Culture is king, so why doesn’t recruitment reflect that?

Candidate fit sets the foundations for an engaged and productive workforce, yet most organisations don’t screen for culture.

Everyone knows culture is all-important, but most recruitment processes don’t reflect that. In fact, the typical organisation’s hiring process would make you think that culture fit is an afterthought – a tiebreaker that’s only used to distinguish between the final candidates rather than informing upfront who should be a top candidate. How did we get here, and what should we do to turn it around?

A history of bad practice

With the ever-increasing pace of change, for many organisations your only true competitive business advantage lies with your organisation’s culture and the human element that drives it. This thinking is not radical; research from Deloitte shows that 94 per cent of executives and 88 percent of employees say a “distinct workplace culture is important to business success”.

But as much as leaders see the benefits of a great company culture, this doesn’t extend to incorporating cultural fit at the very beginning of the hiring process. We’re stuck in the past where shortlisting candidates is based on the data in their resumes.

In one view, this is understandable. Gartner research shows managers are time poor and the average time to hire has increased significantly to 72 days since 2018, hence, there is a lot of pressure put on screening and shortlisting.

This has driven the significant innovation and proliferation of recruitment technology in the last twenty years. Most of these tools essentially filter candidates via keywords, check boxes, and knock-out questions. Many of these solutions are purely systems of record, process or data storage solutions. They are not designed to be intelligent, decision-optimisation platforms.

With HR in the habit of shortlisting based on resumes, the initial cull of applicants is too simplistic. There is no objective and deep understanding of the candidates work behaviours and preferences, or their alignment with the company’s purpose and values. If you have bad data in, there will be bad data out. Improving the quality of the steps that follow after the initial screening is not enough because you may already have lost the best candidates.

Combine flawed screening with the risky belief that you can match candidates to your unique company culture at the end of the hiring process and you have a real problem. The thing is, you can train someone to have the right technical skills, or you can send them on a course to get the right qualifications, but it’s an uphill battle to change a person’s attitudes, values, and job motivation so that they are the right fit for your company and its culture.