Would you choose a candidate who 100% matches the skills and experience you’re looking for but only aligns with your company culture and personality fit by 70-80%?
Or would you prefer someone who’s a perfect fit for company culture and personality-wise, even if they didn’t fully match the skills and experience you’re looking for?
Or perhaps the question should be, do you hire based on what a candidate can do? Or who a candidate is and what they could do?
I remember helping an agency with a very senior hire many years ago, and they had a candidate who 100% matched the skills and experience they were looking for, but I advised them the candidate was a long way from a culture and personality fit for the agency. They went ahead anyway with hiring the candidate as they felt it would be fine because of their skills and experience. Three months later I received an email from the MD saying “Phil, you were right, they just didn’t fit into our culture, in future we’ll give far more focus to culture and personality fit”
– Ultimately skills can be developed and evolved over time. Given the rapid pace of industry changes, some specific skills become obsolete anyway depending on the role.
– However, personality and how that person influences your company culture, is much more challenging to change.
– Of course, some skills are non-negotiable but if you focus purely on finding the candidate who can do it all, you might overlook individuals that could make a huge impact to your team and business, through their personality and culture fit, and their medium to long term potential. It doesn’t always have to be about finding unicorns, as I often say, if you can find a horse with a great personality, maybe you can add the horn yourself? Or with the help of external training – there is so much skills training available for anyone within any creative or marketing role, we know lots of training providers for different skillsets and disciplines, just reach out if you’d like us to introduce you to anyone.
Remember, finding the right personality isn’t about cloning your existing people, its about adding to the culture and team dynamic with someone who brings something new to the table.
Ultimately why not shift the focus of your hiring of talent to personality and culture fit, allied with a stripped back, core set of essential skills, and see how that impacts your long-term hiring success?
But how do you assess your company culture and measure against it?
Make sure you track your key metrics – Retention Rates and Referrals, Turnover Rate, Engagement and Collaboration.
There are a variety of methods you can use to assess your company culture including Employee Surveys, Performance Management Tools, People Analytics Tools, Exit Interviews, Focus Groups and Organisational Assessment Systems such as an Organisational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI) or a Business Needs Scorecard. Through a combination of the above you’ll be able to build a clear picture of your company culture and then be able to hire against it, as well as being able to articulate it to potential new employees. Tools like Thomas Perform have been designed and built to enable employers to hire and keep the best people and are well worth considering further. Thomas have for over 40 years been developing people science that helps teams and businesses thrive, and it is something we’ve used for many years. We’ve conducted Personality Profiling of potential new additions through to Team Audits to more accurately understand the existing team in place, in order to find the best personality fit when adding to the team. Ultimately giving you a better understanding of yourself and your colleagues.
So, next time you’re hiring, have a think about whether you want to hire based on what the candidate has done previously? Or who the candidate is and what they could do?