears about a recession have surfaced. Regardless of the economy, firms may struggle with attracting and hiring people who are a fit. The stress of the pandemic amplified this challenge. People are less tolerant of recruiting missteps. Further, pandemic burnout accelerated the trend toward prioritizing culture and wellness in career choices.
In “How to Solve the Performance-Wellness Conundrum,” I made the case that high performance and true wellness can coexist if you get the culture right. People want to work at firms with a healthy culture and where their life works. They leave firms with terrible cultures, and while they may also leave for better compensation, anyone who has exited a truly toxic culture will confirm that the compensation wasn’t worth the suffering.
Consider the effect of lackluster recruiting on the people who pick up the slack as they wait for the firm to hire, and then wait for the hire to onboard and get up to speed. Preexisting team members can become stressed and exhausted, which damages their own wellness and the firm’s culture. Add to that the cost of replacing a lawyer or staff member when it doesn’t work out, and successful recruiting is critical to every firm’s performance, wellness and culture.
Let’s assume that your firm has a great culture—it is producing excellent work and the culture supports wellness. How do you turn your culture into an effective recruiting tool?
The answer is in your thinking: You need to think like a marketing and sales executive and then manage the process accordingly. It’s simple; ask yourself: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” You get the point. If your potential candidates don’t know of your firm or that it has a great culture, your firm won’t attract the best candidates. You need to raise your firm’s profile.
Yes, you read that correctly: Marketing your firm to prospective recruits will also attract clients. When you raise the firm’s profile, you raise it for everyone. Here’s how.
You’ve got an interested candidate, so now what? You must ensure that your recruiting process signals that the firm does indeed have a great culture.
A firm’s culture is critical to performance, wellness, recruiting and retention—the last being the subject of the next article in this three-part series. None of this is hard; it just requires thoughtful focus and trust in the process. Just remember, if you’ve got it, flaunt it!