The candidates that emerge as the best one for a position you’re filling may not be the best option after all. If you based your decision on the curriculum vitae alone, you will hire the most qualified one in terms of academic achievements and work experience. What you cannot see in one’s resume is if this person is someone who’s going to fit in your organization nicely.
Clan Culture
The types of corporate culture include the clan culture, market culture, hierarchy culture, and culture. Clan culture is when the organization acts like a family. They thrive in collaborating, and they have strong bonds of loyalty, tradition, and commonality.
Adhocracy Culture
Adhocracy culture came from the root word ad hoc. You’ll mostly see this in tech companies like Facebook. These companies must stay nimble. They are innovating nonstop. This is an environment where the leaders are seen as inspirational figures rather than authority figures.
Market Culture
The two most popular companies with a market culture are Jeff Bezos’ Amazon and Apple during the time of the late Steve Jobs. These organizations want to make as much profit as they can. The purpose is to get as much work as possible. They want to get down to business and achieve results.
A company with a market culture has a competitive environment. Employees want to be better than their colleagues because of opportunities for promotions. The culture trickles down from the leaders — Bezos and Jobs — down to the last employees on the payroll.
Hierarchy Culture
In this type of corporate culture, leaders are going to monitor and facilitate adherence to office policies. Most government organizations follow a hierarchy, as well as organizations concerned with workers’ safety such as aviation and health care. The purpose of this type of culture is to minimize mistakes and to strengthen accountability.
Every business has a different culture. Even within the same industry, the food and coffee sectors have different organizational cultures. A fried chicken restaurant business franchise usually has a clan culture. The employees treat each other as family. They hang around in the break room and invite each other to their kids’ birthday parties.
In a coffee shop, the culture is a mix of clan and adhocracy. They treat one another as family, yes, but they are also modern and innovative. They get inspiration from their leaders about life and work.
Determine Your Organizational Culture
How can you find the right candidate for a job if you don’t understand the culture in your company as well? Be observant and find out what kind of relationship you have with your employees. See to it that you also identify key relationships, hierarchies, and politics among your employees. A thorough understanding of your own corporate culture will create more opportunities for you to hire the right people.
Draft the Interview Questions
You cannot hire a person without an in-person interview. Or, at least, try to do one virtually. List down a series of guide questions that will allow you to take a peek into the candidate’s personality. During the interview, aim to understand what the candidate’s aspirations are. This will help you see if their future goals fit your own goals in the company.
Stop Focusing on the Past
While their behavior and work ethic in the past are important determinants to whether or not you should hire them, don’t hyper-focus on them. Otherwise, you will end up hiring or rejecting a candidate based on something in their past. Shouldn’t you look to the future instead? Try to find out how they will react to certain scenarios. Give them problems to solve and see how they react.
Go Beyond Face-to-face Interviews
Personality tests and skills-based questionnaires are scientific- and evidence-based methods to determine if a candidate’s personality fits your organization’s culture. These tools are a more well-rounded approach to measuring a candidate’s skills vis-à-vis what you are looking for. Some people are great with interviews. They know how to speak and what the potential employer wants to hear.
Work With Them First
Wouldn’t it be great to test out the candidate first before you hire them? You are going to invest in them by hiring them. You are going to compensate them with salaries, insurance, and other benefits. Try to put them in a business scenario where they can show you their skills in problem-solving, communication, process, work ethic, and teamwork style. Seeing them fit right in with your other team members is going to help you determine whether to hire them or not.
There is no exact formula on how to hire the right person for a job. It takes years of experience before you can develop the “eye” to assessing the candidate correctly. So, in the end, it matters to spend as much time deliberating (you can include the rest of the team, too) before finally hiring someone.
