The Importance of Company Culture and How to Hire the Right Fit
6 tips on hiring employees who wont run for the door.
Everyone likes to wake up wanting to go to work! And every company wants their employees to be motivated, productive and loyal. One of the biggest factors in fostering a hard-working, happy team is by not only creating a vibrant company culture, but also making sure new employees fit into your company’s unique style. Whether your company is a more casual, “8–5”, family friendly environment, or a high pressure, career lifestyle, competitive, highly results-oriented workplace, using smart recruiting tools like predictive analytics to evaluate candidates will help ensure the perfect match.
Programs that foster company culture like flex time, happy hours, volunteer work, recognition opportunities, cross departmental “lunch and learn” events, competitive pay structures and opportunities for bonuses all make employees less likely to take calls from other companies.
“Culture is the number one contributing factor to every single aspect of the employment relationship — from both the employee and company perspective,” says Amber Rhoton, Owner/President of Owner and Chief HR Advisor for Amplified HR. “A strong culture is the fastest way to weed out under-performers and cultivate superstars.”
Here’s how to find the perfect match for your company’s culture and avoid costly hiring mistakes. Job searchers, listen up to increase your chances of getting hired!
- Ask candidates to take a personality test such as Talentoday’s which in a few clicks provides a comparison of the candidate to your current workforce and is designed to allow you to get an idea of who a person really is and what motivates him or her.
- Have multiple people speak with the candidate to see how well he or she meshes with different personalities. Also, meet a candidate on several occasions on different days and times to gauge the consistency of the fit.
- Watch how a candidate interacts with the receptionist. It may seem minor, but you want to hire a genuinely nice person. If someone is cold or rude to the person they are first meeting in the lobby, it’s not a good sign.
- Check references, and not just the ones a candidate gives you. Dig a little deeper and find an objective opinion on someone’s past performance and potential fit. It’s hard work but will pay off to avoid hiring the wrong person.
Observe how smoothly offer negotiations go. If a candidate negotiates heavily and isn’t easy to work with during that process, it’s a sign they aren’t the right person for the job. - Ask the hard questions. If you know your company’s culture requires night and weekend work, find out how a candidate will handle that. Be transparent on all the down sides of a position and when someone is still excited to join, you’ll know they’re right for the role.
“Match your applicants with your culture and the rest will fall into place,” says Rhoton. It’s way more important, in my opinion, than skill set or experience.”
By ensuring your new hires match your company’s dynamic, you’ll not only reduce your turnover but also increase engagement and overall performance of the entire team. And with today’s easy-to-use candidate-culture matching technology, there’s no excuse not to!
3 things you must do before hiring candidates
Every manager, HR professional and recruiter faces the same question: Am I recruiting the right candidate for this position? It became essential to be able to discover and acknowledge the value of your future employees and the way they will match to the job position in our fast-paced and technology driven world. Performance is directly correlated to the fit between your candidate’s skills, personality and motivation but also to your company culture, requirements for the job, team members already in place, etc.
Here are the 3 things you need to do:
1 — Evaluate their skills
You want to explore the knowledge and cognizance of every individual, or what the person knows how to do. The skills and aptitudes of a person are usually identified in resumes, diplomas, and experiences. These can also be distinguished via aptitude tests, performance tests, real-life simulations or exercises. Before the meeting, it’s essential to take note of the exact tasks, responsibilities and tools the future employee will have to do, use or learn.
2 — Explore their personalities
This point is crucial and it is the center of the assessment process, in meetings between a recruiter and a candidate. It is not groundbreaking to acknowledge that there is a strong correlation between personality fit and performance in a career. Personality is a complex concept that can be explored in many complementary ways.
We can evaluate it by using personality tests, and with previous employers recommendations, 360-degree feedback or in a well-conducted face-to-face semi-directive interview. The main advantage of using personality tests for interviews (when they are serious!) is that they allow for the standardization and normalization of assessments between different people. Nowadays most are online, easy-to-use and inexpensive. In a way, they allow you to know your candidates before you meet them.
