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Does Your Hiring Culture Fit Your Company Strategy

When you are looking for new talent, how does your company’s hiring culture influence your recruiting process?  There are several qualities that are traditionally given more importance than others. Some of these include good time management, solid work history, being a team player and showing an overall strong resume. However, with recruiting trends undergoing major changes over the last few years, there is a whole new set of critical qualities that are now considered equally important, regardless of which industry you belong to. Along with these trends, the way in which hiring teams sort and manage candidates has also changed.

How much does a candidate’s personality factor into the decision to hire one candidate over another? Does your company have a good hiring culture, a great hiring culture or is this something that is not given much attention? Is this type of candidate data easily accessible within your recruitment software?

We’ve put together a list of conflicting characteristics of potential new hires and business realities to help you manage the hiring process with a high level of efficiency. There are various ways to collect information and evaluate candidates in addition to a resume and traditional interview!

1. Style vs. Substance

When you meet a candidate, there are several factors that contribute to how effective you think this person would be if selected for the job. Is it what’s most obvious in the resume and what you see at the surface that impresses you most? Or is it what was revealed in answers to very directed questions or perhaps shared in a deeper conversation that had the most impact on your thinking about the candidate? Clearly, you are looking for someone who would be successful in your company’s work environment for the long-term. Many people and hiring managers make the mistake of making decisions solely on traits that may have little substance in the context of the job requirements they are hiring for.

However, it is also important to consider a candidate’s work style and methods! It can also be helpful to find a new team member to help a candidate mesh with the processes and people that you already have in place. Using modern recruiting technology will make sure that your team is able to track the right information about a candidate during the interview management process. Furthermore, the ability to scorecard candidate evaluations based on carefully selected criteria can help you pick the ones that are most suitable for your positions.

2. Reality vs. Resume

Embellishing a resume can be a serious issue when a new employee has claimed to have skills that they don’t have. Remember, however, that people today are trained to put very specific keywords on resumes so that they can stand out.

Does your hiring culture explore other aspects about potential hires that a resume may not disclose? Consider what you might look for that a resume isn’t telling you. A carefully created list of targeted questions can serve as a great way to do initial screening of incoming applications. Depending on how you craft your questions, you can bring out a lot of information that typical resumes and cover letters do not reveal. Simplicant’s powerful recruiting software takes it a step further by allowing you to assign scores to the answers that candidates provide to you questions.

3. Passion vs. Ambition

Ambitious employees, no doubt, play an important role in helping companies accomplish their goals and become successful. However, when looking for new team members, what other characteristics should a company look for when looking for ambitious individuals. It’s important to distinguish between candidates who are driven only by their desire to get a job or a title and those who are ambitions and also very passionate about the type of work that they will be doing if hired.

The interview process is a great opportunity for a company to get a more detailed understanding of what the selected candidates bring to the table. A collaborative hiring process enables your entire hiring team to easily get involved in the interview process and share their feedback and evaluations. This makes sure that a variety of comments, unstructured notes as well as structured evaluations are recorded and tracked in an organized way. With all information available in one place, decision-making is data-driven, swift aligned with your hiring culture.

4. Determined vs. Persistent

Does the position you are hiring for require the person to make quick decisions and get things done with minimum supervision?You are probably looking for someone who shows the determination to learn fast and wants to discuss “deliverables”. In addition to determination, however, you are also looking for someone who has the persistence to keep working with the same determination even in the face of challenges that may keep them from getting things done easily.

However, there should be a balance between being determined and persistent on the one hand and having the sense to work in a team environment. If your work environment is collaborative, you probably want people who are determined and persistent but also skillful at working with other team members as needed. This combination will certainly help them be more effective in getting things done.

Identifying such traits can sometimes take more than one interaction with the candidates. For such positions, you may consider presenting your top candidates with mock scenarios and then asking them directed questions to see how they would react to certain situations.

5. Independent vs. Team Oriented

Some people work really well in teams, while others do better on their own. Whether you are working with remote, spread-out teams or large groups that are co-located in the same office building, the ability to work well in a team environment is always important. However, certain positions may be more team-oriented than others. And for certain positions, it might be acceptable to have the new employee work mostly independently and submit their work by certain deadlines. In either case, a well-oiled interview management process and tracking of all necessary and relevant information from various members of the hiring team will shed more light on these characteristics. With Simplicant, when interviewers complete the scorecard evaluations for their respective interviewees, the information they provide can be used to quickly filter and sort through the specific type of candidates you are looking for.

6. Leader vs. Follower

These opposites depend greatly on the position you’re hiring for. Do you need someone who can take direction? Or, are you looking for someone to take the lead? How would you determine someone’s leadership ability or their ability to follow instructions? While specifically designed tests can help you get a good sense for what you are looking for, a lot of this can be determined and tracked during the interview process as well. Can your recruitment process track this information?

7. New Hiring Culture vs. Traditional Hiring Culture

The new hiring culture takes into consideration many different aspects of a candidate’s profile, while the traditional hiring culture relied too much on a person’s education and work history. Move ahead of the competition by creating a great hiring culture with the right applicant tracking system. Want to discuss this in more detail? Get a Simplicant Demo!

Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash