How to Ensure Effetive Leadership Recruitment

When recruiting leaders, you are not simply hiring for a role. You are hiring for culture, direction, and relationships.
A leader sets the pace for the team. A leader shapes psychological safety. A leader has a far greater direct impact on well-being than any HR process could on its own.

Research from Gallup shows that up to 70 percent of the variation in employee engagement can be attributed to the manager. This highlights that leadership recruitment is not just about experience and results, but about behaviour, relational skills, and cultural alignment.

While a specialist is often measured on professional expertise, a leader is measured on the ability to deliver results through others. That is why leadership recruitment should always have a clear focus on:

• Strategic understanding
• Relational and communication skills
• Decisiveness and integrity
• The ability to create well-being and provide direction

In Chapter 1, the employee journey from A to Z made it clear that it is important to view the entire journey as a coherent experience rather than a series of isolated processes. This is especially true when recruiting leaders.
A leader is not only at the beginning of their own employee journey. They influence the journey of the entire team.

If you make the wrong hire, you risk:

• Increased employee turnover
• Declining engagement
• Uncertainty within the team
• Loss of productivity
• Lower wellbeing

The quality of the immediate manager is one of the most important factors in employee retention and engagement. According to Finans.dk, lack of attention from one’s manager ranks number one among the top ten reasons employees resign. Leadership recruitment should therefore be seen as an investment in organisational stability, not merely as a staffing task.

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When you’re recruiting leaders, you are often competing for candidates who are already employed. In that context, employer branding becomes crucial.

Leaders don’t just choose a job – they choose an organisation, a board, a culture, and a direction. They evaluate things like:

• What the company stands for
• Its ambitions
• The level of autonomy and responsibility they will have
• How HR and leadership collaborate daily

In the first chapter of this series, employer branding was described as the starting point of the invisible thread throughout the employee journey. When it comes to leadership recruitment, that thread needs to be even clearer.

Strong, honest communication about culture, values, and expectations doesn’t just attract more applicants – it attracts the right ones.

You might also like: 5 Tips for Employees and Managers: What Makes a Great Onboarding Program?

A long CV with impressive titles does not necessarily equal strong leadership. Instead of focusing solely on results, leadership recruitment should centre on the following:

1. Concrete behavioural examples
Ask the candidate to describe specific situations where they have:

• Managed conflicts
• Created psychological safety
• Delivered difficult feedback
• Navigated change

2. The ability to develop others
Ask questions such as:

• How do you work with talent development?
• How do you follow up on employee wellbeing?
• How do you measure success within your team?

3. Self-awareness
Strong leaders understand both their strengths and their areas for development. The ability to reflect on one’s own leadership is often a stronger indicator than confidence alone. Research from the Harvard Business Review highlights self-awareness as one of the most overlooked yet essential leadership competencies.

Effective leadership recruitment requires a well-thought-through process.

Consider the following:

• Define success criteria before drafting the job advertisement
• Involve relevant stakeholders early in the process
• Use cases or presentation tasks
• Work with structured interviews
• Obtain qualified references

Without structure, recruitment decisions are easily influenced by gut feeling. With structure, the process becomes a professional assessment of the match between candidate and organisation.

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In chapter 2 and chapter 3, we explored the dimensions of onboarding and showed how culture, networks, collaboration, competencies, and results are closely connected.

This is even more important for leaders. Leadership recruitment should therefore never stand alone. Already during the hiring process, you should consider:

• Who will be the leader’s sparring partner?
• Which relationships should be prioritised during the first 30, 60, and 90 days?
• What early wins are realistic?

Leadership hires rarely fail due to a lack of competencies. More often, the reason is a poor cultural fit. A structured onboarding process for leaders can be the difference between long-term success and a costly mismatch.

Leadership recruitment becomes even stronger when you take a data-driven approach. Ask yourself questions such as:

• What characterises our most successful leaders?
• How long do our leaders typically stay?
• What do employee engagement surveys reveal about leadership quality?

When HR works with data across recruitment, onboarding, and employee engagement, you gain a clearer understanding of what strong leadership looks like in your specific context. This makes recruitment less random and far more strategic.

You might also like: Mastering HR Development: Strategies for Nurturing Employees, Managers, and Student Workers

Ultimately, leadership recruitment is not just about finding a candidate. It is about deciding which culture you want to strengthen.

• A leader is a role model
• A leader sets the standard for feedback, pace, and collaboration
• A leader shapes job satisfaction in everyday work

In the chapter on employee well-being and engagement, it became clear that engagement does not happen by chance. It is created in the relationship between the leader and the employee. That is why leadership recruitment is one of the most critical HR disciplines throughout the entire employee journey.

Leadership recruitment requires the courage to ask difficult questions, the structure to assess candidates objectively, and a strategic perspective on culture and direction.

When you work consciously with employer branding, structured processes, behaviour-based interviews, and a well-planned onboarding experience, you increase the likelihood of finding a leader who not only delivers results but also creates them through others.

In the next and final chapter, we bring everything together and explore how you can connect the entire employee journey by gathering it all on a single digital platform.