Cultural screening still pays off
by Miki SaxonWith the national unemployment rate low, at 4.7 percent, and the Baby Boom generation heading into retirement, employers from Microsoft Corp. to rural hospitals are worrying about finding enough workers.
So is now the time to grab the talent when you find it and the heck with cultural fit and all that touchy-feely stuff? Bad idea. It still only takes one missed fit to stunt innovation, increase dissention, lower morale and undermine productivity and some companies are being more careful than ever.
Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier said, “We’d rather miss a good one than hire a bad one.”
Kris Thompson, vice president of human resources at Lindblad Expeditions, a 500-employee adventure cruise company, said, “You can teach people any technical skill, but you can’t teach them how to be a kindhearted, generous-minded person with an open spirit.”
At KaBoom, a nonprofit that builds playgrounds, the board was hammering co-founder and CEO
Darell Hammond four years ago over the organization’s high employee turnover. “I rationalized that they were on the road too much, when in reality, it was the wrong fit in the wrong role.”
These companies jump through hoops to turn people off, not on.
Rackspace – “They’re here for nine or ten hours,” Napier said. “We’re very cordial about it. We’re not aggressive, but we haven’t met a human being yet who has the stamina to BS us all day.”
Lindblad – It sends job applicants a DVD showing not one, but two shots of a crew member cleaning toilets. A dishwasher talks about washing 5,000 dishes in one day. “Be prepared to work your butt off,” another says. “It’s meant to scare you off,” company founder Sven Lindblad said. It does. After watching the DVD and hearing an unvarnished description of life onboard a Lindblad ship, the majority of applicants drop out, Thompson said.
KaBoom – sends prospective project managers to one of its four-day playground building trips, with the actual build on the last day involving 200 to 300 volunteers, many of whom have questions for KaBoom staff. “If they’re not easily approached, or they’re easily stressed—this is the way we find out and they find out if it’s not going to work.”
Having people who are synergistic with your culture won’t homogenize your organization. Culturally compatible doesn’t mean being identical any more than married couples are identical. It also has nothing to do with an organization’s diversity. If the team includes seven hard workers who take pride in being on time/in budget while the eighth member is a slacker who doesn’t care you’re going to have trouble sooner or later no matter how good the slacker’s skill set.
