Looking for a new person to hire? Follow these tips to find the best fit for your company culture.
“Great employees possess qualities such as talent, drive, flexibility, and personality. Finding and hiring the best people—who have the right combination of these qualities—can be a complicated process.”- Paul Jun, marketer at Help Scout.
Finding the perfect way to create culture within your company and then hiring for that is nothing if not tough and people mess up as much as they get it right. That said, try these easy fixes to get more people who match your company goals and fit right in!
1: Watch your tone…
In your job ads. Your job ad is the first thing a prospective applicant sees, which means it should reflect your company to a T. If your company is casual and relaxed, then a stiffly worded list of job responsibilities is going to attract the wrong kind of person. We know that job advertisement messaging can attract more men than women since women only respond to job ads if they’re 100% qualified, and the simple act of including compensation can increase clicks on your job by a factor of 8.
“With a properly worded job description, you’ll benefit from having fewer applicants to consider and more high-quality applicants in the pipeline, allowing you to spend less time on the hiring process and more time on your day-to-day operations.”- Wade Foster, Co-founder & CEO at Zapier
Wade couldn’t have said it any better. When you put out your job ad, use the general tone of the company as the voice in your writing. Whether your company is a little more laid back or buttoned up, convey that tone in your ad. This will give job seekers great insight into what your company is looking for.
Next Step: Once you do attract a potential employee, make sure you reply in a timely manner. Nothing deters new talent more than not responding in a timely matter or worse yet, not at all. You can even include your typical response time in your automated response or on your candidate FAQ page on your career site. Enlist in the help of an onboarding software that streamlines communication with candidates. Sign up for a one-on-one demo to see how Click Boarding can help you do just that!
2: Really pay attention during the interviewing process
This is simple, but sometimes it’s easy to overlook an obvious character flaw because of a flashy resume with an impressive diploma.
Ask behavioral and situational questions, see how they would react in a difficult situation.
“It’s just as important to know how to grade the responses you get. Because what’s the point of giving a test, and interviewing is a test, if you don’t have an answer key that lets you accurately grade that test.”- Mark Murphy, Contributor at Forbes
When you ask behavioral and situational questions, truly look at how the potential employee answered. Did they exhibit certain emotions when they were describing a simple discrepancy in the workplace? How would they handle that same event in your office? Evaluate everything.
If you don’t hire someone that fits into the company culture, it can cost your company any where from 50-60% of the person’s annual salary.
Next Step: Consider personality assessments that gauge what a person’s work values actually are. These are difficult to “game” and create a picture of a client ahead of time.
3: Incorporate diversity
Incorporating diversity can either make or break your talent pool. Having technologically diverse and culturally diverse workforce can really set you apart from your competition.
“The key to understanding the positive influence of diversity is the concept of informational diversity. When people are brought together to solve problems in groups, they bring different information, opinions and perspectives.”- Rachel Miller, an engineer at Asana
In addition to problem solving diversity also gives you insight into various pockets of the markets you may not have even thought about. Joe Gerstandt recently said: “If you do not intentionally include, you will unintentionally exclude.” Only 57% of corporations indicated their organizations have HR staff conduct diversity training which means we’re not intentionally including.
Next Steps: While we all have our college recruiting program, start looking outside your standard comfort zone by targeting trade schools, technical institutes and even sourcing from professional communities like Behance, Quora and GitHub.
4: Look for positivity in potential employees
Attitude is everything. Attitude can make or break your workplace flow. If the majority of your office is positive, then the majority of your workplace is happy. What happens when a workplace is engaged? You get more productive employees. Happy doesn’t mean that every day is sunshine and unicorns but it does mean you have a workforce that can keep a positive attitude throughout tough times.
Yes it’s important to look for highly intelligent, sharp witted individuals, but is it not equally as important to look for positive uplifting employees that keep up company moral? Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to spot positivity in an interviewee. Beware those applicants where everyone else is at fault, or where they HATED their last job.
“I have found that people with a great attitude fly above the noise and refuse to be distracted by the pull of negative chatter. In many cases, their desire and focus to keep moving the bar can be contagious.”- Craig Cincotta, SVP & Head of Communications at Porch.com
Next Steps: Work hard to cultivate positivity in your current workforce and allow new applicants to see this when they walk in the door. Form an applicant welcome wagon who can be on alert for new interviewees when they walk in the door!
Now that you have an idea of how to hire quality employees that will fit in with your workplace culture, put yourself to the test. Review your onboarding process, fix the little tweaks, and get to talent searching! Don’t forget to sign up for a one-on-one demo of our employee onboarding software to see how you can make these practices even more successful.
