Recruiting for Cultural Fit

So you’ve crafted the perfect job description, prepped the team for best practices in interviewing, clearly defined the technical need for a position, and met with a slate of candidates, but something is missing. Tactically, the candidates you’ve met with can do the job, but you question if their attitude, work ethic, personality and values, align with your organization.  More often than not, pinpointing if a candidate will fit within the company culture is an ongoing pain point for organizations of all sizes.   

A strong sense of culture is the engine that keeps an organization powering forward. Company culture is the likelihood that someone will reflect and/or be able to adapt to core beliefs, and behaviors that constitute your organization.

Before you can adequately determine if a candidate is or is not a fit, you must first clearly be able to articulate your organizational culture. This means truly understanding what motivates your core company values and knowing what keeps existing employees motivated, fulfilled, and engaged.

The right skill set and experience is only one component of finding the perfect candidate. And because interviewing can be an imperfect process, there are multiple tactics to help bridge the gap between technical proficiency and the confidence that your next hire will align culturally and morally with your team.

Here are some techniques to help you better determine if a candidate is an all-around fit:

1. Have your final candidates take a personality or Strength Finder assessment. These assessments are not a definitive indication of fit, but they certainly provide additional context that may be hard to gather from a 1-hour interview.

Here at SelectOne, we rely heavily on the Big 5 assessment. This Five Factor Model assesses how a person stacks up in certain dimensions of personality. There are several other similar tools including the Myers-Briggs and DiSC assessment. To use this tool effectively, it’s important to understand the particular traits that make a person successful in a certain position. You want to establish a benchmark. When assessing if a person is a good fit, compare the results of the potential candidate to those results of existing key performers on your team. 

2. Be sure to differentiate between the person and the job: Just because you can hang out with the person at a bar or they’ve worked for some “cool” companies in the past, doesn’t mean he or she will be the most effective in a particular role. Do your best to differentiate

3. Ask behavioral based, non-traditional questions, such as:

- What was a time you didn’t know how to do something? How did you overcome that?

- If you could open your own business what would it be and why?

- Tell me about a time you had to deliver bad news. What was your approach and what was the     outcome?

The key to these types of question is to eliminate the potential of a “yes/no” answer and to allow the candidate to speak freely.

Implementing these techniques coupled with solid interview preparation and clear understanding of your own company culture will allow you to better identify cultural fit, ultimately leading to better employee engagement, production and retention.