#440 How Leaders Motivate or Demotivate their Recruiting and HR Teams
How Leaders Motivate or Demotivate their Recruiting and HR Teams
By Niels Brabandt
At Europe’s largest HR and recruiting fair, Zukunft Personal in Cologne, one reality became unmissable: too many leaders are professionally demotivating the very people tasked with winning and retaining talent. Recruiting and HR professionals, those on the front line of an organisation’s talent strategy, often find themselves underappreciated, poorly supported, and misdirected. In an era where access to global talent has never been easier, the way leaders treat these teams may well determine the long-term competitiveness of their companies.
The Misconception of the “Employer’s Market”
Some executives remain convinced that the balance of power in hiring has shifted back to employers. This belief is dangerously outdated. Pre-pandemic, job mobility was constrained by geography: candidates often stayed with their employer simply because alternatives required impractical commutes or relocation. Remote work and digital connectivity have erased those boundaries. Today, organisations are no longer competing regionally—they are competing globally. Employers offering higher salaries or better working conditions across borders are just a click away.
For recruiters and HR professionals, this means their work is more strategic than ever. Yet many leaders still treat recruiting as mere administration rather than as the sales process it truly is: persuading highly qualified talent to choose their organisation over countless other opportunities.
When KPIs Undermine Motivation
A second, recurring issue is the fixation on flawed metrics. At Cologne’s fair, one leader proudly cited “number of applications received” as a primary KPI. This is meaningless. Any company could post an unrealistic offer, “1 million salary per month”, and be flooded with unqualified applicants. What matters are relevant, outcome-driven indicators:
the percentage of candidates meeting job requirements,
the conversion from application to interview,
the offer-to-acceptance ratio,
and actual employee retention after hiring.
When leaders impose irrelevant KPIs, HR teams are forced into activities that waste time, damage employer branding, and ultimately erode motivation.
The Strategic Gap
Too often, HR and recruiting departments are buried in operational tasks: payroll, vacation planning, training logistics, dispute resolution. While these are necessary, they crowd out time for employer branding, strategic outreach, and long-term talent pipeline development. When leaders fail to create space for strategic work, they send a message that HR is merely transactional. Over time, professionals seeking impact and development leave, taking with them hard-won organisational knowledge.
Presence, Recognition, and Trust
Leadership presence matters. Teams quickly recognise when leaders only appear to criticise, labelling negative encounters as “feedback.” The damage is compounded when achievements are dismissed or reframed as failures. Consider the company that secured €500,000 in new recruiting business within three days at an expo. Instead of celebrating a remarkable 50% progress toward a three-month target, the CEO scolded the team for not closing the full €1 million. The immediate effect: demotivation. Shortly after, employees began applying elsewhere.
This is leadership 101. Path-goal motivation, acknowledging progress while keeping focus on the end objective, is fundamental. Leaders who ignore it not only miss opportunities to inspire but actively drive talent away.
The Leadership Training Deficit
Underlying these failures is a striking fact: according to the Chartered Management Institute, 82% of leaders have never received a single minute of formal leadership training or coaching. Leadership is treated as an accidental promotion rather than a discipline requiring study, practice, and accountability. Imagine hiring an untrained machinist simply because they “like machines.” It would be unthinkable. Yet when it comes to leading people, organisations too often take that gamble. The result: disengaged teams, broken trust, and lost talent.
Leadership as the Deciding Factor
Data from platforms such as Glassdoor and Kununu make one point clear: the number one reason employees stay, or leave, is leadership behaviour. Motivation, trust, job satisfaction, and willingness to go the extra mile all trace back to how leaders treat their people. For HR and recruiting teams, who are simultaneously ambassadors, salespeople, and strategists, this reality is amplified. Poor leadership costs not only the employees in those roles but also the talent they fail to attract or retain.
The Imperative for Change
To win in today’s borderless talent market, organisations must reframe HR and recruiting as strategic functions, not back-office administration. Leaders must:
Adopt meaningful KPIs that measure quality, not volume.
Create space for strategic work beyond payroll and paperwork.
Be visibly present, recognising progress as well as addressing setbacks.
Invest in leadership training to build trust, predictability, and consistency.
Leadership behaviour is the decisive variable. Companies that understand this will motivate their recruiting and HR professionals, turning them into strategic drivers of organisational success. Those that do not will continue to lose both staff and opportunities in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
Niels Brabandt is the Owner and Founder of NB Networks, based in London and Zurich. He works globally as a leadership expert, speaker, consultant, and executive coach.
