How do you know you’re hiring the right person to fit your culture and team?
Did you know that 88% of employees view culture as an important part of business success? Or that employees are 24% more likely to leave a job if they don’t like their employer’s culture? What about culture’s impact on productivity? Happy employees in a good culture are 12% more productive, whereas disheartened employees are 10% less productive.
The statistics don’t lie: culture plays an important role in employment and productivity.
You can spend endless hours, days, weeks, and even years carefully cultivating your company’s culture. But with just a few poor decisions, you can ruin that culture. How do you avoid doing so?
Make sure you are hiring the right person for the culture and the job.
As business consultants and COOs, we help CEOs and executives ensure they are hiring the right people to build the culture that generates profit. We often come across companies, though, that fall into a few common traps when hiring that could destroy their culture and, in turn, profitability and productivity. Take the following situation as an example.
What Happened During The Hiring Process?
A business was working on hiring a person for a specific role. This role had a number of criteria, but a candidate came in who fit all of them. They interviewed well, yet something simply felt off. The interviewer was focused on asking questions to ensure the candidate would be able to do the job.
The candidate was only asked to go through one interview with no behavior analysis questionnaire. Thus, the information the company had was limited.
While the interviewer felt the candidate was a little off in the interview, they did fit all the qualifications for a tough job. At the end of the day, the interviewer was left unsure. This was a hard job to fill, should they just go with the qualifications? They only met with the candidate once, could they be mis-interpreting the situation and bad feelings?
The interviewer decided against hiring the candidate, but didn’t feel confident in the decision. They were unclear on exactly why they made the decision and how to prevent it from happening in the future.
What Was The Ultimate Problem With Hiring The Right Person?
The person responsible for hiring fell victim to a few common hiring traps that stopped them from knowing if they were hiring the right person.
Trap #1: They put qualifications over culture.
While a candidate does need to be qualified for a job, they also need to mesh with the culture. Would you rather work with someone who fits well with the team but might take a bit of extra training or someone who is entirely ready for the job but is a pain to work with?
Trap #2: They didn’t ask the right questions.
Common interview questions have scripted answers. So make sure to switch them up and ask open ended questions. Don’t be afraid to ask the candidate to elaborate on or explain an answer. We recommend having some questions in mind when you interview a candidate, but let the interview flow naturally. Take notes throughout and let curiosity drive the conversation.
In this situation, the interviewer also only asked one set of questions one time, which is a common question trap. This can leave the interviewer questioning the experience and can be unfortunate if the candidate is having an off-day.
Trap #3: They didn’t protect the team.
One of the best ways to ruin your team’s morale and productivity is to put someone on the team that doesn’t meld with the other members. If you get hyper-focused on someone’s qualifications and ability to do the job without a regard for how they will work with the team, you can hurt more than help. To keep your team happy and working hard together and for you, make sure to take them into consideration.
Trap #4: They weren’t fully aware of their company’s culture.
The interviewer couldn’t put their finger on why the candidate wasn’t a good match because they didn’t have a good understanding of their company’s culture. Since they didn’t know what they were looking for to support their culture, they couldn’t make a comprehensive decision.
How Would We Resolve The Problem?
If 35% of applicants are willing to turn down an ideal job because they feel the company culture is out of alignment, then a company should be able to turn down an ideal candidate because they believe they would not fit the cultivated culture. Thus, if you’re interviewing a candidate and you don’t think they’ll be a fit but they have all the right qualifications, you can still turn them down for the job.
Giving someone a job in a culture they will not thrive in is setting the team and the candidate up for failure.
So, in this situation, we would recommend cordially turning the candidate down and look to hire the right person for the job and culture.
We would also recommend examining the hiring process in this situation. Instead of just one interview, use a layered interview approach. Additionally, we would suggest using a behavioral analysis questionnaire to filter candidates during the interview process. These questionnaires use seemingly unrelated questions and scenarios to give you a good idea of the candidates’ personality without the fabrication of an interview.
Lastly, we would want to work with the executives and employees responsible for hiring to truly pinpoint and build their culture. We want to give the companies we work with the tools and processes to build a culture that drives profit and productivity.
What Is The Ultimate Take Away?
Your company’s culture is a powerful tool. It will either work for you or against you, and the most important decision you can make in your culture is who you hire.
To make the most of your company’s culture, you need to learn what it is, decide where you want it to go, and protect that culture. From there, you need to learn how to ask the right questions to ensure you’re hiring the right person.
So take a look at the culture you are cultivating. Do you know what that culture is? Are you hiring people who are beneficial to your culture? Have you built the process that sets you up for success to hire the right person?
How Does Corporate Culture Matter In A Business’s Numbers?
If culture is so important, why do only 28% of executives feel that they understand their company’s cultures? Well, studies have shown that 60% of senior management teams primarily use the left side of their brain. This means they tend to focus on the analytics and numbers whereas right-brained people tend to think more in holistic patterns and emotional reasoning.
As we move up in an organization’s leadership ladder, we see more and more tendencies towards left-brain thinking. After all, businesses run on numbers and numbers are what pays employees and drives revenue. So why should the numbers not be the focus?
To put it simply: without employees there are no numbers. Employees work better and stay with a company longer if they feel supported by a business and its culture. For example, according to recent studies, employees are 87% less likely to leave a job they are highly engaged in and, coincidentally, 87% of employees say they expect their employer to help them develop a healthy work life balance. Those same studies also revealed that replacing an employee can cost upwards of 200% of their annual salary.
The numbers show that creating a culture where employees feel validated, supported, and engaged will lessen turnover, lower training costs, and decrease recruitment costs. So even if you are a numbers driven leader in your business, understanding and supporting your company’s culture ultimately plays into the numbers.
It can be tricky, though, to look at your business to identify where the culture gaps are and how to fix them. That’s where a fresh set of eyes and a third party comes in.
As business consultants and COOs, we help CEOs and founders evaluate their business to turn roadblocks into opportunities. We can see where the trouble lies in existing processes - such as ensuring you’re hiring the right person - and identify solutions. Essentially, we help you lay down the groundwork so you can scale your business.
If you’re ready to take a hard look at your business so you can scale, let us know. We offer hassle-free, no obligation 30 minute discovery calls with our founder to see how we could help you. Just email us today.
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