The “Unthinkable Approach to Hiring” – the Key to Hiring An Employee to Fit Your Company’s Culture
What is the Unthinkable Approach to Hiring? In this article, I will show you how my approach works to hiring employees to fit your company culture.
We are in the second year of a labor market characterized by record-level turnover and job openings, increased stress, and significantly changed candidate expectations. Companies are spending an unprecedented amount on recruiting.
The costs of hiring include advertising the opening, the time cost of an internal recruiter, the time cost of a recruiter’s assistant in reviewing resumes and performing other recruitment-related tasks. There is also the time cost of the person conducting the interviews, drug screens and background checks, and various pre-employment assessment tests.
What Are Employers Looking For?
The “Top Priorities for Talent Acquisition Leaders in 2022 listed responses from over 800 recruiters who discussed their priorities, challenges, and trends for the upcoming year. The top 4 recruiting priorities of recruitment professionals in 2021 are:
Even though The Great Resignation led to a record number of employees leaving their current jobs for more competitive offers, a shortage of qualified talent remains in the market. Candidate expectations for employers are at an all-time high, and they are waiting to find a company to meet their needs rather than taking the first offer. Out of companies surveyed, their priorities are:
- improving the quality of hire (48%),
- Improving the time to hire (28%),
- Increasing the retention rate (26%)
- Growing the talent pipeline (25%).
In-house hiring practices aside, the recruitment and hiring business has seen an existential crisis. According to Harvard Business Review, nearly half of the national companies have outsourced their hiring process to what they call “recruitment process outsourcers.” Hiring is outsourced to subcontractors who hunt LinkedIn profiles and poach people on social media to find candidates that match an often-shallow set of skills. It’s not uncommon for them to contact the candidate directly and persuade them to apply. They might even mention salary negotiation, which is attractive to a potential recruit. These recruiters receive a commission through incentive pay if they can negotiate with the candidate to take the lowest salary possible.
Practices like these are so standard in the hiring field that it still needs to be determined how much damage they’ve done and whether their methods produce hires that meet even the lowest bar for some companies and their productivity level.
Average time of employment
Typically, it is not a norm for a company to monitor whether their practice toward hiring leads to good employees. The culture is more focused on filling seats, a quantity over quality attitude. That’s why it’s no surprise that hiring is the number one concern for CEOs in the United States.
The average time required to hire a new employee is around 20 days, with some positions taking longer. The next problem is that there is no guarantee that the candidate will remain employed. According to the American Management Association, 46 percent of new hires will fail within the first 18 months on the job. The reason they will fail is not a lack of skills but instead a lack of attitude.
Benefits of hiring for culture
Hiring for cultural fit is hiring someone who will reflect and/or be able to adapt to your company’s core beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors.
The old approach of hiring for the sake of hiring does not work. Why? When an employee is a wrong fit, they cost you time and money. They cost time and money before and after they quit and create problems for their teams. Furthermore, their responsibilities will fall to their colleagues, who become burned out and disgruntled. It’s not a good cycle.
Recent studies show that many professionals would consider taking lower salaries to work at companies known for their great cultures. Employees care about their work environment and want to be part of dynamic, supportive organizations that stand for well-defined missions.
The Unthinkable Approach to Hiring
Here’s the good news. The “Unthinkable Approach to Hiring,” an interview tool I’ve developed, can help you locate and retain the right employees. My interview tool can help you find the best candidates with the right skills who can demonstrate they know how to think as your company thinks.
The interview tool provides employers with unique prompts. By using the “unthinkable approach” prompts, you will understand your candidates’ motivations, values, and reasons behind their thinking. This tool will help you successfully locate the star player with the MVP attitude within an enormous pile of applications.
How it Works
The 90+ prompts are simple: The interviewer will use one to two words or phrases. By using them, a pattern will develop based on how the questions are answered. It is the pattern that will show how each candidate thinks critically, solves problems, manages stress, and whether or not they will be a good cultural fit for your business. You will know it in your mind and your gut. It is all about hiring for culture and training for skill.
The “Unthinkable Approach to Hiring” is designed so hiring managers and business leaders will have a much clearer understanding of how interviewees will collaborate with your staff, communicate with their team, and ultimately know whether or not they’re a good fit for your company’s culture. Hiring the wrong person can cost you not only time but thousands and thousands of dollars. Why not make a smaller investment in an interview technique that contains a method employees cannot prepare for? This will help you quickly discover their potential and whether or not they’re a good fit? And there are all kinds of success stories that prove it works!
With all the issues present in the world of hiring, take time to find the right staff to grow your business. People want to come to work daily because they love their co-workers and feel valued by the organization. Moreover, when you hire the right people, the organization thrives. For more information, contact me or go to www.marklewisllc.com.
