Do Your Recruitment Practices Screen for Culture Fit–Part 5

Evaluate your recruitment practices

Do your recruitment practices—before and after the candidate interview– support the Core Culture?

What recruitment practices do you use to get applicants? And are those recruitment practices aligned with your Core Culture? For example, at the Whole Foods Market, one of their values is teamwork. The fundamental work unit is the self-directed team. Therefore, job fairs are generally staffed by the actual leadership that the new team members will be working with. Also, after the candidate interview, prospective employees have a four-week probation period where the team decides whether or not the applicant stays after that trial period. Their selection practices align with their culture of teamwork

Many companies have an initial phone conversation with the candidate to screen for the core values and evaluate how well informed the candidate is about the culture. Any aspects of the culture that would make the person feel like a mismatch should be communicated at this time. For example, if it’s a noisy workplace or a hierarchical workplace or whatever it’s like there, the applicant should know upfront to ensure time is not wasted on the part of the individual or the organization in the hiring process.

Southwest Airlines believes that behavior is the best predictor of behavior. Being a service leader, they want to hire people who naturally have that warm, friendly service attitude. When a candidate calls for an application, managers jot down anything memorable about the conversation. And when the company flies recruits for interviews, they receive special tickets, which alert gate agents and flight attendants to pay special attention to how they are behaving to determine whether the recruits are a natural fit for their service culture.

In the recruitment process, some companies have employees spend informal time with recruits in social settings like a meal or attending a company event. These informal settings are prime opportunities for evaluating for culture fit—both for the applicant and the company.

At Zappos.com, after a person is hired and at the end of the first week of training, the company offers the new employee $2,000 plus the time he or she worked to quit. And the offer continues until the end of the fourth week of training. They want only those people who love their culture to stay. Again, these selection practices are established to build a strong culture with employees whose values are aligned with the culture.

Giving applicants the opportunity to see the culture and understand the way things work in the organization offers applicants a way to screen the organization themselves.

[For continuation of Hiring for Culture Fit discussion, read the next post on topic: Part 6]