Cultivating the right company culture is the key to attracting and recruiting the talent that’s right for your workplace’s unique requirements. Here are five key ways leaders can recruit (and retain) great employees through company culture:

1. Be Clear about Your Culture: What does your company stand for? What differentiates it from the competition? At Dale Carnegie, we try to be very intentional about what we stand for, how we approach our work, who we are and what we value. And because of this, we’re able to elucidate our brand to clients purposefully.

2. Be the Example: Real leaders set the pace for culture rather than dictating it from the top. Culture affects how people and groups interact internally and with clients. There isn’t a more effective way than to communicate this by example. Everyone must be on the same page regarding the values and norms that apply to your organization and live them every day.

3. Learning is a Journey: Leaders often perceive mistakes as punitive occurrences, but what if instead, you looked for the root cause of the mistake and evaluated how to improve processes to prevent it from happening again. This can actually turn mistakes into a positive thing, because you’re constantly bettering things on a micro level.

Nordstrom is well-known for its ethos of empowering staff. Director of Talent Acquisition Mary Porter said in an interview, “every Nordstrom employee (whether they work on the sales floor or in a support position) is focused on making people feel good, and our culture is centred on creating an environment where our people feel supported and empowered to do just that.” One of the ways Nordstrom achieves this is by encouraging staff to work as if they were operating a business of their own and “do what they feel is right to build lasting relationships with their customers.”

4. Empower Your Employees: One of the easiest ways to let top candidates slip through your fingers is by ignoring their individual professional growth. To retain top-talent employees, it’s important to have development programs that give them an opportunity to grow their careers. However, ensure these opportunities align with employees’ goals. This is one of the best ways to foster positivism and a sense of goodwill within the organization.

5. Work Environment: Creating the ideal work environment entails sticking to your brand ethos as well as a parallel set of values or standards that you think will engender positivity. When employees work productively, the whole organism moves in the right direction. Emphasize humility, honesty and respect in the workplace so that every employee knows they are respected and held to the same standard as their colleagues.