Making the right hire is critical to your team’s success. But how can you find the right candidate?
Although there are some benefits to hiring for culture fit, building a team too heavily based on it can result in competency gaps on your team. The solution is to balance hiring for JOB FIT with hiring employees who can add new competencies. This has been commonly referred to as CULTURE ADD.
When you are hiring for culture add, devote a round of interviews to measuring the way your candidates both align with your culture and add new competencies.
For example, you have a highly organized team – meaning that the members of your team are big into planning, preparation, timeliness, and categorization. Organization, then, is a big part of your team culture. If you set out to hire someone who adds the competency of creativity to the team, they must also be moderately strong in the competency of organization. Why? Because a new hire who is disorganized or who doesn’t value organization will struggle to succeed on a team that strongly values organization.
Steps to creating interview rounds for job fit and culture add
- Identify your team’s culture and find your gaps. In this example, the team culture is centered around organization and the gap is that you don’t have anyone strong in creativity.
- Create your own interview scorecard. OR
- Create your own custom interview Smart-Scorecard in the interviewIA platform. Do this in the “Builder” section.
- Focus about half of your questions on the strongest elements of your team’s culture (i.e., organization). You want to select candidates who share your culture. Search for questions that measure this competency. In the interviewIA platform, you can use the search term organization.
- The rest of the questions should focus on the gap you are trying to fill (i.e., creativity). Search for questions that measure this competency using the search term creativity.
Repeat this process for an interview focused on the candidate's job fit, or their ability to the job.
The idea here is that you never want to force opposites to work together. If you hire a candidate who differs from your current team in most ways, it will be hard for them to succeed in that role. However, if you find a candidate who overlaps with your current team in many of their values, they will be able to bring their new perspective onto the team in a productive way.
