Hiring a Cultural Fit Employee

You can train your employees for a process or skill, but not qualify them for how they operate or behave. For example: Employee X is skilled and brings tremendous value to their craft but is not aligned with your work culture. This is a red flag, isn’t it? Regardless of the skill or experience a candidate has, if they are not willing to try to fit in with your company, the culture will likely be havoc.

 
Hiring candidates who fit the cultural helps you maintain employee retention and reduce the employee bounce rate. Employees are likely to stay in an organisation when they see their views align with their workplace.

In a recent online surveys, data has shown that 73% of job seekers don’t apply for a job that has no cultural value or if they are not okay with the organisation’s cultural values.

This simple survey shows how much interest is shed upon an organisation’s culture by job seekers. Hence your organisation must have a culture set. Here comes the difficult task: How to hire a cultural fit employee? We’ll help you figure it out.

Determine Your Organisation Culture:

Your organisation’s culture comprises three elements: values, beliefs, and behaviours.

Value: The values you expect in an employee are said here. Honesty, accountability, communication, and/or trust.

Beliefs: What’s the foundation of your organisation? That’s where the element of belief lies, like being customer-centric vs. employee-centric.

Behaviour: Behaviours don’t mean being kind or rude; it is about the organisation’s behaviour towards its employees, like being open to learning new skills or maintaining a good work-life balance.

Before starting the interview, write down two or three points for each element and be fully aware of your organisation’s culture.

How Do You Hire a Cultural Fit Employee?

Your organisation should be well equipped and prepared to hire an employee who meets the requirements in terms of skills and experience. Hiring a cultural fit employee seems like a tricky task because it is. To find a cultural fit employee, you don’t necessarily need to strike out the equally important skills and experience requirement.

The interview process or the candidate’s resume will not portray the candidate as a cultural fit. Instead, you may have to add a few questionnaires or steps to assess them.

Define Your Company Culture: Who else will do this part, if not for you? You need to be clear about your company’s culture in your job postings, job board, and the introductory call you set with the candidate. In addition to the X experience and Y skills you require for the job, it is better if you’re loud about the company’s culture.

Train Your Hiring Staff: Until onboarding, hiring staff represents the company. Hence you need to train your hiring staff. You cannot be loud about the culture in job postings and not follow it. This will lead to the wrong impression of your organisation. Make sure your hiring staff sticks to the culture to give a better impression to eligible candidates.

Real-Time Questions: You cannot ask a candidate, “Will you fit into the company’s culture?” The reply will obviously be a yes. But words don’t add value if they are not followed by action. Accessing them during the interview is your only way to know. You can try the following method and see if it works: Take them around the office. Let them talk to a few key employees and ask them, “What do you think of the office?” This way, you will not receive generic answers, and your question will also seem natural. Doing this, you might find out if they are the one for your company.

Consider DEI: DEI means Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in consideration. You can frame your questions around this to find out if the candidate suits your organisation.

Here Are Four Tips for Accessing the Candidates

1. Keep Personal Traits Away: Your personal traits might not interfere when hiring based on skills and experience. Still, there is a chance your personal traits might get interrupted when you hire a culturally fit candidate. So, you must conduct the interview mindfully, based only on your company’s culture. Keep your personal interests aside when stepping into the interview zone.

2. Structured Interview: Wondering what a structured interview is? You can interview quite a few candidates in a day. The skill set interview is pretty easy to narrow the eligible ones. But in a cultural fit interview, you might get confused if the questions you ask the candidate are not in unison. Set a questionnaire that asks the same questions to the candidates. You can quickly narrow down the eligible ones. If it’s still confusing, you can ask “Why” to their answer. The justification they provide will be your answer.

3. Set a Trial Day: Like OTTs provide a 14 or 30-day trial window to see how excellent their platform is, you can try implementing a trial day for the candidates who have cleared the test. More than a day may cost your organisation revenue. Let the candidate mingle with other employees in the company and ask your current employees for their feedback.

The candidates will be nervous on their first day, so judging in a day may seem unfair. That is why eligible candidates must mingle with fellow employees, so they can let their guard down and be themselves.

4. Self-Assessment Before Employee Assessment: Just like how much your hiring staff should train about the company’s culture. It is mandatory that you self-assess to see if you align with your culture. Your company’s culture is not readily available on google or your website to read and prepare for the interview. It is something followed by everyone. Hence if you have doubts, discuss with your fellow employees, and get ready to hire a cultural fit candidate.

Conclusion

Hiring a cultural fit employee is as important as hiring a skilled and experienced candidate. Employees who are culturally fit tend to maintain a long-term relationship with their employer and productivity (because they are not uncomfortable in the workspace.) Happy finding culturally fit employees.

LogicMelon

Award-winning recruitment software that will find, attract, hire and analyse the way you want to work. At LogicMelon, we have experienced software recruitment marketing specialists to help you build effective recruitment solutions supported by the best customer service you’ll find anywhere!

Email: sales@logicmelon.com or call LogicMelon (UK) +44 (0) 203 553 3667 (USA) +1 860 269 3089