No longer is it enough to offer a higher salary than your competition for the same work if you want to hire good people. More people today care about being happy at work than ever before.
For many people, this condition is less about getting paid and more about being in an open and friendly place. Harvard Business Review’s research on culture-based recruiting shows that university students value culture and people more than career potential, work-life balance, and pay.
But any owner or person in charge of hiring knows that finding good people is only half the battle. Just as necessary is retention, which is greatly affected by cultural factors. In March 2015, Forbes published an article about what Aetna Health Insurance was doing to keep its employees.
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CEO Mark Bertolini started programs to raise wages and benefits and give workers perks like yoga and training in mindfulness. As a result, the turnover rate dropped significantly, and the bottom line is expected to improve by 5 to 10 percent in about a year.
It’s time to learn more about recruiting culture and how to develop it.
The importance of culture-based recruiting
Fitting in with the organization’s culture is what keeps it together. Because of this, it’s an essential trait to look for when hiring. The Society for Human Resource Management says that a company can lose 50–60% of a person’s annual salary because of a bad fit with the company’s culture (SHRM).
Organizational culture can be defined in many ways. For example, by working with an outside consultant or having focus groups and discussions led by staff. The result could be a formal declaration from the CEO describing the organization’s culture, a list of operating cultural norms that tell the team how to interact with each other, or both.
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What’s important is that hiring managers, interviewers, recruiters and everyone else at your company can identify key traits that fit well with that culture. For example, suppose your organization’s culture is built around a strong sense of entrepreneurship. In that case, it will be essential to ensure that potential candidates are entrepreneurial and have a history of doing well in similarly entrepreneurial environments. This would be a vital sign of a good fit with the culture.
How do you define your culture?
By identifying your culture-based recruiting, you can more easily reach your strategic goals because you will have the right people in the right jobs. A recruiting culture that works well can quickly determine what skills are needed and find people with those skills. These workers do a lot for the business and help other workers make the most of their abilities.
When you have an excellent recruiting culture, your managers can find the best people in your company for different jobs and projects.
You can figure out a candidate’s work ethic and style by asking if they do well in a virtual environment or when everyone is in the same room, if they prefer a hierarchical structure or can do well in a flat one, and if they tend to work together across teams or in more of a siloed way.
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Lastly, give your candidates a complete picture of what it would be like to work at your company. Please provide them with a visit to the office and an opportunity to see how workers of all levels interact during meetings or lunch. Please pay attention to how comfortable the candidate is and ask the staff what they think. The best candidate will be the one whose behavior and values are most like your organization’s.
Suppose you check for a culture-based recruiting process. In that situation, you will employ professionals who will do well in their new jobs, help your company grow, be successful in the long run and save you time and money.
“traicie can match candidates to your company culture. Curious about how traicie can help you defining your company culture? Or how we can tell you if a potential candidate fits your culture at a glance?
What are the strategies to hire people based on their culture?
Put your values into action
You need to know what makes your organization unique. Tell us about your company’s core values and behaviors that make up its culture. Sometimes it’s even helpful to spell out specific values-based behaviors for a particular role or group.
Prepare questions to ask about each of these values and actions
Write questions asking the candidate to give specific illustrations of past actions you can connect to your core values. For example, let’s say that your organization rewards team members who are proactive and show initiative. In that scenario, you can ask, “Can you give me an example of a time when you saw a problem that wasn’t directly your responsibility but was affecting team performance. What did you do about it?”
Here are some questions that will help you figure out how well a candidate fits into the culture during an interview:
- What kind of culture makes you happy? (Does the answer match the way your company works?)
- What are your values and where would you like to work?
- Why are you interested in working here?
- Based on what you’ve seen, how would you explain our company culture? Is this something you can use?
- What good ideas from another company would you bring to our company yourself? Would you be able to use these best practices in our setting?
- Describe a time when you worked for or with a company where you didn’t feel like you fit in well with the culture. Why didn’t it work?
- traicie not only helps recruiters screen candidates for a culture match. We go even further and provide you with useful information to take to the candidate interview. Want to know more about how we can help you?
Plan the interview
Think about doing the skills and values part of an interview with someone else or at a different time. So, you can be sure that the values section will get the attention it needs. And don’t talk about the culture of the company yourself. First, listen to what they say about their lives and beliefs.
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This method will get more honest answers, which will help figure out if the person is a good fit for the organization. It might be helpful to have two or even three people interview the same person to discover their core values and beliefs. Everyone will see and hear something different.
Do you want to hire great people who know your hiring culture and are willing to promote it and take it to the next level? Then, add these tips to how you hire people:
- Make a clear list of your values and show how they adhere to the job you are applying for.
- Have a page on your website that shows what your company stands for.
- Include the values of your company in the job advertising.
- During the interview, talk about your company’s culture.
- Make a quiz about your company’s culture for the job interview.
- Spend much time on culture during the induction phase.
- If you use these tips, you’ll hire people who will significantly impact your business and help you build a more robust culture-based recruiting.
During the interview, use the best ways to do things
Use the STAR method to discover everything you need to know: situation, task, action and result. Ask the candidate what they learned from it as well. Ask how a candidate makes an impression on everyone they talk to. Listens to the questions candidates ask to see if they match your company values. Try to pay attention to the questions they ask and think about the values behind them.
Do you know that traicie can help you to find candidates with culture fit in less than 1 minute?
Choose how strict you will be
Every hiring decision is based on cognitive ability, personality traits, skills, perception and cultural fit. When there is a pressing need to fill a position, you should decide how important the candidate’s cultural fit will be. It would be best for you and the candidate if you were strict about cultural fit.
The biggest problem with culture-based recruiting is cutting down on diversity. It’s natural for recruiters to choose people who are most like them, even if they don’t mean to. Take the difference between shy people and those who are outgoing.
But if your company culture is very outgoing, does that mean that someone who isn’t very outgoing will be unhappy there? After all, you don’t want everyone to be a perfect match because that could lead to too-close-knit groups at work.
Building a Strong Reputation
A modern and active culture-based recruiting can benefit your company’s reputation and brand. The benefit of a company-wide recruitment drive is that it gives your company a unified brand message and shows that you are serious about finding the best people. You can use the media and events to get the word out about your hiring process, which will help your brand even more.
Every single employee is an integral part of building an employee brand. It won’t take long for the word to spread, especially if your employees are always talking about how great it is to work at your company and all the great things you are doing.
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In summary
Finding, talking to and employing the best potential talent will always be at the heart of any recruitment effort. To reach these goals, you need a professional and large-scale platform for recruiting people.
Your recruitment system needs to be based on a direct employee referral system. It would allow any employee to quickly suggest potential candidates. By then, we can track the whole process. You will always have a great pool of candidates, a strong recruiting culture and an extensive employment referral system. A robust culture-based recruiting brings in candidates from all over the world and helps you keep your best hires. Start by giving your employee referral process a makeover if you want to get the best people.
Do you know that traicie’s sourcing tools for recruiters can help the Hiring Team with Culture-Based Hiring but also in the strategic, operational value of the recruiting process :
- Cost of a job board – Reduce annual spending on job boards
- Cost of HR tools – Reduce the cost of surveys and assessment tools
- Recruitment costs – Reduce selection costs
- Internal mobility – Fill more skilled jobs with internal staff
- Time to hire – Reduce the number of days a role goes unfilled
- Salary costs – Reduce overall salary costs
- Attrition – Reduce the rate of turnover
- Recruitment cost – Reduce the general recruitment cost
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