I suggest asking questions like the 10 questions above to both the hiring managers and non-management employees of the company, to get a more balanced and relistic viewpoint. Also, a great recruiter needs to be able to read between the lines and figure out what is not overtly said about the company culture, in order to discern the REAL company culture. They need to assess how the company is actually treating its applicants, and what traits are valued and discounted in resumes and applicants for that firm.

This is just one measure of why recruiting requires experience, business, organization and people savvy, and a great recruiter is not just a new grad with social media skills or someone who can use an ATS or Monster to source resumes.

Corporate Culture to me means the people that that the founders hire: either because they’re like the founders, or the ones their founders like. For example: I worked for a major company (and you folks may have, too) which was founded by major “Aspies” (the friendly term for those with Asperger’s Syndrome) who like to hire friendly, outgoing, perky individuals, and where diversity was defined as:”we hire all kinds of upper-middle class, mainly white people, just like us!”.

I think the next few years will allow an especially easy time to establish preferred (if not
functional) corporate cultures. This is because of the great number of Gen Y/Millennials- the largest cohort in history of individuals entering the work force, and entering in a time of lingering high unemployment and economic uncertainties. These factors should help to subdue the high workplace aspirations of the supposedly pampered Gen Ys and enable employers to obtain a docile and loyal workforce “ready to drink the Koolaid”, at least until things pick up again in earnest….

Cheers,

Keith “Cherry, Grape, or Orange?” Halperin

It turns out that in a previous life as a pointy-headed academic, I developed a measure of motivational culture that measured the answer to the question: “How do we get people to do the things that need to be done?” The Leadership Culture Survey put numbers to Roger Harrison’s 1972 HBR culture factors of: Mission, Support, Rules, and Power. My research in the mid 80s found that a simple index of (Mission+Support)-Power captured about about 50% (R=.71) of the differences in competitive success of a wide sample of firms. So why isn’t it (or something else) used in making hiring decisions?

First, as Kevin points out, many companies lack a uniform, dominant culture. Apple, Google, and Netflix are the exceptions, and even they likely have sub-cultures within a dominant culture. There may be a strong, overall, Google culture but that could differ in the Google facilities maintenance group (possibly outsourced) or the Google Revenue Accounting department (probably not outsourced). Most other companies are a patchwork collection of cultures that depend to some large degree on the leadership of the sub-group within the corporation (or corporate holding group).

Second, and more problematic for those who want to see culture play a bigger role in hiring, most people want the same culture. Whether in China, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, or North America,– the Ideal culture (measured on the Leadership Culture Survey) differs only slightly— high on a shared Mission and Support for the Mission, low on Personal Power (who likes being tossed on the whim of personal preferences?), with some moderate degree of regulation depending on the saftey consequences of mistakes. So the “wished for” culture is pretty similar. The actual culture differs widely, and is not so great in China across the electronic manufacturing organizations studied there. The ones that made your iPhone and iPad, along with lots of other things.

So what measure of personal culture can be compared to what measure of company culture to assess the fit vs. gap? Most people can align themselves nicely with a culture that has a customer-focused mission that the workforce can share, that provides the means to support that mission, that adopts regulations needed to prevent disasters and that ropes in abuses of personal power. The real opportunity lies for organizations that depart from these best practices. They are the ones that need to check out candidates for their ability to tolerate a confusing or distateful mission, inadequate support for accomplishing corporate goals, too much or too little regulation and widespread abuses of personal power. Now let me just check to see who is in the line-up to include those kinds of questions in their behavioral interviews. Hmmm. Short line.