Niels Brabandt
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More on this topic in this week's videocast and podcast with Niels Brabandt: Videocast / Apple Podcasts / Spotify
For the videocast’s and podcast’s transcript, read below this article.
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Niels Brabandt is an expert in sustainable leadership with more than 20 years of experience in practice and science.
Niels Brabandt: Professional Training, Speaking, Coaching, Consulting, Mentoring, Project & Interim Management. Event host, MC, moderator.
Podcast Transkript
Niels Brabandt
Motivation. And when you now think, yeah, I had that back in the days, that is probably not what we want to have. However, we are just past the Zukunf Personal Future Staffing, which is the largest European HR and recruiting fair. It's less about hr, it's more about recruiting how to win talent, actually develop this talent and keep them in your organisation without making them change employers and move on. And the question now is, how do you actually do that? And I was rather shocked to see how many leaders either professionally demotivate, which unfortunately was happening in most cases, and the very few examples of where leaders actually motivated their people. And I'm talking about their people who are doing exactly what we focus on at the moment, meaning to develop staff or to keep staff or to retain staff or to win staff, win talent for your organisation.
And these are people working in recruiting and hr. Sometimes in smaller organisations, they simply do both at the same time. So we are going to talk about exactly that, how leaders sometimes either motivate or demotivate their people. And the question is, how can this happen? How did we get here? The main issue here is, especially when we talk about recruiting and hr, that often people do, especially larger, smaller organisations, they often do both at the same time. And that of course is not a great thing, sometimes can't be avoided.
However, often they are massively underappreciated. When we talk about how to motivate or demotivate, the first thing we need to talk about is this. What is the situation in which we are. Because there's a massively wrong perception, people now say, oh, we are getting back to an employer's market. The job market is pretty dire. So we have the opportunity to choose who we want to hire and we have the opportunity to turn people down. So there must be lots of choice.
And that's the wrong thinking. What you refer to is the job market for employers, the employers job market before COVID and before the pandemic and before remote work fully took off. What happened then was that often people had regional limitations, especially when you live in regions with not many employers there. When you wanted to have a different job, it often meant that you have to drive a long way or you simply have to find something which is well connected with public transport, often not existed in certain areas. And then you say, well, I just stay with my employer because there's nothing else available. That's not the case today. You're competing with anyone that has an Internet access.
Any company which has access to the Internet, which surprisingly is any company really in your organisation can now compete. I give you a very, very, very easy approach here. When we talk about the job, the job simply is that you find the right people. And for example, in Switzerland, what we do in Switzerland is we advertise jobs in Germany and Austria where many Germans people, German speaking people live, or in France and Spain where you have the same, and we offer, compared to which part of the country you're in, 30 to 100% more salary. And even when you have to tax it locally, when you live there, it simply means still having doubled the salary. Definitely is more net income. And then you say, yeah, but we are used to have, we just used to have this employer's market where we can choose who we want to hire.
Isn't that coming back? No, absolutely. Clearly not. When we talk about the job and often people say, yeah, you know, when you work in hr, it's often underappreciated in recruiting as well. And that's part of the job. You know, if you want to have appreciation, usually that's what people in sales get and you're not doing sales. Massive misperception.
If you have talents approaching your organisation saying, I think I could work for you, or people who are in your organisation and think, should I change and move on or should I stay in the organisation? What happens to make it with a positive attitude, to make a positive outcome happen is a sales process. Recruiters who talk to talents who often can choose where to work, especially when they are well qualified. These people simply say, look, I simply want to have the best choice for me. And then your HR and your recruiting people are the ones who do the sales process here. It is a sales process, so there is no reason not to appreciate them. However, often, especially HR is way too operative.
You work paywall, you do any kind of conflict negotiation, you do any kind of complaints, you do any kind of planning what the next training session is, you do all of that on operational level. But when someone says, what's the employer brand? How do you want to develop the employer brand? How do you want to get recruiting out there? How do you want to find talent? How do you want to get outreach? How do you want to get the brand known in the market or the region at least then usually people often say, yeah, you know, it's difficult, isn't it?
We just don't have the time. And that's exactly the issue you have at the moment in this job. The demands compared to the reality shows a massive gap. There are high expectations with low appreciation and at the same Time you wonder why people say I don't think I want to work in HR or recruiting.
It's just not for me. Rather more recruiting often because of commissions when you close certain talents and they start working with you. But often HR people say it's basically an office job 9 to 5 where you just do paperwork, isn't it? And unfortunately, especially in the English speaking world, that is not wrong. The reality often is that people say it's not an attractive job and it's not an attractive job due to what you need to do. It's often not an attractive job due to how leaders deal with that job. And you need to change that first.
