How to ensure you recruit people who fit your culture

Recruiting for your business isn’t just a question of skills, qualifications and experience. To stay afloat in any competitive market, business professionals need to be hiring people who not only excel in those areas, but whose personal values are also aligned with both the culture and future vision of a company…

The one issue with ensuring surrounding cultural fit is how difficult a concept it can be to define. Although on the surface it can seem like a simple statement about the working processes and environment within an office should suffice, in reality cultural fit is more than skin deep. While an individual might be attracted by a company’s culture, they won’t necessarily fit into that culture unless their own working styles compliment it.

What recruiters are seeking to find when looking at cultural fit, are applicants whose working styles will be empowered by the processes and facilities in an organisation. Many employers already understand the importance of assessing cultural fit in the recruitment process. This is understandable when you consider that those applicants are often the ones who invest themselves more into the development of an organisation and become a working asset.

Personal development is only good for what can be taught

The reason that cultural fit has become a hot topic for managers and recruiting professionals is simple. Teaching someone to perform a role can be done, whereas teaching someone to work in a way that isn’t natural to them is nigh-on impossible. In the same vein, loving what you do means nothing if you don’t love how and where you do it. With that in mind, here’s how to ensure you recruit people who fit your culture.

Identify and communicate your culture

Although it might feel obvious to you, the key to identifying and hiring people who fit a business’s culture is through being able to articulate that culture. When you’ve been working in a certain way for a long time, the processes, practices and work styles become second nature. Applicants are coming in completely naive; so it stands to reason that you should take time to re-identify the values and practices that define an office.

The way to make significant and lasting hires is through defining an organisation. You’ll soon find that your new-found understanding of your culture emanates right down to branding and marketing further down the line, as it’s these human systems that truly make a company individual.

Think about how your values translate

Identifying an applicant’s personal values is particularly difficult. It’s much easier to assess how they behave in certain situations and scenarios. The best people to look at for these are often the senior professionals in an organisation – after all, these people have been successfully complimenting a culture for the longest period of time.

Use screening to ensure the best applicant pool

There are a number of tools that you can use to screen your applicants for cultural fit. Alongside job postings across an unrivalled variety of media, eRecruitSmart offer a range of psychometric profiling and aptitude tests that will ensure only the most suitable candidates are taken to the next level. To find out more, get in touch today.