Hiring to match your corporate culture
by Miki SaxonImage credit: mzacha CC license
Do you use Google Alerts? I do and one of mine is for ‘corporate culture’. Friday listed a title so intriguing that I just had to click on it.
What caught my eye was Mel Lester’s Natural Selection vs. Intelligent Design on E-Quip Blog—remember that this was an alert for corporate culture.
So I clicked over (and highly recommend that you do,too) and found an excellent article propounding that corporate culture is formed in one of three ways—
- accidentally, through unconnected, random circumstances;
- by intentional design; or by a
- combination of the two he calls “natural selection”.
Over the last decade or so, corporate culture has gone from intangible, smoke-and-mirrors, touch-feely consultant talk to a recognized, dominant factor in corporate success.
“Harvard business professors John Kotter and John Heskett have conducted some of the most extensive research on this subject. They found that firms with a strong (deliberate) culture built upon a foundation of shared values outperformed other firms by a large margin:
- Their revenue grew more than 4x faster
- Their rate of job creation was 7x higher
- Their stock price grew 12x faster
- Their profit performance was 750% higher”
Mel explains each one, so I don’t have to and then goes on to talk list six steps to create your corporate culture.
- Assess your current culture
- Fortify your company values
- Align strategy with your culture, or visa verse
- Commit to regular communication
- Take steps to promote a sense of community
- Hire for cultural fit (this is critical!)
Good stuff, but exactly how do you hire for cultural fit?
I first wrote about using your culture to screen candidates in 1999 for the MSDN ISV Program Newsletter and have republished several times since then, most recently in response to Guy Kawasaki’s comments about Bob Sutton’s book The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t.
Read Screen out turkeys, jerks and a**holes and if you have any questions, or want some help doing it, give me a call at 866.265.7267 between 8 am and 11 pm Pacific time. (Calls are better, email can get blocked by filters.)
And NO charge—I do it for fun.
