Many studies have shown that culture fit can lead to better retention rates. In today’s competitive job market, this is a strong reason to prioritize culture fit. Thankfully, culture fit brings more benefits than just better retention rates. When you hire employees whose values, attitude, and personality align with your company culture, you can anticipate quicker adjustment, higher productivity, and greater job satisfaction.
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These benefits have led many companies to make hiring for culture fit a priority. Putting this idea into practice, however, requires a comprehensive recruitment strategy that allows you to identify and attract the “right’ candidates.
UNDERSTANDING CULTURE FIT
Culture fit isn’t about hiring employees who are all the same. In reality, having a diverse workplace is key to a successful business. Culture fit involves finding candidates who align with the company’s core values, identifying those with the right hard and soft skills to thrive in your unique environment, and bringing on new hires who can succeed and develop within the company.
defining your company culture
Before you can hire employees for “culture fit,” you must first define your specific company culture. Take time to evaluate the core values of the company, identify primary business goals, and set a vision for where you want your company to be now and in the future. Determine what really matters to your company and use this assessment to build a company culture that matches your brand.
Keep in mind that culture doesn’t develop overnight. It takes time and commitment to grow and build properly.
Sending a clear and consistent message about your company culture to your current and potential employees will help foster the type of culture your company wants.
Assessing Culture Fit in Candidates
Defining your company culture allows you to strategically look for candidates that match the company’s goals and vision. Making this assessment, however, is not always easy. Here are some tips for making this happen.
• Create a Candidate Persona
Once you have defined your company culture, you can use this to build a candidate persona that matches your company’s goals and values. This persona will help you determine which candidates have the specific aptitudes, traits, and soft skills that “fit” well with your company.
• Build Culture into Your Job Descriptions
Prospective candidates should get a basic view of your company culture just by reading through the job description. Be sure to list the desired skills, traits, and attributes that match your company culture in the job description. Use your company’s unique RJP to help candidates get a sense of what it’s like to work with there. This strategy alone may deter some candidates that aren’t a good match for your company from applying in the first place.
• Use Pre-Hire Assessments
One of the most challenging aspects of hiring for culture fit is identifying the “right” candidates. Resumes tend to shed very little light on many desired culture fit characteristics, such as decision making and innovation. While applicants may list on their resume that they possess these crucial traits, their self-evaluation may not be as accurate as you hope.
Pre-hire assessments help take the guesswork out of this process by providing a data-driven process for assessing many of your most sought-after soft skills, including communication, motivation, adaptability, integrity, and dependability. You can align your pre-hire assessments to measure the skills that are most valuable to your company culture. This process will help you filter through your candidate pool to identify your ideal applicants.
• Hold Structured Interviews
When hiring for culture fit, you should avoid unstructured interviews. Without structure, your interview questions could stray off task and leave you with little insight into culture fit. Instead, you want to create a specific interview structure and interview questions that align with your company culture. Structured interviews will enable your team to assess each candidate more consistently.
Hiring for culture can help to bring cohesiveness to the workplace and help promote the core values and principles of your company. It’s essential to create a strategy that allows you to attract and identify those candidates that best match your company culture.
