Recruiting candidates that fit your company culture can get you the best results in terms of quality of hire and employee retention. But to do so, you need to be able to describe your company culture and the shared values, beliefs, behaviors and experiences that hold your organisation together.
Cultural fit is one of the most important aspects for recruiting and retaining the best talent. By not assessing candidates for cultural fit, you risk hiring employees that don’t identify themselves with your company. The costs of this misfit can be high: poor quality work, lack of job satisfaction and high turnover rates. Moreover, employees that don’t fit your company culture tend to contribute to creating a toxic work environment which affects entire teams.
This makes it clear that assessing candidates for cultural fit is essential to make the best hiring decisions and deliver an efficient recruitment process. According to a study that surveyed 55 large companies, 84% of recruiters agreed that cultural fit is one of the most important factors to consider when recruiting. Actually, nine out of 10 recruiters said they reject candidates that don't fit their company culture.
What is Cultural Fit?
Cultural fit is the ability of a person to reflect and to adapt to the values, beliefs, behaviors and experiences that are at the core of your company’s culture. The company culture is formed by the values, vision, norms, working language, symbols, belief systems and behaviors shared by everyone. When employees are aligned with the company culture, they contribute to strengthen the organisation.
Building teams that fit your company culture can greatly impact your business, driving growth in sales, share prices and net profit. Companies that manage culture often get a productivity increase and have a greater chance of success.
Why is Cultural Fit Key in Recruitment?
As mentioned previously, cultural fit directly impacts your company’s performance and financial results. High turnover is often related to hiring employees that don’t fit your company culture, which significantly raises your recruitment costs. That being said, it gets pretty obvious why you need to assess candidates for cultural fit. By hiring new employees that fit your company culture, you avoid:
- Productivity Issues
Onboarding a team member that isn't a good cultural fit may affect both your new and current employees’ productivity. Cultural misfits have the power to affect other employees, especially top talent. Employees that fit your company culture value healthy and productive work settings and have the drive to make projects succeed. If they find themselves in a situation where they systematically have to compensate underperforming team members' work, their own productivity may drop.
- High Turnover Rates
Evidently, when recruiting a new employee you expect to see your efforts compensated by bringing in people that will stay in the company in the long term. Every time you bring in a new employee, your company makes many long-term investments related to onboarding and training. If your not able to hire people that fit your company culture chances are that the new employee won’t succeed on the job and all the time and effort spent with his integration on the company is lost.
- Decrease of Employee Satisfaction
Developing a strong and positive company culture takes a lot of time and effort. Hiring the wrong people to your company can damage it and negatively impact employee satisfaction.
Finding the Right Balance between Cultural Fit, Personality and Diversity
Assessing candidates’ personality is a reliable method of predicting future job performance. The predictive analysis of the personality assessment provides an overview of a candidate’s behavioural tendencies and that allows recruiters to really understand if a candidate will, in fact, be a top performer and if he will fit the culture of the company.
In fact, combining the personality assessment results with other elements like the CV and interviews significantly improves the quality of the candidate selection and provides you deep insights and reliable data that can support your decisions, so that you choose the right people for your company.
However, you must keep in mind that it is also positive to embrace new ideas and improve your company culture. The way to do it is by assembling a diverse workforce and embracing a work environment that welcomes and encourages creativity and new ways of thinking.
This means that a candidate that is a good fit shouldn't be a mere replica of your current employees. Actually, including a somewhat culturally distinct people to your team can definitely strengthen your company culture and increase your team's performance.
Skeeled offers you the perfect opportunity to bring innovation and digitalisation to your hiring. Check our website or our LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook pages for further information.
Thanks for reading and see you next time!
Your team here at skeeled
