Company culture has a significant impact on its success. While skilled, focused, and driven employees are crucial to improving your bottom line, you could see the opposite result if they don't match your cultural fit. Hiring people for their skills, values, attitudes, and behaviors is a big part of creating a top-notch team. Employees who can connect on multiple levels optimize teamwork and achieve excellent results. HR specialists must ensure candidates culturally fit with the workplace to create a collaborative work environment and streamline operations.
In this post, we'll discuss how HR can develop company recruitment strategies to find candidates who will fit well within your culture so companies can find skilled, hardworking employees who will fit in well as part of your team.
How HR Can Determine Cultural Fit
Around 94% of executives believe a distinct company culture is essential for success. Cultural fit assessment is an integral part of the full-cycle recruitment process and includes a combination of assessments, questions, and evaluations at each recruitment stage. Hiring employees who share the existing team's beliefs, values, and attitudes can make the work process more engaging and enjoyable. When people feel included and engaged, they are more likely to dedicate themselves to the company, leading to higher productivity and lower turnover rates.
Know Your Company's Culture
Recruiting candidates to fit your company culture relies on HR having a great understanding of the existing work culture, as that will allow it to match the prospective candidates to the cultural criteria. Part of knowing your culture involves implementing your core values as part of your everyday work life, such as by reminding employees of the company's values during your recurring meetings or commending workers when they adhere to them. However, conducting regular engagement surveys will help you understand how your employees feel about your culture and if they think it is positive. High engagement will likely indicate a positive culture, whereas lower engagement indicates a need for improvement.
While assessing the culture you already have, you could consider how you want to improve it to focus on hiring employees for the culture you wish to achieve as you enact changes to it. Understanding what you want your work culture to be can help you find suitable candidates, and bringing them on board will make positive changes to your work environment in the process.
Tailor Interview Questions to Determine Cultural Fit
You must structure your interviews to assess their beliefs, behaviors, and attitudes to determine the potential candidate's cultural fit. Asking them about their skills and qualifications is essential, but your questions can also have them speak to their character.
Some examples of questions you could factor into the regular interviewing process are:
- What do you like the most about working in a team?
- What motivates you to do your day-to-day work?
- What is your dream job?
- When and where do you do your best work?
- How do you respond to critique?
- Are you a leader or a follower?
- Have you ever had to work with someone whose values differ from yours?
- What do you do to stay organized?
- What's your leadership style?
- What would you change about your recruitment experience?
Your interviewers must pay close attention to how genuine the candidates are when responding. Some people are willing to adjust their answers to fit what the interviewer wants to hear, which could cause you to make the wrong hiring decision. It's crucial to determine how well their answers align or if they feel like a generic or prepared response. Asking clarifying questions or for further insight could help you see how well they speak to their story.
Have Casual Conversations Outside the Interview
One of the best ways to assess a candidate's cultural fit is to see how they interact with others outside the interviewing process. Try to have a short, casual conversation with the candidate before or after the interview. A one or two-minute interaction can give you significant insights into an employee's courteousness, seriousness, and politeness. If you have a front-desk attendant, asking for their opinion on how a candidate behaves can be vital, especially in a situation where the candidate behaves very differently to someone in a position of power. Being courteous and polite, regardless of who they're speaking to, shows that the candidate has significant integrity and will work well in your group.
Seeing how the candidate behaves in a casual setting can give you a better understanding of how they could fit in with their future colleagues, and you could give the candidate a tour of the workplace and allow them to observe some of your team members in action. Meanwhile, it will enable candidates to assess their fit with your culture. The potential employee must also enjoy your workplace environment, which is why cultural assessment works both ways. That can help you determine how well the candidate's beliefs and attitude match the existing company culture.
Take a Measured View of the Results
Measuring a cultural fit is a comprehensive process. You would need to review several factors, including:
- Answers to interview questions
- Casual interactions before and after the interview
- Replies from questionnaires
- Information from previous employers
- Reactions to cultural fit questions during the interview
- Employee's assessment of the cultural fit
All this information must be measured carefully to better understand what the potential employee has to offer. Remember that bias could be a serious challenge when assessing the candidate's cultural fit. That's why pre-defined metrics and benchmarks are vital. Implementing a structured interview strategy when assessing cultural fit will help to avoid those natural tendencies and bring in great talent from multiple work backgrounds.
Ensuring a Cultural Fit with a PEO
Highlighting the cultural fit during the recruitment process helps you find the best-matching candidates who could stay with your company for many years. No matter how much effort you put into hiring for cultural fit, new employees will still bring old habits and behaviors with them from their previous employment. Training and onboarding procedures help them acclimate to your culture smoothly.
The focus on the cultural fit requires a recruitment and training strategy that revolves around it and may demand additional research, effort, and resources. When your HR team is already overstretched by their standard daily responsibilities, making such a change can be challenging, especially if it requires increased ongoing tasks of managing a growing team.
A professional employer organization (PEO) can provide qualified guidance to your HR team, helping them manage their workload and provide employees the support and care they need to ensure a thriving and positive culture. They can help you adjust your hiring process to include the cultural fit assessment, streamline onboarding and training, and improve your healthcare and retirement benefits. With the assistance of a professional recruitment team, you can grow and improve your business functions more efficiently.