But let's get to what I really saw on that expo on that fair Sukhoff personnel, future staffing, future HR in Cologne last week. Largest Expo Xing the competitor. Well not really competitor anymore. They do recruiting only now they don't do social. Xing is still the largest German recruiting brand and network. So when you're looking there, that's the place to be. They had a massive, massive presence and of course put their name on the whole expo.
Well done for that. However, I looked around with lots of organisations where people from HR or recruiting were there to to polish their brand and get their brand out there. And at, at a certain booth, midsize company, two digit amount of employees, there were leaders who really, I have to say, professionally demotivate people. But it happened not only there, it happened on many booth. And the first thing that is not really great is wrong. KPI's and one KPI which I often hear is how many applicants did we get on the job? If you say that how many applicants we got on the job is a relevant KPI, I have bad news for you.
It's not because if you want to have as many applicants as possible, when you consider more is better, then simply put a job advert out there saying we offer some piece of work and we pay a million a month, then you will have 1 million applications in an instant. I mean no one will fit on the job. But you have lots of applications coming in the KPI. Just saying how many did come in doesn't give you any clue. The best job ad, the best job campaign is not the one where you get most applicants. The best campaign is where you only get people applying who fit for the job. Not the ones who say yeah, you know, I it yeah, I have a computer at home and I do stuff on that computer.
You know, I'm not an expert in, how do you call it? X Change.
Never heard of that. And so cool.
Oh, it's always SQL. Yeah, no, I never heard of it. But you know, quick learner. Also, I have Excel at home and you know, this is all somehow the same, isn't it? It's not. However, you often have certain applicants who think they can do everything as long as you pay them. And of course they are not up to the job.
When you have KPIs you need to have KPIs that are relevant. So for example, how many, what's the percentage of people fitting for the job? How many were still there when it comes to stage one and invitation to the interview, Stage two, doing the phone interview, Stage three, if needed, do the interview on site. How many got an offer, how many signed the offer, how many showed up for the job? These are KPIs and percentages just to give you a very tiny, tiny amount of KPIs here that are actually relevant. But saying something like, when you contact more, you get more outcome. Another KPI that I heard, one leader told me, the more people we proactively in active recruiting and active sourcing, the more people we contact, the better it will be.
That's pure nonsense. You only force your people to contact non fitting candidates and force them to do applications which are pointless from the beginning. And people will of course then just contact another 100 people on LinkedIn and they will say that's not for me and your employer brand will have a massive damage. So stick with scientifically sound KPIs that actually make sense. And the next aspect is you need to focus on the right thing. When you tell people the only focus you have is operational level work, you shouldn't be surprised that people, after they got a certain level of experience, simply move on. No one wants to work, only operational. The focus often is that people in HR and recruiting say, yeah, I have to do all the interviews and I have to do all the documentation of that and I have to do all the paperwork and we have to do payroll and we have to do paid vacation, annual leave and we have to do the next training session, organise it in book hotels and book meeting rooms and book meetings internally and everything we do internally and all the complaints that we have and everything of conflict negotiation, alternative dispute resolution and, and, and, and, and as soon as someone says, how do you work strategically?
How do you do employer branding, how do you get the brand out there, how do you get a campaign out there, how do you get outreach into the job market? How do you get known in networks that can actually refer you suitable candidates and then they say, yeah, we, we, we just don't have the time, you know, we don't have the time when you put the right focus in there. As a leader, you motivate people because they have a job where they say, some tasks I like more, some tasks I like less. And that's always part of a job that you have task you like more or less. And let's face it, no one says, oh, finally, travel expenditure needs to be documented. My favourite task of the week, travel expenses is hardly anyone's. I would almost claim no one's favourite task of the week, but still, it needs to be done, by the way, with AI tools, way better.
Focus is important and I often saw people who focus simply on the wrong aspect. They focus on getting operational stuff done and of course operational stuff needs to be done, but not as the only thing you have. You need more than just operational work done. Tick the box and move on. And also leaders need to be present and not only show up when they have something to criticise. Calling it feedback, by the way, doesn't make it any better. People very quickly figure out when you only show up to have criticism.
