Hiring for Corporate Culture

What is corporate culture?

Corporate or company culture, also known as organizational culture refers to the values, behaviour, attitudes, goals and practices that personify an organisation. Company culture can effectively be defined as the way you perform the tasks assigned to you in the workplace. Collectively these translate into the culture or personality of the organisation.

Why is cultural fit important?

Cultural fit is important because most employees consider the organisation’s culture before applying for a job, and the majority of employees wouldn’t apply for a job unless the organisation culture and values affiliate with their own.

Employees who fit well into their organisation’s corporate culture are more productive, engaged, and show more job satisfaction. Cultural fit could also possibly decrease the employee turnover rate as employees who feel like they are a good fit have a higher chance of staying in the company longer.

How to hire for a cultural fit:

1. Define your organisation’s corporate culture

In order to define your company’s culture, you must be able to define what values and practices define your business. Defining corporate culture also refers to determining how management and employees interact and deal with exterior business interactions.

Company culture is often implied rather than defined, it’s not as set of rules, it then grows and develops overtime based on the attributes of the organisation’s employees.

2. Reflect your corporate culture in your hiring details

Your decided corporate culture should be reflected on your site, job posts, and other recruitment tools. Ensure that your business culture and core values are conveyed in your job postings and ads.

This can be done by including certain qualitative characterise that you’d want to see in a candidate. You can mention the years of experience you require along with descriptive words such as entrepreneurial, innovative or creative. Mentioning the attributes you require in an employee helps narrow down your choices to fill a position, and whoever you chose will probably be a good fit for the organisation.

3. Ensure hiring staff is able to discuss your corporate culture with potential candidates

Your business culture should be touched on multiple times throughout the hiring process by one of the organisation’s associates who has a competent level of knowledge concerning the organisation’s business culture.

Ideally, you should be looking to employ candidates who are actually concerned about who they work for as well as their potential colleagues, and not a candidate who solely cares about collecting a pay check.

The best candidates come prepared with answers to all your corporate culture related questions, meaning their answers would be disingenuous. To avoid this, it’s suggested that your employees undertake a training course on how to discuss corporate culture in a genuine manner.

4. Provide potential employees with a comprehensive view of your organisation’s culture

Another method deemed successful to give job candidates an idea about the organisation’s culture is to give them a quick overview of it. This simply means taking them around the office and allowing them to see things as they are, introduce them to key employees, and lastly, show them where all the real work takes place.

Personality tests can also be used to check whether or not a potential employee is likely to fit in to the company and its culture, and you could also take them around to meet members from different teams and departments.

5. Consider DEI when hiring new employees

The consideration of diversity, equity, and inclusion is crucial when hiring new employees. You should foster an inclusive hiring strategy which gives everyone an equal chance to all potential employees as this is beneficial for both your staff and your business.

If your workforce is uniform and non-diverse your business will suffer, this promotes a lack of creativity and innovation and will also result in undermined competitiveness. From a legal perspective, an employer cannot refuse to hire someone on the basis of an inappropriate cultural fit. Hiring for a cultural fit doesn’t give the employer the right to ask inappropriate or personal questions, he can be held liable for these actions.

The end goal is to select a candidate who is the best fit for your company, someone who understands and agrees with your organisation’s core values, and shares values and characteristics with the rest of the staff.

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