Culture puzzle graphicWhen making a hiring decision, assessing cultural fit is as important as a candidate’s functional skills and industry experience. You want to hire a candidate who will be able to conform and adapt to the core values and collective behaviors that make up your organization. Although cultural fit can be hard to truly define, it is easy to tell when it’s missing.

Research has shown that employees who fit well into their companies have great job satisfaction, perform better and are more likely to remain with the same organization for a longer period of time. According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the result of poor cultural fit will result in turnover that can cost a company between 50-60 percent of the employee’s annual salary. Before you begin the executive search process, make sure you clearly define and articulate your organization’s culture that connects back to your core values. Express it in all of your communication materials, including recruiting tools, job postings and your website, and share it multiple times.

Interviewing for Cultural Fit

Many cultural attributes are behaviorally based so structure interviews with behavioral questions to help properly assess cultural fit. Executive search firms can design questions that require candidates to demonstrate how they deal with uncertainty, solve problems and approach new challenges. Certain questions can also elicit information from the candidate’s past job experience. The right questions will help you hone in on what type of culture the potential candidate thrives in, their work ethic, their ideal work environment and their beliefs and attitudes. Of course, the candidate must exhibit both the necessary qualifications to perform the job and the essential fit needed to work effectively within the existing organization.

The goal is to identify and hire candidates that are a “perfect fit,” those whose skills and attributes match the job competencies as well as your organization’s core values. This doesn’t mean hiring people who are all the same. The values and attributes that make up company culture should be reflected in a richly diverse workforce.

Keep in mind that savvy candidates are evaluating your company’s culture as much as you are evaluating how well they fit into it. Be prepared to answer their questions about your culture, such as, “What attributes do your top performers have in common?” Candidates want to know if they fit into your culture and if so, they want to be considered a top performer.

If you’re partnering with an executive search firm to find your ideal candidate, choose an organization that uses competency-based behavioral interviews to determine the candidate’s cultural fit within your business environment. This will ensure you’re looking beyond their functional skills and industry experience listed on their resume, and hiring an employee with the best combination of soft skills, personal characteristics and behavioral competencies; an ideal employee who will rise to the next level and make a major impact on your company’s performance while being happily employed for a long period of time