As the business landscape continuously evolves, hiring people with years of experience and the right attitude is no longer enough. To ensure that your hiring process stays relevant and your business remains successful, you need to look for individuals who fit your company culture.
The idea of looking into how ‘culturally fit’ an applicant is to the business might seem new but is essential to scale and improve the business. Diversity is always important in the workplace, but too much of it—to the point where efforts no longer align with the business’s objectives—can result in friction and prevent the business from growing.
What Is Cultural Fit?
Before defining what is a cultural fit, it’s necessary to understand what company culture is in the first place. Company culture refers to the set of attitudes and behaviors of the company. It’s how the people in that business do what they do in the workplace.
Corporate culture varies from one business to another. While some businesses prioritize creating a positive culture of mentoring and leadership, others spend more resources in creating a company culture that’s centered on passion.
Hiring for culture fit involves bringing employees whose behaviors, beliefs, and values align with the company. It’s essential to include cultural fit during hiring because it helps the business access different experiences and perspectives from individuals.
Hiring someone who’s a great cultural fit is based on the fact that the person feels connected to the values set by the business. New hires who are culturally fit are more likely to thrive because they feel they belong.
Why Is Cultural Fit Important In Hiring?
Aside from investing in recruitment tools, such as Innovex Global, and implementing tried and tested recruitment strategies, how culturally fit an applicant is should also be considered when hiring. It should make or break a recruiter’s decision on who to hire. Hiring for cultural fit is necessary because of the following reasons:
1. Increases Employee Retention
Hiring employees repeatedly might be costly for your business. Statistics show that, on average, businesses spend 30 days and USD$4,129 to hire an employee. It still doesn’t include the resources that the HR department has to spend to train them.
Also, it can increase employee retention, allowing your business to save resources on recruitment and onboarding. When you hire someone culturally fit for your business, they’ll be satisfied with their position and the culture they are exposed to every single day. As a result, the employee will be motivated to stay with the company for years.
2. Guarantees High-Level Performance
Hiring the best talents isn’t enough for your business to thrive and survive. You need to ensure that your employees perform well on the job. How can you achieve short- and long-term goals if your best talents are slacking off? Do you think your business can stand out from the competition if your employees have been producing mediocre outputs?
Someone who’s culturally fit for your business will feel that they belong and will possess the enthusiasm to work and even go beyond the extra mile. Hiring for cultural fit means welcoming individuals who are ready and willing to take on new challenges and responsibilities associated with their position. Over time, this behavior will produce high-level performance from your workforce.
3. Creates A More Positive Work Environment
The working environment your business has doesn’t only affect your employees’ morale; it can also impact your branding. A negative work environment will likely cause your employees to lose motivation to work. They will talk about their experience to their friends and families and can put your business in a bad light.
None of these things will happen when you hire someone as culturally fit. When you only welcome individuals whose values and behaviors match your company, you’ll have peace of mind knowing that your work environment stays the same: positive and aspiring.
Culturally fit individuals will not bring any negative attitude or create a negative work environment. On the contrary, they’ll support whatever company culture has been set and advocate it to their social circle.
4. Enhances Collaboration
The maxim that states, ‘Two heads are better than one’ remains true in the business setup. When employees work together, they can come up with better ideas and resolve conflicts faster. Collaboration also improves the communication of the business and its daily processes.
Collaborating with colleagues will come off easier when you focus on cultural fit during recruitment. Individuals who share the same mission and vision as the company can easily work together and form better teams. When all of your employees are culturally fit, they’ll have a common ground (which is the culture of the company), making it very easy for them to work together.
Collaboration eventually breeds innovation. When collaboration becomes innate to all of your employees, they can develop innovative strategies, which can help your business adapt to the trends in the industry.
5. Lowers Stress Levels
Stress is common when working. However, too much of it can adversely affect the morale of the entire workforce. When this happens, the business can no longer stay productive and will eventually lose money.
Hiring for cultural fit will lessen stress levels in the workplace as you won’t have employees who have weak morale or low productivity. Employees who aren’t fit to your company culture will likely feel stressed and anxious about their job performance, unmanageable workloads, and unaddressed issues between their colleagues. Having this kind of behavior or mindset can be contagious and can cause stress to high-performing employees.
Ensure that your workplace remains stress-free by hiring individuals who are culturally fit. The dynamics of your new hires can affect the dynamics of your existing employees, so make careful decisions when hiring.
Improve Your Existing Recruitment Strategy
As you can see, hiring culturally fit individuals is an important component of your business’s long-term success. If you’re still using traditional recruitment strategies—ones that only look into the experience and attitude of the candidates—make necessary adjustments right away. Ensure that your company culture is part of your recruitment—from job descriptions, interview questions to the onboarding. You can easily identify a culturally fit applicant when your company culture is highlighted throughout the recruitment process.
