Ensuring a Cultural Fit with New Hires

Industry News | Posted December 06, 2016

Studies have shown that employees who fit well with their organization, coworkers, and supervisor had greater job satisfaction, were more likely to remain with their company, and drove success for the business. Katie Bouton of Koya Leadership Partners shares how important it is to know, communicate and use your company culture to assess and recruit candidates who will fit in and be successful with and for your organization.¹

But hiring for culture fit doesn’t mean hiring people who are all the same. What’s key is that hiring managers, HR interviewers and everyone in your organization knows and can identify important characteristics in candidates that will be a good fit with your company culture.² The likelihood that a person will demonstrate and adapt to the key values, attributes and behaviors of your organization makes for the cultural fit.

Collaboration is a valued trait in many organizations and if this is an example of a core feature of your corporate culture, those who enjoy and share a true belief in collaborative work will be a better cultural fit than people who are more productive as individual contributors. Experienced hiring executives will recognize that candidates coming from very different backgrounds and settings –corporate, non-profit, or military—can all possess a strong sense of collaboration.³

These are the interview questions Ms. Bouton shares that can help evaluate culture fit:

• What kind of culture have you succeeded in?
  
• What types of company values are you drawn to and what’s your ideal workplace?
  
• What attracts you to working here?
  
• What best practices that you bring from another environment would you be able to implement here?
  
• Tell me about an organization you worked with where you were not a strong culture fit; what made it a bad fit?
  

Taking the time to see how a candidate interacts with employees in a meeting or over a meal can provide a window into his/her comfort with your organization. Feedback you obtain from your staff, combined with your candidate interactions in various settings, can help reveal whether the behaviors and values you are seeking are shared. Ms. Bouton’s recommended approach promises to be productive in identifying the culture fit in your recruiting process to help you bring on board candidates who can succeed in and for your company going forward.⁴

If you would like to discuss how Corporate Fuel can help you realize full value in your business through leadership talent development, please give us a shout.

¹²³⁴(To read the full article reviewed here, see: Recruiting for Cultural Fit by Katie Bouton, Koya Leadership Partners, July 17, 2015 Harvard Business Review - https://hbr.org ).