Company culture: Why finding the right fit is important

It can be easy to look at a recruitment process from a cold, factual point of view. What qualifications do you want an applicant to have? What sort of experience fits the role in question? How much can you afford to pay your new recruits?

The truth is that an effective recruitment process is not about ensuring a candidate simply ticks a few boxes and meets a rigid criteria. It’s not like buying a piece of furniture, where the measurements need to match the space you have. When you employ a person you’re not simply tapping into their skills or experience – you’re investing in them as a person.

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That means that their character is particularly important. It’s one thing having skills and qualifications, it’s another entirely being able to put them to use in the right environment. The environment you foster in your company, whether you realise it or not, is at the heart of the culture you espouse when you do business. The values you hold, the way you want your employees to interact with one another – and with clients – and the goals and ambitions that you hold set a tone. A new employee needs to be able to understand that tone and be able to fit into that culture that comes from this.

The right employee will not be someone as rigid as that piece of furniture from the earlier analogy. Good recruitment will pinpoint someone with the ability to grow and thrive in their new role. It’s not just enough to ‘fit in’ to a culture – the best recruits contribute to that culture and help to shape it further as you develop as a company.

Here we can see that there are two key reasons as to why finding someone who is the ‘right fit’ is crucial. To unlock someone’s full potential they need to be in the right environment while, at the same time, for a business to flourish it needs employees who achieve that very goal. It’s a two-way relationship with the company’s culture at the centre of it.

Getting this right is, undoubtedly, not easy. That’s why many firms opt to employ the services of a recruitment specialist. Often these firms can be enlisted, for a fixed price, to take the whole process off a company’s hands. Such firms use experts in the required field to search out the right people, advertise in the right places and trawl through CV databases to come up with the solutions to this familiar conundrum. Of course, it’s important to focus on how to get this right but it’s probably worth reflecting on what might befall you if you don’t.

HR Review has published the details of a study that suggests it costs, on average, more than £30,000 to replace a staff member – largely due to the 28 weeks it takes a new recruit to reach maximum productivity. The methodology and the numbers can, of course, be debated – but the simple idea underpinning the study is a strong one. Getting recruitment wrong can cause a costly and lengthy process to fix. Getting it right is tough, but hugely beneficial.