Hiring for your Culture : Ways to get the Right Employee

Organizational culture is ingrained in the way a firm does business and engages with peers, competitors and vendors which over a period of time become a part of its business strategy. While sometimes it is easy to find people that are on the same wavelength as the company’s culture they may have to hire someone who is a partial fit and hope that the person can adapt to its core values and not stand out like a sore thumb. Human resource experts may say that diversity is essential for improvement but people that fit into an organization’s business model perform to their full potential due to job satisfaction. As Lauren Kolbe of Kolbeco says, “you can teach someone to do a particular job, but you cannot teach someone to like the way you operate”.

So how do you hire the right employee or the hands that fit into the cultural gloves of your organization?

1. Identifying skills that make up your culture: Get your hiring team to first identify the skills that are part of its unique culture with the help of its employees. Get them to talk about reasons why they love working with you through personal stories and group discussions which will highlight skills that work as a common thread to link them all together. Once the skills are identified and highlighted it will be easier to reinforce the same when selecting candidates for hiring process.

2. Reinforcing culture during selection process: Give employees the opportunity to share their vision about culture and work processes with prospective candidates. Flaunting your organizational culture is a powerful and low-cost method of bringing it in the public domain and displaying pride in it so candidates get an up-close picture of work standards required. This will make it clear to aspiring candidates that they would expected to uphold these values after joining the organization and helps them to have a clear perspective about work ethics and standards.

3. Assessment methods should enable creative mix: Formulate a selection process that attracts candidates that are culturally responsive to your organization and want to add it to their experience. Have a combination of interviews and tests to encourage prospective candidates to share their perspectives about your culture that makes it easier to make a final decision. Instead of building a homogenous workforce that can lead to lack of diversity and adversely affect an organization’s competitive power, focus on employees that have similar experience background.

4. Have an informative page about organizational culture: Promote your business values at every opportunity through online and offline content like business conferences and hiring campaigns. These could also include text and video testimonials from existing employees about how they value the company culture improvement it has wrought in their work and career. Sometimes employees even from another organization with similar line of business can be misfits if work culture relating to behavior with customers and vendors is different which can be disastrous.
5. Personality tests – Psychometric tests are a great way of understanding a prospective candidate’s attitude, traits and work style so you can know if he/she would appeal to others within the organization. Select candidates that are closely aligned to your firm’s cultural makeup through multiple interviews and competency based questions to get a clearer idea about his suitability.

Organizational culture encompasses the experiences of its founders and employees that join it during different stages of growth and expansion and their common values that bring them together. Though culture is chiefly based on influences of its founders and executive members, employees are the ones that drive and reinforce it through attitude, behavior and acceptance of its values. During the hiring process keep in mind that happy employees are the ones that contribute and go the extra mile to fulfill responsibilities that may sometimes not be within their job profiles just to show their gratitude about finding the perfect job.

What do you think? Do use comments to let us know your thoughts or if you have something that you wish to share.