Have you heard that saying, “Hire for attitude and train for skills?” I agree with that premise.
Entrepreneurs are commonly described as risk-takers. I believe that business leaders should also vet their values against potential recruits.
It’s a risk worth taking, because you want to make sure those new employees can succeed in a culture that also works for them.
This way, too, you can use your company values as a recruiting tool to hire for attitude. A business can always train later for skills; but it’s much more difficult, if not impossible, to change someone’s attitude to fit your culture.
The word ‘culture’ is frequently referenced in business writings and discussions about the workplace. To me, culture is nothing but a system of values. So when you set out to recruit employees, you want to analyze their values and essentially test them against whatever cultural values you have in place.
You may have heard this too: “The best sales job I ever did was the one I used when I got ‘such and such’ a job.” In other words, job applicants are usually motivated to put their best foot forward and say all the right things, etc. Everyone understands this, so recruiters have to dig deep in order to examine an individual job applicant’s values, to make sure that they are a fit for ‘being on the bus,’ if you will.
Here are a few pointers for following-up and vetting your company values against potential recruits:
- Make sure you can define it. If you can’t define it, then you can’t measure it. Then, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. It’s surprising to me how many employers today cannot even tell you what their values are; they might stumble around and try to explain. But if you ask them to put it in writing—in clear, defining statements—they may fall short. So make sure that you can define at least four to five really solid values that your company espouses to live by. And utilize those values in the same ways that you, as a person, would live out your own personal values.
- Leverage your recruiting tools, such as cognitive testing and/or personality profiling. These recruiting evaluations can help you make sure an applicant fits the job. For example, one of our testing formats gives applicants opportunities to choose from 25 stated values. Applicants are asked to pick out their top five from that list. We can then look to see if they have selected at least two to three values from that top five; ones that are aligned with our company values. This assessment process gives us a good idea of who would be a good fit for our company, and it works for us.
- Distinguish the differences between attitude and values. When you’re talking about attitude, you’re thinking more about how people show up at the office or the workplace. When you’re talking about values, you’re thinking more about how people make decisions. Simply put: You can have someone in the workplace who is very likeable, but who, unfortunately, cannot make the right decisions. It’s an important distinction.
In closing, here is a brief example of how this process can work in an actual recruiting setting.
We recently hired a director of sales, and it was a very competitive interviewing process. This position is a high profile one in our organization, and, at the end of the day, the values assessment and measurement actually were the deciding factors between the final two candidates.
It ultimately boiled down to who of the two candidates most closely aligned to our values, and the final selection has turned out to be an excellent fit within our organization.
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