While the term “company culture” is thrown around a lot, not many employers pay attention to what it means. In simple terms, the culture of your organization determines how you handle your employees, your processes, and your goals, among other defining traits of your business.
Your organization’s culture is the key to how it operates while also acting as the foundation for its performance. This makes it crucial for you to hire employees who fit into your culture and become a part of it, instead of ones who challenge it and cannot thrive within it.
To help you on this recruitment challenge, here are a few tips to find the perfect cultural fit for your organization.
Understand Your Company Culture
Before you can embark on the quest to find candidates that fit into your company culture, you need to determine what type of culture you have in the first place. From clan culture that favors small businesses to adhocracy culture that works for startups, your business could be working with any of these culture variants. Similar to understanding network strategies for troubleshooting, taking the time to assess your existing company culture can help you figure out an ideal candidate profile for your business.
Develop Targeted Interview Questions
If you’ve performed a criminal background check for applicants, you may know how important it is to take your time with candidate assessments. Following this approach, you should take a beat for developing interview questions in order to find the right fit of candidates. These questions can help you understand candidates’ intentions, goals, and plans to see if they fit into your company.
Ask Candidates About Their Ideal Workplace
To determine if your workplace culture fits into the idea of what the candidate’s ideal environment might be, simply ask them about it during the interview process. This answer can help you uncover if your organization’s day-to-day operations could fulfill the candidates’ vision of their preferred working environment. You can make this question part of your standard process within your recruitment software.
Inquire About Their Previous Organization
Asking applicants about their previous employer is an easy way to figure out their suitability for your organization. This helps you conjure a picture in your mind about what experiences they bring to the table and how adaptable they would be to the company culture that you offer. Besides performing a quick background check, this could be a good practice to learn more about your candidate’s past and history of employment.
Probe About Their Future Goals
When you discuss future goals with candidates, it opens up a window into their vision for their own future. This helps you determine if the candidate you are hiring could be a good fit for your company’s plans. No matter if you are using an accounting solution to cut down expenses or taking out financing to grow your business, this could help you hire according to your goals.
Find Ideal Improvement Tools
Different types of company cultures provide their own level of support for employees. For example, in clan culture, problems are discussed openly and support shifts to whoever needs it the most. But in hierarchy culture, support comes from clearly defined roles for certain responsibilities. Questions modeled after this approach let you unearth what type of support the candidate prefers and how they complement your strategies for business protection.
Question Them About What Motivates Them
When you question candidates about their motivational force at work, it can quickly allow you to discover if your current culture would help them put their best foot forward. For some employees, a sense of community at work is important. For others, having a free hand to do their job holds more weight. These inquiries can also help you assess if your current employee training program could help motivate the candidate.
When you go through these details, you can get a pretty good idea of assessing candidates’ level of interest in your offered company culture. This can help you hire the perfect applicants for your organization and lead your business down the road of success that you see for it.