3 — Understand their motivations
Motivation is the third fundamental element to consider while assessing individuals you wish to recruit. It is so important to be aware of people’s aspirations, to know what they seek in their professional lives, and what motivates them. Candidates must select the organization that interests them, identify the people for whom and with which they work, and enjoy the possibilities offered. Every career opportunity must also fit the career plan of the applicant. For example, you can hire the best talent to work for Salesforce.com, but if he is not motivated by the tasks, he will not perform his best, and will leave the company earlier than expected.
If you wish to hire applicants who fit the open position and company culture, make sure you take these points into consideration. While you are free to select a candidate, applicants also choose the company and the people they will work for, their preferred position, and the working framework that matches their expectations.
Adopt the best practices for recruitment and download our free 20 page guide on assessing and selecting talents.
Simply hire quality employees
Have I hired the right person? This is a common question asked by human resources professionals and managers around the world.
In many companies, human resources managers, career coaches, and recruiters are faced with a large number of job applications each year, many of which don’t even get looked at. Let’s be honest, only the first couple of applications get reviewed and the rest come from references or connections you have. You trust your connections and you will hire those referred to you because this makes your job that much easier.
But still, how do you know you’ve hired the right person? You could literally sit and read all of the applications and resumes sitting on your desk. We don’t doubt your ability to do this day in and day out. However, we know a way that you can zip through applications, and feel more confident in narrowing your choices to the right candidates for an interview.
Talentoday offers innovative and modern cloud solutions to professionals like yourself that allow you to view and interpret the personalities and motivations of each applicant (with their consent, of course).
Talentoday differs from the Myers Briggs in that it allows you to explore precise personality traits and enables you to reach and serve more individuals by satisfying their needs. Between the career coach and the potential employee, there exists a sense of openness, communication and accountability or transparency that is not found within other tests because results can be immediately shared and interpreted. Not only do you benefit from this experience, but your population does too! In other websites where questionnaires are offered, people don’t have direct access to their own results and, in fact, sometimes never even get to see them. Talentoday, on the other hand, offers everyone a personalized, user-centric experience that facilitates potential employees to seek the right position for themselves, which lowers the number of applications you must go through to select the perfect candidate. It’s a “win-win” situation if you ask us…
Talentoday has also broken from traditional pay-pertest models and allows career coaches or career counselors to administer unlimited questionnaires via the Talentoday online platform. Our cloud solution provides the speed, flexibility and security that every human resources manager and recruiter needs. To help you guide every individual in the right direction, our Talentoday Manager gives you access to the fundamental tools and empowers you to be better at what you do.
With Talentoday Manager, more HR Managers and professionals aren’t just reviewing the first couple of applications, but are getting to know each candidate at a more personal level, and are identifying the qualities or talents that naturally fit the role in less time.
We aren’t saying that resumes or CVs are not important! Realistically, however, these can be painted in a distorted way, which is what Talentoday’s unbiased personality and motivations questionnaire avoids. Talentoday adheres to the highest standards of the American Psychological Association (APA) and makes it difficult for applicants to shape an “ideal” profile. As Talentoday does this, we are able to lower the high percentage of unhappy employees in the world. A recent Forbes article stated that, “only 13% of workers feel engaged by their jobs” and that “work is more often a source of frustration than one of fulfillment for nearly 90% of the world’s workers.” At Talentoday, we believe that it’s best to select those who are fitting, motivated, engaged, and fulfilled in their position.
Talentoday’s tools get you access to an accurate representation of each person’s talents and incentives, leading you to select the right person for the position offered.
Be a part of our growing community of professionals in human resources and feel confident with your choices in less time. 88% of users recommend Talentoday to their friends, and our Certified Counselors couldn’t be any happier!
References:
Adams, Susan. Unhappy Employees Outnumber Happy One By Two to One Worldwide. Forbes. 10/10/2013.
Engineers vs. Business people: A War of Talent
Both engineers and business people are believed to be some of the most intelligent professionals in the world, embracing and conquering a large wealth of skills and knowledge. But which group of them will adapt their behaviors and personality to meet the social demands of the workplace? In such a competitive professional world, it is these talents that lead to the success of an individual. A study of Talentoday’s results database reveals the differing “Soft Skills” adopted by engineers and business people. It is not surprising to see that there are certain inclinations and differences within the results, since ultimately, everyone is unique. Personalities and motivations that distinguish us as individuals will naturally complement particular careers.
The following statistics indicate the trends identified by the study.