Culture fit assessments - adding to the Search Firm offering
25/02/2010, Author: Ruth Williams
We all know that the relationship between the individual and the company is crucial; however, experience and qualifications often fall short of capturing that more illusive match between the company culture and the personality of the individual that really drives the success of a new recruit. This can pose a problem for companies whose service offering is judged on the quality of potential candidates they present to their clients, such as search firms and recruitment agents.
So how can these organisations get smarter about how they identify potential candidates? And how can they ensure candidates are not put forward for a role within an organisation which doesn’t suite their cultural and motivational preferences? Poor fit often means the candidate is unhappy working for the organisation, resulting in low motivation, engagement and retention.
The business media is increasingly drawing greater attention to the area of culture-fit assessment and the research data continuously demonstrates the strength of personality measures in predicting great performance. This means company leaders now frequently view a measure of culture-fit as being a valuable part of any contemporary search organisation’s offering.
So how can Search Organisations embed values-based assessment as a standard offering?
1. Find out about and build a picture of the values and culture of their client companies. Talk about what differentiators and idiosyncrasies define culture in their organisation and why.
2. Using this understanding, design a bespoke personality questionnaire using an online assessment tool such as Coast (the latest online innovations make this process really easy).
3. Ask candidates to complete this questionnaire (ideally at the sift stage) when applying for a vacancy within this company.
4. Use online functionality that enables you to easily match candidates against the ideal picture of personality for your client organisation and generate relevant reports. This information can be used as part of the sift and also in later stages of the process.
5. Encourage the organisation to use the findings from the questionnaire in the later stages of the recruitment process, referring to them during the interview and assessment centre if appropriate. This adds great value and insight and significantly improves the decision.
To give but one example of its success, British Gas have observed a 55% increase in the approval scores of line managers and departmental recruiters in regards to their new recruits following the introduction of values-based assessment. Adding this as a service offering is likely to help search organisations gain some even more satisfied customers.
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