And on top of that, and I give you a real world example that happened just a couple of days ago on site there in Cologne. I was at this Expo at this fair for delivering 10 speech in three days. I had more than 40 appointments in three days. It was a rather intense three days. I can tell you the path, goal aspect of it is of crucial importance in one company where they said, we set a certain goal for the fair, for the Expo, we have a special thing that we offer, it's a 30% discount on our recruiting activities, which we do for companies. And then of course they had a goal and the sales leader gets to the owner of the business, you call it owner, managing director, CEO, whatever it is, and says, look, we've already have 500,000 in business in three days because this whole special offer was limited to 30th of November, but can be extended to 15th of December. So it's rather from the moment I record this, pretty much three months from now.
And the owner of the business said, yeah, you have 500,000, but we agreed on 1 million. And I see the utter demotivation happening instantly. So of course I need to do background check, not judge quickly and ask was it agreed to have 1 million on the Expo? And then I find out, by the way, that's what this business owner said. They said, no, no 1 million till the end of the activity. So 1 million until basically the last date is 15th of December. So let's face it, people did 50% of the path, 50% of the way was already agreed, signed, ticked off the box, done, the path is walked down.
50% achievement in three days. You have 87 days left, left for the other 50%. I have a projection, I think they're going to make it. But when you say hey, just 50% after three days, we agreed on 1 million in 90 days. So why are you not having the 1 million after three days then? That is how you demotivate people professionally. When you say there are a million things out there and you have one year time and people do 900,000 in three days and you say yeah, but we agreed on 1 million then you do not understand basic 101 leadership motivation.
And of course it was massively demotivating Just a couple of days later. Now I received via LinkedIn because I got in touch with all the people because they were really lovely actually also very professional, very driven, really loved to work there. But one person now said that this was the moment why they now apply for jobs in other companies. And that is again another talent lost due to leadership action. The question now is how do you implement better leadership to actually motivate people in recruiting and HR and probably anywhere else? And step number one always is you need to be able to learn leadership. When you think that leadership just happens, you are wildly wrong.
When I would ask you what do you think? What's the percentage of people who had zero minutes of leadership training or coaching? Zero. They just became leaders either by coincidence or no one invested in them. Because this is backed by the Chartered management Institute study. 82% of all leaders, 82% of all leaders had zero minutes of leadership training, coaching or whatever else. And then you wonder that things are going wrong.
Just imagine when you are a mid sized machine construction business and I show up at your doorstep saying something like, yeah, you know, I know you do something with it and machines. Never had vocational training on that or did uni, I just don't like that, you know.
But I like machines. You know, I have a car at home that's a machine and I have a coffee machine, also machine.
So where's my job? Can you offer me a job? And of course your answer will be bit of more substantiation might be very nice. What about having some vocational training, get some certificates, get some training, go to uni or whatever else of the things that I told you before and with leadership People are just like, yeah, didn't have any training, no problem, just go. It's just humans, you know, learning by doing. What could possibly go wrong? You need to learn leadership.
With professional training, leadership coaching, mentoring, whatever else, many options out there, you need to learn leadership. Anything else is going to be the most expensive choice. The number one reason why people still stay or leave is leadership behaviour. You can see it on Kanunu, which is the German version, or Glassdoor, which is the international version. People complain about leadership behaviour all the time. And of course you can say they are all complainers.
That's not very likely. Some of them might be complainers, many of them are not. Many of them are not very important here is that you give them professional leadership training because what you train with that as well is you're training trust. As soon as people know what they do immediately people perceive our leader now is a lot more structured, they are a lot more predictable, they are a lot more reliable in what they do. And that's what immediately drives people's trust. When you think trust happens automatically here, the news, it does not, unfortunately. People often do not have an awareness about leadership and the issues there because absolute awareness needs to be happened.
Leadership is the number one reason why people stay or leave, why they are motivated or demotivated, why they do their job or don't do their job, why they love their job or they hate their job. If they go the extra mile or if they do nine to five, not a single minute longer than they are legally obliged to according to their working contract, this absolute awareness needs to be there. Bad leadership is always a bad result. First you lose talents or you don't even win them, you can't retain them, you can't keep them in your organisation, they are moving on quickly. And you wonder why this happened. It is extremely important that you are the one who knows about what makes great leadership, because great leadership means you know how to motivate people professionally, you know the tools to motivate them, you know the scientific backing of motivation. And as soon as you do that, everything will be a lot, will be a lot better from there.
So if you implemented the way we just talked about, everything will become better and you motivate instead of demotivate your people in recruiting HR and beyond. And I wish you all the best doing so. And when you now say, that sounds like a bit of work. I have about 48 different aspects to talk about right now. Feel free to contact me. So first, when you, when you're now watching me on YouTube, feel free to leave a like there or subscribe to my channel. Feel free to comment of course.
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