Strategies for Assessing the Cultural fit of new Recruits

The culture of an organisation is the sum of principles, values, beliefs and attitude imbibed by the members of the organisation collectively. Culture fit is the glue that binds the organisation together. The traditional model of recruitment of person-position fit fails to consider the fit of the individual character into the organisation’s core values. According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), “the turnover cost due to a poor cultural fit can cost an organisation between 50-60% of the person’s annual salary”. But before designing a recruitment process revolving the culture of the organisation, every organisation needs to first identify and define their core values and work ethics that they expect their employees to possess, at the same time ensuring that their current employees have a crystal clear understanding of these values. The culture should align with the vision and the goals of the company. There are various processes that an organisation can adopt to assess the cultural fit of a candidate in their recruitment process. This paper intends to enlist a few useful practices. HR managers and employees of a few companies in India and abroad were interviewed, for whom organisation culture holds a spot of prime importance in their selection process and otherwise. Here are a few examples of the same with some excerpts of the telephonic interviews with them. Read more...