Culture, culture, culture.
While a company’s outward-facing brand – the mission, vision and values – has traditionally taken up marketing’s focus, businesses have been increasingly looking inwardly at their internal culture over the last decade.
And not without reason. A great internal culture helps businesses attract and retain great talent – people want to work for companies that invest in them. Beyond that, it feeds into the overall brand equity of a business, improves productivity (one study found happy employees are 20% more productive than unhappy ones), and adds value to companies if they decide to sell up.
It’s no surprise, then, to see businesses looking for new employees that are a great cultural fit, often over candidates with many years of experience under their belt. One way to ascertain cultural fit is through personality testing. We caught up with Heikki Karimaa, the Customer Executive for Criterion, our psychometric testing partner, to assess the value of cultural fit for new employees and businesses themselves, and to learn how psychometrics can unearth opportunities to fill roles with the right people.
It starts with business culture
The role of culture in recruitment consists of two key factors: one, the internal culture of each business, and two, recruiting the right candidates that will fit into this business. The better you understand the former, the more accurately you can do the latter.
The trouble is, as Heikki notes, many businesses don’t have a grip on their culture at all. “Every company has a culture”, he says. “But the question is whether the culture they believe they have is a reality.
“When a company starts out – in the startup phase when everyone’s in the same room – culture is easy. But when it grows, you have to manage the culture. If you want it to help people perform, you need to know what the culture is all about. Companies are now waking up to the fact that the culture is more than just the values of the company, or the words on the website which no-one has read for the last six months.”
Psychometric testing can help to uncover the truth of a company culture in a way that questionnaires can’t. Why? Because people don’t say what they think. New York Times columnist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz demonstrates this brilliantly in his book, Everybody Lies.
Psychometric testing can cut through accepted wisdom and get to the heart of a company’s culture. “A helpful exercise is to ask people what they think the company culture is,” Heikki says, “then assess them using the testing to see what they’re like. Do people’s personalities and abilities correlate with what the management says the culture should be and is?
“If you’re lucky you’ll have a strong culture, and employees live and breathe it. If your stated values and culture don’t marry with the people that work within it, you need to work hard to manage the culture properly.”
One area of focus should be your recruitment process.
Introducing culture into the recruitment process
Traditionally when recruiting, particularly in IT fields, businesses and hiring managers have been heavily focused on skills and experience. 20 years in a job, in our minds, demonstrates a deep knowledge and understanding of an industry, sector or specific role. The trouble today, when technology and IT move so quickly, is that the knowledge of 20 years ago is not the knowledge needed today. It’s virtually impossible to find someone with all the skills and experiences you need.
“Solely looking at experience as a sign of something valuable is a mistake.”
It’s one of the reasons Heikki thinks experience is somewhat overrated in recruitment: “Firstly, I should be clear that experience is a wonderful thing”, he tells us. “But solely looking at experience as a sign of something valuable is a mistake. If you’ve leveraged your experience, learnt and grown, of course that’s invaluable. If you’ve just ‘been around’, not so much.
“A lot of jobs where you have previously required experience don’t really require experience to get them. The reason I’m saying it’s overrated is because it’s overused. And the reason it’s overused is because it’s incredibly easy to assess. You can see from people’s CVs how many years they worked somewhere.”
“If you’ve been around and you’ve consistently applied yourself, you are showcasing more than just experience, you’re showcasing a mindset that a lot of people would find attractive. But that’s a cultural thing – a mindset or soft skill – that goes beyond just experience.”
Understanding the right characters that will contribute to the workplace are essential.
In our 2017 interview, Joe Luong, co-founder of Crypta Labs – a security startup developing a quantum-based encryption to secure the Internet of Things – touched on the issue: “I’m not necessarily looking for the main expertise [of a candidate]. I’m also looking for people who have got cultural values that are aligned with ours. That’s incredibly important with a startup, because the goals keep shifting all the time – but the goals can also be met very quickly. Flexibility, adaptability and focus are key for me. In many ways it’s contradictory because you need to be focused on the right thing, but you also need the ability to be a generalist, to understand the ecosystem and adapt to it.”
In short, they need adaptable people, and people that can work together as a team to get the right results. This isn’t people with every single answer, not people with the requisite experience or knowledge. What Joe was looking for were people with inquisitive minds, a flexibility and collaborative natures. And while technical knowledge is paramount in a space as new as quantum cryptography, it’s the mindset and culture that were – and still are – important to him.
A person could have all the technical knowledge and experience in the world, but without a collaborative or problem-solving mindset, they would be a bad fit.
What isn’t cultural fit?
“There have been some critical statements towards recruiting on cultural fit,” Heikki says, “but most are borne out of the common misconception that cultural fit means hiring people ‘exactly like us’. That’s a misunderstanding of how cultural fit works. Cultural fit comes in understanding the key things that make your business tick – those values that make your business special. Then it means hiring people that meet these criteria. The people themselves, of course, can be completely different”.
In many ways, this ‘people like us’ paradigm is more of an issue for the old ways of working. Psychologically, we are automatically drawn to people like us; we have bias in all of us. We marry people like us, we are friends with people like us, and, when we’re in an interview situation, we warm to people like us. Psychometric testing puts safety measures in place, ensuring we don’t simply look at carbon copies of existing employees to fill the roles, and instead look for the real best fit for the team and the business.
“I’m not saying get rid of interviews at all”, says Heikki. “What I’m saying is to use the results of tests to structure interviews and improve them depending on the candidate.
“Psychometrics aren’t, and will never be, a replacement for an interview, of course, so that bias will still be there. As a tool, though, they allow interviewers to shape their interview, tailoring it to each individual to see how they will perform in the role itself.”
In summary
Work has changed significantly over the past two decades. Employees are asking more from their employers, and expect certain benefits from them that go beyond the quarterly bonus. As Hekki tells us: “We’re not just working for the sake of work any more, it’s part of our lives and we want to fulfil ourselves in work as well as out of it.
“Companies are experiencing high competition and they need to be able to get the most out of their people. They’re also becoming acutely aware of the cost of bad recruitment. The traditional strategy of getting bums on seats or hiring specific skill sets doesn’t necessarily work for either party. In general, we are becoming more aware of just how much it matters to hire people that fit in the family.”
Google became famous for their employee-first approach to culture, providing perks that no other business would offer, investing heavily in incredible offices, creative spaces and whatever else you can think of. In some ways, this is almost now a cliché, with actual culture replaced by a couple of bean bags and a table tennis table.
In a fantastic LinkedIn rant, content creator Dan Kelsall spells out the issue: “You can’t cover up a shitty company culture by putting a fucking beanbag in the corner, or having a DJ on Friday afternoons.
“Sticking a film on, on Valentine’s Day, so that you can plaster your social media with ‘Look how fun it is to work here’ posts, doesn’t hide the fact that loads of your staff fall asleep at night to dreams of your management team being hit by a bus.”
An authentic company culture can attract and retain talent, can foster a common belief and can accelerate business growth. On the flip side, if you hire on bias, if you fake a culture that doesn’t exist, and if you bring in the wrong staff for the business, the results can be equally dramatic. Psychometrics can help determine who’s right for you. Without it, you’re playing roulette.
