What does the Word on the Street say about your firm?

There is the firm that leadership thinks it runs, the firm that  people actually experience, and the firm that the market believes it is. They are not always the same firm. Ask a leadership team to describe their culture and you will probably hear: “collaborative”,” meritocratic”, “supportive”, “high-performing”, or “people-first”.

Now ask current employees, former employees, recruiters who work in your market, or candidates who have turned your offer down. You may hear: “Great training, but nobody stays past three years,” or “It really depends on which partner you land with,” or “They talk about wellbeing, but the billable target hasn’t moved.” You may also hear something like: “That firm actually backs its people” or “It’s demanding, but you will grow and develop quickly,” or even: “People stay because they have great leadership.” This is the Word on the Street.

Culture doesn’t stay inside the building

Whether leadership is listening or not, the conversation is already happening; in universities, professional networks, WhatsApp groups, recruiter conversations, and the calls candidates make before they ever reach an interview.

People talk, former employees talk and recruiters compare notes. Senior professionals call people they trust and candidates conduct their own due diligence. In professional services, reputation is rarely singular. A firm can have a strong overall brand but  different reputation based on office, practice group, team or individual partner. Candidates don’t only ask: “What is the firm like?” They ask: “Which team”? “Which partner”? “Which department”? “Who will I actually be working for”?

By the time a highly sought after candidate enters your recruitment process, they may already have formed an opinion about you or your firm.  

Imagine this conversation:

Recruiter: “This is a progressive firm with a strong culture and genuinely accessible leadership.”

Candidate: “That’s interesting. Three people I know who worked there told me something very different.”

At that point, you no longer simply have a recruitment problem,  you have a credibility problem.

The Culture-Reputation Gap

I think it is important for leadership to understand the distance between three things:

1. Declared Culture: what leadership says the firm is.

2. Experienced Culture: what working there actually feels like.

3. Market Culture: what the market believes about the firm.

   
   

The distance between them is the Culture Reputation Gap. These perspectives will not always be identical. 

Risk arises when leadership doesn’t know where they differ, why they differ and what those differences are doing to the business.

As that gap widens you will experience offers becoming harder to close, lateral hire candidates become more difficult to attract and your own good candidates become easier to poach. This can have a knockon effect where you see your strong team members  leaving as competitors become more attractive (sometimes, based on perception alone). 

This all goes beyond recruitment. Persistent reputation gaps can affect leadership credibility, succession planning, critical capability, transformation, client confidence and ultimately the organisation’s ability to execute its strategy.

So perhaps the question for leadership isn’t simply: “What do we say our culture is?” It is: “Do we know what our people and the market say it is?” Because whether leadership is listening or not, people are already talking.