How to hire for a person/culture fit

Research shows that when people fit in the culture of the organization in which they work, they are happier, more engaged, more productive and they provide better service. Angelo Kinicki, the Weatherup/Overby Chair in Leadership at the W. P. Carey School of Business, describes a hiring process that will help you hire people with the personality and values that fit with your company culture. This podcast is brought to you by Business to Go, a podcast series produced at the W. P. Carey School of Business: knowledge and skills you can put to work today in your business and career.

Research shows that when people fit in the culture of the organization in which they work, they are happier, more engaged, more productive and they provide better service. Angelo Kinicki, the Weatherup/Overby Chair in Leadership at the W. P. Carey School of Business, describes a hiring process that will help you hire people with the personality and values that fit with your company culture.

This podcast is brought to you by Business to Go, a podcast series produced at the W. P. Carey School of Business: knowledge and skills you can put to work today in your business and career.

Transcript:

Hello, this is Angelo Kinicki. I’m a professor and the Weatherup/Overby Chair in Leadership at the W. P. Carey School of Business. I want to talk to you briefly about how to hire for a person/culture fit. Now this is a very important issue because research shows that when people fit in the culture of the organization in which they work, they are happier, more engaged, more productive and they provide better service.

That’s why it’s important. How can you hire for a person who fits? First off, [as you learned from] the previous podcasts on what culture is, you need to know what is the culture that you desire and that culture needs to be specific with the strategy. Now let’s assume we know the desired culture. For point of example, let’s say you want a culture that’s very collaborative.

Okay, once you know that, the next thing you have to do is in the selection process, you have to generate questions or give candidates some sort of employment test that assesses the extent to which that person is collaborative. Let’s just take asking questions. If you want to know whether a person is collaborative, you might ask questions like: Hey, tell me about a project team that you worked on and what the relationships were like.

You might ask: Tell me about a time they were working on a team and there was conflict. Who resolved it? How did they do it? You might ask: Tell me what team sports you participated in, and then listen to whether they participated in individual sports, like golf and wrestling, versus team sports that consist of a group of people working together.

The next thing you can do is this: if you know, for example, you want a collaborative culture, and we know that culture is a function of beliefs, ask the person some questions about beliefs. For example, you might say: So do you believe that competition is better than collaboration? Do you believe that sometimes when working with others you have to let them have their way?

In other words, you have to generate behavioral-based questions that tap the cultural characteristics that you’re interested in. I think you’ll find if you take a little bit of time to think about those behavioral questions, you’ll find that you will hire people who are more consistent with the culture, they’ll stay longer, they’ll be more productive and everybody wins.