When searching through piles of resumes, you're looking for indicators to show if a candidate will be a good hire. But there's only so much relevant data you can mine from a resume or even a standard interview. Whether or not a qualified candidate will succeed at your company has a lot more to do with your company culture. Understanding the importance of cultural fit can help you hire quality talent that will thrive at your company.

What Defines a Company's Culture?

Your company culture can be made up of many ideas, including your core values and principles. These might be ideas like:

• The customer always comes first.
• The best ideas spring from a collaborative environment.
• It's important to recognize and reward achievements, no matter how small they may be.

These might not be spoken values committed to paper, but they are at the very heart of what you do, why you do it, and how you do it. Your company culture builds up around these ideas and takes shape in the way your employees interact with your customers and with each other.

Why is Company Culture Important When Hiring?

Even the most experienced and qualified candidates can be useless to you without a strong cultural fit. If they don't mesh well with your core values and principles, they're not likely to feel comfortable in your work environment or have the tools they need to succeed there.

Vivian Maza, Chief People Officer at Ultimate Software, emphasizes culture in her hiring choices. She explains, "We can always provide the resources and tools to help employees get better at their jobs, but we can't teach someone how to align with our cultural values."

What About Diversity?

As you test for cultural fit in your prospective candidates, it's still important to be open-minded. Hiring for cultural fit doesn't mean you have to homogenize your workplace. Opening up to diversity can actually help improve your company culture, bringing in new ideas and perspectives to keep up morale and enthusiasm. After all, a good company culture isn't something you just find and stick to forever. It should be malleable and evolving because people change and the culture of the wider world changes too.

How do I Hire for Cultural Fit?

To understand if a candidate fits in with your company culture, you're going to need more than just a copy of their resume and their answers to standard interview questions. Our X-Factor hiring process is built to help you find the best candidates by testing what matters, including cultural fit. Download our free whitepaper on 'Perfecting The Perfect Hire' to learn more about our structured recruiting process. You can also contact us here to start hiring quality talent today.

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