Company culture highly matters. Here's why.

Apart from skills, knowledge, experience and an educational background related to the job role, that are important parameters for hiring new employees, another important aspect is a candidate’s match to the company’s culture. A number of organizations fail to understand the importance of employee-company culture fit, which affects both, the organization and the employees.

The Harvard Business Review highlights strategy and culture as key to an efficient organization. Strategy offers a formal logic for the company’s goals and orients people around them. Culture is what expresses goals through values and beliefs. Culture guides activities through shared assumptions and norms. Company culture is simply defined as the environment in which employees work. It includes a number of elements, including work environment, mission, values, ethics, expectations and goals.

It is important for organizations to find employees that believe in the company’s values, ethics, goals and mission – its culture. Once a company defines its culture, all the departments of the company, including HR mechanisms and recruitment processes need to be aligned with the company’s culture. However, it is not only important for job seekers to align themselves and fit into a company’s culture. Today, equally important is the need for companies to align their culture to the new generation of employees – the millennials. Jim Clifton, chairman and CEO of Gallup mentions six functional changes in the organizational culture that can help companies attract the millennial generation.

• Millennials work for a purpose, not just for money. They want to work for organizations that have a clear vision and a larger mission. Organizations must emphasize their company purpose.

• Companies that give importance to employee development attract millennials. Organizations in which employees have a scope to grow their skillset and career are more likely to have engaged staff that will stay with the company for a longer duration.

• The new generation of employees prefers to work in organizations where they have a better scope for learning. The millennials do not want bosses; they want coaches that will help them grow.

But why is company-employee fit so important? Simply, because hiring the wrong person or the person not fit for the role or the organization has a number of dangers. A mismatched hire can adversely affect the organization’s reputation, performance and success. In today’s competitive, global business environment, organizations that fail to bring together a strong workforce often get left behind and struggle to stay afloat. The values and characteristics of an organization’s culture should be reflected in its richly diverse workforce.

1. Hiring employees that don't fit well with the company culture leads to poor work quality, lack of engagement with work, decreased job satisfaction and a potentially toxic environment. This affects an organization in a number of ways including its turnover.

2.  Hiring employees that match well with the company’s culture, will lead to employees having greater job satisfaction and are more likely to remain with the organization in the long term, perform well, and add to the company’s success.

So what are the factors and tools involved in finding this perfect organization-employee match?

Interview process

The interview process is an ideal way of assessing and gauging a candidate’s capabilities. Although this depends on how good the interviewer is at evaluating people. Most organizations that follow strict hiring processes have several rounds of interviews with different members of the organization. Following which some organizations include background verification as part of the process.

Background screening

Most organizations hire external agencies to run background checks on candidates before taking them onboard. The background verification process addresses various avenues of risk related to different job roles that the companies are hiring for. They assure organizations of the genuineness of the employees that they are about to hire. Background verification agencies offer customized solutions to specific company requirements. A number of checks such as criminal records check, drug abuse check, global database check, education and employment verification, and professional reference check can reveal aspects of a candidate’s personality that can help organizations assess if the candidates fit their company culture.

Hence, a combination of a thorough interview process and efficient background verification process is an ideal and safe method of hiring new candidates. It ensures a fruitful future for the organization, one that saves time and money and ensures success.

Strategy and culture: https://hbr.org/2018/01/the-culture-factor

Six functional changes: https://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL=https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinecomaford/2016/05/14/got-millennials-heres-the-culture-they-need/2/&refURL=https://www.google.com/&referrer=https://www.google.com/