From the time she was a young woman in the early part of the last century my aunt would cut items that she wanted to remember from the newspaper and put them under the glass of her bedroom vanity table. I don’t remember much about the room or other clippings, but I’ve never forgotten this, “Profit from the mistakes of others, you don’t have time to make them all yourself.” Valuable advice for people and companies.

Companies spend a good deal of time/energy/money studying and emulating best practices from corporate leaders which is good. But they might want to spend a bit of those resources profiting from the mistakes, especially in areas such as retention that may not be looked at as often. And not necessarily expert public study, but rather the totally subjective opinions of the people you hire—as well as the ones that you don’t!

Include conversations about previous employers’ cultures to your interviews. Find out what they liked and what they didn’t. What did their favorite managers do that turned them on? Off? What would they like in a culture? Be sure to draw out all the cultural information and opinions you can before you start talking about your culture, because you don’t want to put ideas/words in their mouths.

The information is useful in three ways:

• Individually, if the cultural things a candidate likes and wants aren’t supported by you/your company then the hire won’t work out long-term, and you should keep looking.
• Group-wise, tracking the likes/dislikes of all the people you interview offers an employee-eye view of what’s good and bad in cultures. This can help you hone your own culture to be more attractive—or at least warn you when you head down the wrong cultural path.
• Recruiting-wise, when multiple candidates say negative things about a company or manager you’ll be alerted to a good hunting ground for future recruiting.

So, is this kind of subjective, prejudiced information valid? Is it valuable? A resounding yes on both counts!

Unless, that is, you don’t value the opinions of the people who want to, or do, work for you.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 26th, 2006 at 9:23 pm and is filed under Business info, Culture, Hiring, Retention. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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