Hiring today is no longer what it used to be. In the olden days, employers would mostly be concerned with the candidate’s years of experience, the different fields they’ve worked in, and their educational background. Today, these are still determining factors to a candidate’s qualification, but new factors have also proved to be important in the candidate selection process, especially ‘culture fit’.
Just as humans have personalities that differentiate them from one another, companies have personalities as well. These “personalities” are often referred to as the organizational culture. Organizational culture is a system of shared assumptions, values, and beliefs that govern how people behave in a company. These shared values have a strong influence on the people in the organization and dictate how they dress, act, and perform their jobs. So, when it comes to hiring, it is the responsibility of employers to make sure that the candidate they plan on hiring is a good culture fit.
Culture fit means that a job candidate will be able to conform and adapt to the core values and collective behaviors that make up an organization. Employers can no longer take a chance on someone who won’t mesh well with the existing team, doesn’t share common goals with their colleagues, and is not aligned with the mission of the company.
But keep in mind that hiring a culture fit doesn’t mean disregarding your initiatives for increasing diversity by always hiring an exact replica of your existing employees. It simply means finding those candidates who share your goals and values and are able to assimilate to your work environment in a productive and healthy manner.
So, how do you ensure that your next hire fits your organizational culture? Here are four steps that will help you to do so:
1. Determine Your Organization’s Culture
The first step in hiring a culture fit is determining what values, norms, and practices define your business. These include, but are not limited to, things such as respect, fairness, trust, integrity, teamwork and communication. It is also a common practice to survey your employees and ask them how they perceive the organization’s culture from their perspective. This could help you discover the positive aspects of your organization that you may not have seen before, or you could end up discovering some negative aspects that require your immediate attention and remedy.
2. Make Your Culture “Visible”
On your company website, you can include a brief on your organizational culture under your “About us” section. This is not only beneficial in the case of potential applicants, but it will also benefit you in announcing your culture to any website visitors. Some companies go as far as creating a unique employer brand for themselves where they highlight how their organizational culture differentiates them from their competitors.
By announcing your organizational culture to potential applicants, it is more likely that you’ll receive candidates who truly share your core values and principles and are able to smoothly assimilate to your company. This is precisely why Bayt.com provides a service that helps employers brand themselves with a premium company profile in order to increase their chances of attracting top talent who fit their organization.
3. Showcase Your Culture in Job Postings
Just like making your culture visible to potential candidates through your website is important to attract top talent, outlining your culture in job postings is just as important. Aside from the basic job requirements such as years of experience, education and technical skills, you’ll need to include other requirements such as innovation, creativity, team mindset, and possibly leadership. Add a blurb about who you are and what distinguishes your company. This will provide potential applicants with some form of an introduction to what your company expects from its employees.
To increase the likelihood of topnotch candidates applying for your vacancy, and to decrease the time it takes to hire, Bayt.com provides employers with a huge platform to post their jobs and offers precise filtration tools and questionnaires so that the candidates you receive in your employer inbox match your required qualifications down to the smallest details.
4. Pick the Right Fit During the Interview
Depending on your hiring process, several employees of your organization may be involved in the interviewing process. It is important that they all have a firm grasp of your organizational culture in order to ensure the interviewee is a good fit.
Having said that, there are certain questions that can be asked during an interview that will also help determine the cultural fit of the candidate. These include asking the candidate what they know about your organization’s values, their familiarity with the mission and vision that your organization upholds, and their knowledge about the pillars that your organization was established upon. An additional method that you can use during the interview is to ask the candidate what they would do in certain situations or moral dilemmas. Their answers will also help you determine the cultural fit of the candidate.
Since it might be challenging to assess and compare different candidates based on “culture fit”, it is recommended that you 1) involve your team or your interview panel and hear their impression of the candidate, 2) vary your questions to test for many angles relating to your values and most important cultural elements, and 3) keep a detailed list of what you think “fits” and what doesn’t about the candidate so you can do some contrasting after the interviews are done.
Another solution to truly discover whether or not a candidate is a good cultural fit is to give them a small tour of the organization and introduce them to a few key members, then follow up by asking the candidate what form of culture they observed from their small tour. Depending on the answer, you’ll know if the candidate is in fact a good culture fit.
Today, hiring someone who fits within your organizational culture helps to ensure that they remain productive, honest, and active members of the organization as a whole. So, keep the concept of culture fit in mind to stay on top of your hiring game.