Culture Fit
Posted by Mitch on 16th July 2013
Most people seem to agree that recruiting for attitude is more important than recruiting for skills. Or at least as important.
I’m not sure how much this is actually practiced in reality – especially given how niche many recruitment agencies have become in the past 10 years and whose key USP seems to be that they can produce candidates doing more or less the same job for a similar company fairly quickly.
That kind of narrow market specialisms tends to out-trump culture fit.
Hiring for culture fit is often cited as being practiced more by large multinationals than SMEs but I’m not convinced that a company that big can have one defining culture – in my experience most large companies have lots of sub-cultures.
A real live case study
I have an SME client where I own all of their white-collar recruitment – most of it sales people.
In the 3 years I’ve worked with them, I’ve gotten to know them inside out and converted that knowledge into a series of verbal and written illustrations that when presented to candidates, helps me both identify those to take further in the process and to encourage those who aren’t the right cultural fit to de-select themselves.
I was pitched by a recruitment agency a few months back. Their claim was that they specialised in young sales people and that they knew how to identify the best of them.
When I asked how they would ensure finding candidates with the right cultural fit, they told me (rather proudly as I recall) that they would come in for a visit to “get to know the company better”.
You probably know where this is going.
So after we agreed that their one hour visit was going to struggle to gather as much knowledge of the company culture than my 800 hours or so spent visiting the company’s offices over the past few years, they conceded defeat and hung-up.
What they didn’t do was ask me how they could work with me on a very minimal basis so that when the day comes when I stop working for the client and need to pass the account on, they would be ideally placed (and qualified) to take over the running of that company’s recruitment.
Where’s the pain?
Sometimes the recruitment pain is not there on the day you call. Sometimes it’s waiting to happen at some point in the future.
So what’s this got to do with hiring for attitude and culture fit?
Hiring for culture fit can only be done by people who have genuine, ‘warts and all’ intimacy with the hiring company.
Most of the people best qualified to do this will be working for the company rather than be an external supplier – but for most SME’s with 50 to 300 employees, what they have in knowledge of their own culture, they lack in candidate resourcing and screening expertise and resources.
These types of SME businesses are crying-out for responsible recruiters to slowly assume more knowledge, track-record and influence over their hiring needs. They’re especially crying out for just one recruitment agency or individual recruiter, to take this pain away.
These SMEs are not doing this in enough numbers yet because there aren’t enough external recruiters approaching them offering this type of solution. A solution that doesn’t just cater for sourcing and supply, but also for candidate assessment – of both skills and attitude.
What they’re mostly being offered instead is a service that will:
1. Cost the company more than if they did it themselves.
2. Produce candidates who haven’t been assessed against the real company culture and are therefore more likely to leave within the first year.
3. Only have a 25% job to placement success rate, at best.
What real product knowledge looks like
Getting really good at recruiting, for me at least, is mostly about how strong your product knowledge is, because without it, sales performance is patchy and prone to very poor retention. In fact I suspect that holds true for most commercial jobs.
And the most critical product knowledge a recruiter will ever have, is knowledge of their clients – because only then can they really become effective at attracting the right types of people and assessing them properly.
That knowledge can only be got by investing time. A lot of time.
If you want a number on it then I reckon it will need to be at least 50 hours working out of that client’s offices – double if some of that time is spent interviewing candidates.
Most SMEs don’t think they can justify hiring an internal recruiter – but they can on a part-time basis.
But what’s to stop one recruiter in one recruitment agency having just 3 clients who they performed that kind of function for?
Think what that would do for each of those client’s recruitment effectiveness. Think what it would do for the recruiter’s sense of worth, not to mention the stability of their revenue.
The future
For me, it’s the only chink of light I can see for generalist recruitment agencies over the next 10 years. Their traditional markets (large multinationals) have mostly disappeared but there is a huge opportunity for them to start working with smaller companies on an RPI* basis.
If you’d like to find-out how you might be able to sell this business model to some of your SME clients, feel free to get in touch.
*RPI = Recruitment Process Insourcing
Comments
By Ian Harvey on Tuesday, 16 July 2013Good article, Mitch.
The recruitment industry is too supply-driven at the moment. No matter how good your ability to write a smart Boolean string, if you don’t understand what a good candidate will look like when you find one, then all your hard work will have gone to waste.
And you are right - if I was to start a new agency recruitment operation now, I would work with SMEs and avoid the large multinationals completely.
By Mitch on Tuesday, 16 July 2013
Thanks Ian.
What do you think has contributed to that supply-driven bias?
Do you think it might have something to do with the narrower the niches have become in both agencies and job descriptions?
By Ian Harvey on Tuesday, 16 July 2013
There is a long answer, but I’m guessing you want the shorter version!
1. Recruiters have access to more candidates/CVs than ever before.
2. There are too many recruiters out there trying to get seen by peddling CVs to hiring companies.
3. Client companies have set up competitive recruitment processes rewarding those who can be first to post a CV. Recruiters think this is what they have to do to succeed.
4. Client companies do not invest enough time in the relationship to help suppliers understand what is really required of them.
5. Both clients and recruiters assume that sourcing candidates, or more simply ‘knowing people’, is the core skill - it isn’t. As you point out in your article, understanding what sort of people succeed in the client is the critical skill.
6. That sort of professional-service, consultancy style of approach takes experience which is typically expensive. Often, neither agencies nor hiring companies are willing to pay the premium.
I think the development of a niche is a response to some of the above, rather than a cause.
By Mitch on Tuesday, 16 July 2013
Thanks Ian, I appreciate your insight.
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