Give a Company Culture – The Unthinkable Approach to Hiring

It’s no secret that due to the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, the current job market in the United States is oversaturated with applicants. When faced with a stack of resumes, how does an employer choose an individual that would make the best hire? More importantly, how do you find the right person that will fit into your company culture?

Hiring is an investment, and like any other investment, it can nudge your company closer to the red or black of your balance sheet. If you don’t think the magnitude of even one bad hire is costly, consider these statistics:

• The U.S. Department of Labor’s study revealed that the cost of a bad hire can reach up to 30 percent of the employee’s first-year earnings.[i]
• SHRM reported the cost of recruiting, hiring and onboarding a new employee can be as much as $240,000 in expenses.
• According to Career Builder, nearly three out of every four employers are affected by a bad hires and companies lose an average of $14,900 on every bad hire.

Cost aside, bad hires can dramatically affect a company’s culture as well. The core values of your business can be misrepresented by a batch of bad hires (or bad employees), and the trickle-down effect from these individuals on your current employees is toxic and can lead to revenue loss. 

What Makes a Bad Hire?

How do you know if you’ve hired the right person? Better yet, how can I minimize hiring the wrong person?  In the Career Builder survey, almost one-third of the employers interviewed said they had a tough time finding the right employees. This is what they said about their bad hiring decisions: 

• 29 percent focused on the skill set of the applicant, not their attitude
• 25 percent ignored some of the warning signs
• 50 percent said that the worker did not work well with others

The Interview Model is Broken

The number one contributor to bad hiring decisions is that the traditional model for hiring just isn’t working anymore. Many interviewers’ questions are so benign and accommodating that they fail to uncover anything of substance about the applicant. The traditional job interview as it stands is a system that can be easily gamed. A potential hire can provide highly scripted and rehearsed responses to questions, ultimately modifying and possibly falsifying their image and performance to fit what an employer wants to hear rather than the truth. 

Behavioral interviews, although an improvement over traditional interviews provide some relief but not the full solution. The behavioral interview asks questions meant to evaluate the potential culture fit of an interviewee based on a candidate’s past history as opposed to the theoretical approach of the traditional method. Some examples of behavioral interview questions are: “What made for a good day at your previous job?’, and “What constitutes a bad day at work?” The behavioral interview seeks out true anecdotes about past ethical and productive behavior. Yet, the answers to behavioral questions can also be staged and rehearsed. The STAR (situation, task, action, result) method, helps the candidate rehearse responses to behavioral-based interview questions by discussing the specifics of each situation. By utilizing this method, job candidates can rehearse their responses to reflect their strengths and leadership skills. In short, the employer has a better idea of who they are hiring and how that employee will fit into the culture based on the nature of behavioral questions. But it is still lacking,

Skillsets mean very little if the employee is, by default, in opposition to the values of your business because they are toxic to other employees and therefore have an adverse effect on them. An employer should want their employees to grow with their company and have a positive attitude and represent the central tenants of the company culture. 

The Unthinkable Approach 

What employers need is a set of interview questions that can be asked of any candidate, regardless of the position they are being interviewed. When companies focus too much on the skills and experience in a job description, they may overlook whether an applicant has leadership skills or whether the individual’s values are in line with the company’s core values and mission

In my E-Book, A Unique and Special Interview Tool to Build A Stellar Work Culture That Promotes Teamwork and Comradery, I offer expert advice and a specific method for understanding the thought patterns, values, and motivations of job candidates. The E-book utilizes mainly 1 to 2-word interview prompts surrounded by a unique methodology that works toward securing the few prized individuals from your stack of applications or resumes. By using these prompts, you will get a sense of how each job candidate thinks, solves problems, manages stress, and/or initiates new ideas. This is what is MOST important in anyone you hire. After the interview, which generally takes about 10 minutes to complete, you will have a much clearer understanding of whether or not a person will fit into your company culture. 

By using these special prompts, which focuses on 5 key areas, you will get a sense of how they will collaborate and communicate with others. Based on the person’s answers to the prompts, a pattern will develop on how they think, manage stress and much more. Although not foolproof, the interview E-Book will help you make much better hiring decisions overall and is the preemptive approach to saving you the enormous cost of a bad hire down the road.